M6 : Lesson 3: Breaking The Trauma Activation Loop
We use Self Resourcing and Somatic-Based Trauma/Emotional Processing tools to help us break the trauma activation loop in the body
1. Awareness- Are you being flooded or activated by a survival or protective pattern? (‘parts’ activation/hijack, old memory resurfacing)
2. Presence- Use tools to help you drop into your body and BE WITH the sensations, let go of the story. Engage your inner AMP (adult main personality)
3. Respond- After holding compassionate witness to your felt sense, find the part of your personality/brain state that is more aligned with your True Self and respond in a new way, helping to repattern the old protective responses
Tool:
Self Resourcing Tool #4: Recenter And Ground
Homework: Begin to notice your activation loops or protective responses, and practice holding presence with them before responding.
Please see the Module 6 Workbook for Lesson 3 materials.
Recommended trauma healing somatic practicioners:
Alex Greene: https://www.redbeardsomatictherapy.com/
Transcript
Lesson 3. Breaking the trauma activation loop Self resourcing tool number 4, re centering, and favorite tools for trauma processing. The overarching approach I recommend for anyone dealing with trauma is to attempt to do 3 things over and over to help diffuse the emotional charge. You’ll see this algorithm closely represents the ABC method you’ve already been learning. First, awareness and pattern interrupt.
2nd, finding presence in your body and current environment. And third, respond with a new mindset. So I’ll go over these three steps in detail next as it relates to trauma processing. First, awareness that you are stuck in an old protective survival pattern. Become aware of your specific resistance or protection survival pattern, which is really what level 2 focuses on, but you can begin doing this now.
Began to look for a pattern in your response so that you can recognize, I wonder if this is a survival pattern because I keep doing this. Some of the most common trauma based patterns to become aware of are becoming dissociated, feeling numbed out, overwhelmed with fear, overly aggressive in controlling, getting rigid, and inflexible. Or generally being overly accommodating and saying yes when you mean no. Next, presence. We find presence to help us break the pattern This is where you might first need to use your tools like brain retraining and vagal toning, somatics, your breath to just help you come into the present moment for a bit.
In level 1, we’re really focusing on just regulating the nervous system response with our presence practices And level 2, we’re focused on getting what we call the inner adult main personality engaged to hold space for these highly charged states in the body. So it’s a slightly different focus, but we’re often doing and using the same tools. I especially love breath work for trauma processing. Once you have enough baseline stability of nervous system regulation in place by practicing the level 1 fundamentals. And I’ll go over this more later in this module.
Breath work can be activating. It can even bring up intense suppressed emotions. So although it is highly effective in helping you to complete the stress response in the body, and it can result in deep healing. I recommend that you engage in trauma processing breath work practices after establishing a basic level 1 practice of brain retraining in vagal toning first. Which is why this module is not presented until the end.
By now, you should have been practicing a lot of these things to have a baseline. And the third piece was to respond. So we had awareness, presence, and then responding in a new way from a new mindset. This is how we break the trauma loop. This is where we learn to respond from our inner adult main personality.
This is the mindset that even though we feel uncomfortable, We have the capacity to choose a higher and better way of being and behaving. A reminder of how to use the tools in this module. The tools are here to help you hold presence and to be able to respond differently when you’re triggered. The goal of using the tools is to shift your attention away from your story, your judgments, your resistance, and instead, focus on your felt sense in your body. Or your present moment experience and be totally willing to meet your body, your symptoms, your experience as it is.
Remember, your mind, your limbic system is usually stuck in the story of the past. Your body is having a felt experience of the here and now. So be here now. Feel the now. What do you sense?
What do you hear? What do you see? Being in your body in the present moment interrupts your memory loop in your brain and brings your energy back into your body. Coming into the present moment again and again even with all of the discomfort can really help to improve a lot of your symptoms especially symptoms of fatigue and low energy. Because what you’re doing is calling your life force back into this moment instead of being fragmented by being stuck in the past or in the future.
When trauma occurs, it’s almost like a fuse is blown inside of us, and the energy just doesn’t run through our body properly. So It’s kinda like we need to reset the fuse so that the energy can run again more optimally. I think this is a lot of how acupuncture and the meridian system works. They’re working on restoring our energy flow. Well, How do we do this?
