With trauma, stress originates from inside, taxing the whole body.
Massage, meditation, and yoga may offer a momentary respite but even if the outside world is calm and quiet, with traumatic stress, we end up feeling anxious again, on edge, and hyper-vigilant for little or no reason. The stress is coming from the inside.
Somatic stress from past traumatic experience may be the root of trauma symptoms, such as; chronic pain, anxiety, chronic fatigue, relationship challenges, difficulty recovering from drug and alcohol addiction, physical illness, or lack of clarity and follow through in career and money issues.
Entrenched memories from past traumatic experience leave us fighting even when there no longer is an opponent, making it hard to differentiate fight-or-flight from regular life stress. In fight-or-flight the body is activated in a heightened sympathetic state meant only for immediate, time-limited action. The trapped survival energy draws vital metabolic energy from the parasympathetic functions of rest, digestion, and social connection, weakening the muscles of simple bodily enjoyment, which may lead to addiction and other trauma symptoms.
Unable to complete and turn off this wired ‘on’ state, our taxed system becomes ever more sensitized to stress, quickly becoming activated by someone passing in front of us on the freeway, or by an unhelpful cashier, being a few minutes late to a meeting, not being able to find something we lost, having our schedule changed on us…Life feels like one urgent matter after another, a chore to get through before hopefully coming home to finally relax. The more sensitive and raw our nerves become, the more easily triggered, and the more we may become quickly confused, emotionally overwhelmed, or dissociated when needing to set clear, compassionate boundaries, leading to relationship challenges such as domestic violence, problems with communication, intimacy, and sexuality.
Including the body in therapy we learn to manage stress and trauma symptoms, develop and affirm boundaries with more confidence and integrity, gain a more solid sense of control and inclusiveness, dissolve the root of anxiety, hyper-vigilance, and chronic pain.
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