“Trauma is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you”.
— Gabor Mate
The word trauma comes from the Greek work ‘to wound’. Trauma is not the experience that happened to you but rather the persisting affect, or wound, that the experience has on you. Trauma is a psychological wound that leaves an imprint on your mind, your body, and your soul. It leaves a lasting change on the person you are and the way you function in society.
There is a common misconception around trauma in our society, with a lot of people thinking that traumatic experiences are limited to severely dangerous and threatening events, however we can also experience trauma wounding as a result of stress, anxiety, overwhelm and other common experiences. All of us have experienced some form of trauma in our life and as a result there are millions of us walking this Earth carrying some unprocessed and unresolved trauma within us.
This unprocessed trauma has roots or trauma imprints that live as ‘contracted stress’ in our body, which dysregulates our nervous system and disrupts our wellbeing in day-to-day life. Unprocessed trauma is why some people are ingrained in behaviours such as people pleasing, avoiding abandonment, self- sabotage. It is one of the reasons we self-sabotage and have low self-esteem or self-worth. People with unprocessed trauma can also have dysfunctional relationship patterns, experiencing co-dependency, trauma-bonding and unhealthy attachment styles.
Unprocessed trauma is also stored in the body, and this is why although some conventional therapies can be helpful, often a more ‘embodied’ approach is needed to allow for deep and lasting transformation.
Embodied Processing is a trauma-healing modality that is based on the latest research in neuroscience as well as ancient healing traditions. It is a technique which is used to safely meet and digest or heal underlying emotional wounds, which are often the driving force of many symptoms which show up as physical ailments or other symptoms of ill health.
By allowing ourselves to safely discover the root cause of the problem; to embody the emotion by allowing our body’s (subconscious) intelligence to release stress and the trauma imprint, we enable our dysregulated nervous system to return to a state of homeostasis; the transformation happens on its own.
In an Embodied Processing / Trauma therapy session, our priority is to create a safe space for the client, and we use a few options to find that safety, before anchoring it into the body. We then explore a multitude of methods of working with, and processing thoughts, images, sensations. This includes discerning the emotions, finding its origins, and then using techniques of belief investigation, merging, dimmer switch, pendulation, cohabitation, rhythmic breathing (or other techniques that work best for the individual client/situation). We also use regulation measures until we find a resolution and completion of the trauma imprint / trauma cycle and ensure the nervous system is brought back to homeostasis / a regulated state.