We strengthen our capacity to let the energy of what’s coming up to run through our body by being present and self regulated. This lets memories process. It lets our body discharge different sensations and emotions. And I think overall it helps our entire energy system to run better. So with presencing, let’s just right now, what emotions or felt sense are you feeling in your body right now?
Just drop in and see what you can feel and try to separate from the story that’s been going on in your head whether it’s resistance you’ve been having to your family member or to your body. Just separate from the mental thinking and drop into the body. What is your body wanting you to hold in this moment? This is the practice. This is what you need to practice.
Getting clear on this difference between processing with your thinking which often is almost like you’re thinking your feelings. Like, I’m thinking about the anger and thinking about the anxiety versus feeling the feelings. You see that difference thinking your feelings versus feeling your feelings? We need to learn to feel our feelings and feel our felt sense and get out of the story. So if you drop in, you’re like, well, I’m mad at him.
That’s that’s not a feeling in your body. That’s still the story. What is the feeling, the felt sense of being mad at him or afraid of her What is the feeling of that? Or the feeling of being afraid about your symptoms? What’s the felt sense of that?
Over time, you’ll become aware and be able to just be more present with this. Your brain’s gonna start to discern the difference between you know, what’s happening in the present moment in your body versus the past memory that’s just been triggered. And that’s where you’ll start to discharge some of these patterns. It’s gonna get easier to respond to the same trigger in a higher and better way when you can become present. Again, this is about releasing your your trauma really one layer at a time.
One felt sense moment at a time. So don’t do too many of these practices at once or too much processing at once. Just drop in feel and then go live for a little bit and come back, you know, to do it again at another time. We have another tool to learn. It’s called re center and ground.
It’s one that I personally love, and I’m going to talk you through what it is, and then I will come back on camera and walk you through it. So this is this order of this tool. We start with finding your spine your tailbone, your pelvic floor, and feeling it. Just feel it, finding your spinal center. From there, I’m gonna ask you to inhale as if your pelvic floor or your tailbone can actually breathe and pull air up your spine.
So this is a little abstract You’re gonna imagine breathing in from your pelvic floor up into your spine, and you’re gonna imagine the air coming all the way up your spine to where your neck connects to your head. And then we’re gonna exhale and imagine the breath going from your head down your spine and exhaling out your pelvic floor. We’re gonna keep our focus on our spine and breathe up and down the spine. This is gonna help you find you find your energy, your current body, and the current moment. I also love doing this while sitting next to a tree.
And, like, I just imagine feeling the tree trunk. As if it’s my own back, and I imagine just breathing up and down both my back and the tree. Often, I like to just sit on the ground as well. I just imagine breathing energy up from the ground all the way up into my head and then back down. This doesn’t need to take long.
30 seconds. Maybe you do it for 5 minutes, but you’re just re centering yourself into your spine. And by feeling your breath and feeling your spine, it helps to pull your life horse back into your central column. So shall we do this together? Okay.
So find your spine. Feel your tailbone, feel your pelvic floor, and begin with an inhale. Up from the pelvic floor, up your spine, all the way up into your head. So inhale. And then exhale.
Imagine the the air coming from your spine all the way down in your pelvic floor. So just like that, up the spine and down the spine. So let’s do it again. Inhale, up the spine. Exhale.
Down the spine. Down, down, down, down, out your pelvic floor. Inhale up your spine. Feeling the air go all the way up to your head. Exhaling down your spine, sending the air down your spine all the way down your pelvic floor and out.
One more time. Inhale, breathe up. Exhale down. It’s that simple. Sometimes I take this a step further, and you’ll see me do this in a lot of my brain rewiring attunements in level 2.
I often do this for Part B of ABC, so you could do this for your Part B practice as well. So I imagine breathing breathing from the earth all the way up into my heart. And then I actually imagine sometimes breathing out the top of my head all the way to the sun or to source or to god or whatever that is for you. So now your breath is gonna go all the way up. And then I’m gonna breathe from source down into my head.
Down into my heart. And then my breath again is gonna run down my spine, down my pelvic floor, all the way down into the earth and connect to the center of the earth. So now I’m imagining connecting from the center of the earth all the way up my spine and all the way to source or to the sun. So breathing in again. Up into the heart from the earth and breathing out up the top of your head all the way to the sun, the source, the universe, whatever that is for you.
