In his helpful book, Healing Trauma: A pioneering program for restoring the wisdom of your body, Peter Levine explains how gentle shaking and trembling are a part of the body’s natural way to release nervous system overactivation. 

Why does this matter for women in recovery from addiction, mental health problems or trauma? In short, when triggered into acute fear or anger, we feel it as uncomfortable distress, and if that intense discomfort doesn’t find a healthy pathway out of the body, we can end up going down bad roads trying to get relief. 

Whether we pick up negative thoughts, launch patterns of self-destructive behavior, or just freeze up and dissociate, trauma energy is toxic and better not let it linger too long.

Shaking Is Natural

Animals can be seen shaking and trembling as a way to release energy from the body that they don’t need anymore. In A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle shares his insight that ducks in a pond always take a few moments to beat their wings after any kind of fight or showdown. After shaking off the excess energy, they return to a state of apparent peace and calm. 

What about us, do we easily return to peace after we get triggered? I don’t know about you, but I’m well capable of stewing and churning unproductively for days after a moment’s exposure to something that touches on my core wounds. 

Even though this gets better over the years, I’m always interested to learn more how we might more wisely engage the resources of the body to have a better journey through healing episodes!

Shake it Off

Calling it the “shake it off technique”, Peter Levine incorporates the idea of conscious trembling into his body therapy methodology, Somatic Experiencing. 

Somatic Experiencing therapists are trained to be able to guide their clients to learn to self-soothe, observe their own sensations, and reorder their responses to life through deliberately activating the gentle shaking response when in need of a release.   

Somatic Experiencing has the goal of supporting clients to learn to regulate their body’s responses, through conscious witnessing, monitoring, and working with the nervous system. Rather than suppressing or trying to avoid the traumatic response, the idea is to support the body to do its thing. 

It’s a little bit like saying, the body needs to have its trauma response in order to be able to get over something that shook us up. Rather than resisting the signs and mechanisms of trauma processing, we can become an ally and support the body. Engaging the trembling mechanism is one way to be a friend to the body as it does its work of releasing excess activation energies. 

The end result is a settling in the nervous system – a return to peace. 

Put it to Music!

The method of shaking and trembling is used in dance therapy, too, and works wonderfully with music. So why not try it out ourselves, putting it to music?

Before you do, note it’s important to apply the exercise very gently and gradually and to pay close attention to whether it’s making the distress better. If it’s not working, stop and maybe try again another time. It can take a few tries before getting the hang of it. The line between shaking and trembling will gradually blur, and there may be moments when the body seems to tremble of its own accord – that’s good!

Don’t just go wild, even if you’re listening to wild music. Allow your nervous system to be primary and start with a less-is-more approach and build from there.   

Steps to Get Shaking: 

1. Choose a space where you will feel safe and comfortable shaking the body a little bit. Look for privacy and physical coziness, so that body really feels good to begin with. 
2. Choose between lying down or standing up for this exercise. Lying down is a great place to start and tends to feel a little safer. You might get up during the song anyway.
3. Choose some gentle, but stimulating music. As long as you like the song, it’s fine. Pay attention specifically to the rhythm and whether or not the rhythm feels inspiring to your body. 

A song that works for me for this is The Look by Metronomy (https://youtu.be/sFrNsSnk8GM). I was just thinking “I wonder why” as I wrote this and then I heard one of the lyrics is “remember how we shook, shook.” 

So while we’re at it, it can be a fun project in and of itself to find songs that use the word “shake” or “shook” in it somewhere. There are so many! 

Here are some relatively wholesome songs I like for this exercise: 

Shake It Up ~ the Cars

https://youtu.be/K3SA5Z-cbC8

Shake It Baby ~ John Lee Hooker

https://youtu.be/-pSA8krNJBg

I’m All Shook Up ~ Elvis

https://youtu.be/23zLefwiii4

There are plenty of less wholesome ones too. What can I say? I’ll leave that part up to you 🙂   

3. Once you’ve selected your song, press play and start out in a stable, neutral still position. Softly begin to very, very gently let the body shake, starting with your feet and legs. Do not hurt your body. Shake in only the ways that feel good to you. Explore to see what pace, what angles, what kinds of motions feel positive. 
4. Allow your arms and hands to get involved. If the music really affects you, your shaking will be partly a dance, of course – let that happen! It may end up as a whole body movement. Do this as long as it feels good, but do allow rest and pause when that’s what the body seems to wants.
5. At the end of your song, take a few moments to breathe deeply, rest and let the body settle, in a restorative position, such as child’s pose or lying on your back with your knees bent and your legs together, feet flat on the floor. Enjoy the effects you created in just a couple of minutes of shaking around. 