And then one last inhale from the sun or a source down into your head, down into your heart, and then back down into the earth. And just ground your energy. That’s the basics of energy grounding that I’ve talked about here and there, and I just love it as a deeper way of re centering. The pattern is the same. Just breathing up and down your spine, coming back into you.
Moving on, we’re gonna go over some other tools that I love for sequencing. I’d like to share with you some of my other favorite tools to help process intense emotions and bring presence to those protective parts of you. One of my favorites by far is sound healing. And we actually have quite a bit of this in the Primal Trust community in our video library section. And also live classes, usually a couple of times a month.
And I also recommend Dorothy who does the sound healing, her website at aurasdot calm as she has other soundtracks to help with trauma healing. And, of course, my own brain rewiring attunement There’s many of these in the primal trust video library under both levels 2 and 3 materials. This really helps with parts integration and memory reconsolidation, and you’ll get a lot of this practice as you go through level 2. And, of course, breath work, which I’m gonna discuss later today. I also love emotional freedom technique, which I mentioned earlier.
It’s just an excellent tool to help you move energy through your meridians to help you come into your body and often discover new perspectives. There’s a lot of people in the community who know how to do this and are trained in this so you can always ask in the form if you want to learn more about emotional freedom technique. Of course, somatic presence and practices of all kinds, including TRE, which is also known as trauma release exercises, inquiry work. If you’ve ever heard of Byron Katie, she is the master of this, and it’s where I first started doing inquiry work. This helps you to find different perspectives and it’s just another way to really drop in and ask is what I’m feeling true in this moment for me.
If you’re interested in inquiry work also my partner, Aaron King, who’s part of the community, is one of the mentors. This is his specialty, and he often helps people using inquiry to help process some of their trauma patterns and presents their parts, so I recommend him as well. And journaling, automatic writing, and gratitude journaling. I’m gonna speak to you about this because there’s different ways of doing this. Automatic writing, you can Google this.
It’s just writing nonstop, whatever you’re feeling, and it can be great to help just get some of those feelings out. I did this every day for a long time. It was super helpful. But also, gratitude journaling. Now, there’s a couple ways of doing this.
Often you hear, write what you’re thankful for, which is great, but here’s a way that I often recommend doing gratitude journaling. At the end of the day, write down three things that have to do with a pattern you’re trying to break Meaning, let’s say your protective pattern feels like you’re never supported. You’re somebody who’s like, I don’t have any support. No one is here for me. Well, at the end of the day, instead of writing gratitude, I mean, you can still write your gratitude, but I would write how have I been supported today and look for three ways that you’ve been supported.
Maybe you were supported by the earth that day or even by, you know, a neighbor in some way or the person at the grocery store, but start looking for the opposite of your pattern or maybe a pattern is I can’t do anything right. Well, at the end of the day, write three things about how you did do things right, or maybe your pattern is they don’t love me. At the end of the day, write down three ways how you were loved today. Or I’m sick, write down the ways that your body functioned well today. So do you get the point?
So instead of just gratitude, make it a little more specific to the way your trauma patterns operate and find the opposite of how that might be true. So that’s a little bit of inquiry as well. I also recommend finding guidance if you’re dealing with really tricky or deep trauma patterns. I personally received guidance from a somatic experiencing practitioner that was so beneficial for me. I also worked with a mentor and coach and a therapist along the way.
So be willing to reach out for port to find a mind outside of your own, to help you find different perspectives, and to be able to maybe help you even come into your body in a deeper way. And general calming of all kinds, being in nature, earthying, yoga, like yoga, knee dress, awesome for trauma processing and being in the body in my opinion. Dance, which I use all the time. I specifically love something known as 5 rhythms dancing. I love playing music, hugs, and massage, and micro rest.
What do I mean by micro rest? It’s about deliberately disengaging from your activity throughout the day and practicing, resting, and relaxing. Because with trauma, we often lose the ability to just come back into calm and relax. So taking micro rest throughout the day, even like 1 to 2 minutes and then going on with your activity that’s been very helpful for me personally. And I just wanna mention some new interesting technologies that are coming through that I personally been experimenting with and I found some really curious results.
Such as the Healy, the AO scanner, and Stellar Technologies, and more. That concludes lesson 3. Next up is lesson 4. Where we move from primal fear to primal trust, and I’m just gonna speak a little bit about fear and give you some ideas to help you deal with that.