How do you feel? All shook up in a good way?

Thanks for reading! 

There is a type of Somatic Therapy called Somatic Experiencing, developed by trauma-work pioneer Peter Levine.  

Somatic Experiencing, as the name implies, helps people release trauma patterning through learning to experience life somatically (through the body). 

Why do we need help experiencing life through the body? Don’t we always experience life in the body? Yes, we do. But we’re not always conscious or paying attention to how our life feels to the body. 

The Body Dimension

The body does many things on its own, without us even noticing. Things like how we are breathing, our muscle tension, our posture, pleasant and unpleasant sensations, can all be ignored if we keep our focus elsewhere, which, let’s face it, we often do. One of the goals of mindfulness practices, breathwork, and yoga, is to help us tune into and stay in the body awareness. 

Human life can be experienced through many different channels of our awareness, of which our body awareness is only one. In any given moment, there is a thought dimension to our experience, an emotional dimension, a creative dimension, a relationship dimension, a spiritual dimension, and so on. When we’re balanced and whole, we can be aware of many of them all at once, which is a very satisfying, colorful experience. So why do we skip over the body awareness so frequently? 

The body dimension of our experience is rich with resources. Body lives in the now. Body gives us warm, pleasant sensations. Body is like a friendly pet. 

Noticing the Good Times

Body is also that aspect of our experience that we are robbed of through trauma. Those of us who experienced deep injury to our being are frequently trapped in patterns of fearing our own bodies. We’re afraid to feel sensations in the body in part because after trauma, the body becomes a dangerous place, full of intensity and discomfort. 

One of the brilliant insights that Peter Levine had and expanded upon, is to help shift our awareness towards the times when we’re not feeling trauma energies. For those of us who experience trauma, distress can feel like a permanent state, that we are “always” triggered, afraid of being triggered, or recovering from having just been triggered. 

However the over-focus on the experience of being triggered is itself a sign of trauma, and represents that permanent, unchanging, looping quality that trauma has, which is not exactly right, objectively speaking anyway. Every day we have little moments during which we are not actually suffering, when our bodies do feel relaxed and safe, though we often miss these moments. 

The following exercises is a variation of the Recalling Being Yourself Technique, a staple of the Somatic Experiencing toolkit. You can find the original exercise in Healing Trauma: A pioneering program for restoring the wisdom of your body, by Peter Levine.

I have found it to be helpful in shifting into body awareness in a way that feels safe, easy, and approachable. May it be helpful for you too!

Short Exercise for Feeling Yourself: You at Your Best

The goal of this exercise is to recall a time when you were not in your traumatized self state, but actually doing pretty well. Not only were you feeling like there wasn’t any fear, pain, stress, or anger bothering you for the moment, you were actually letting your light shine. It’s important to acknowledge these moments, and love and celebrate ourselves for having them.

1. Prepare for Meditation. Find a comfortable place to sit or lie down. Prioritize positive body sensations, don’t be strict with yourself about how you sit. Take a few moments to ground and center into the breath, allowing your outbreath to gradually lengthen to be longer than the inbreath. You may like to count to three on the inbreath and to five on the outbreath, if that feels natural enough.  
2. Recall A Moment of You at Your Best. Once settled, think of a time, as recent as possible, when you felt like you were, for whatever reason, being your normal, natural self, without being all messed up in a trauma reaction. Maybe you weren’t just your normal ordinary self, but actually a pretty wonderful side of you. Perhaps you were being big and shiny, commanding the attention in the room, or just walking along outside relaxed and happy. 

Maybe it’s a situation in which you were expressing love and affection, telling jokes, doing something really well, or just singing and dancing around when no one was looking while you made dinner. You can do this exercise as many times as possible, so don’t get too hung up on choosing a perfect memory. Just choose one memory, more recent than ancient if possible, of a time when you were at your very best.

3. Explore the Positive Sense Memories. Once you’ve identified a memory, start allowing yourself to remember all of the sensory details. What can you recall about what the scene looked like? How was the lighting, the atmosphere? Any sounds, touch sensations you can recall? What season was it? What were the colors in the space you were in? Allow your memory to drift around to open up all the pleasant sense impressions. 
4. Notice How You Feel Right Now As You Recall. As you continue to recall the scene, gently place your attention to your physical and emotional sensations that you’re having right now while you remember. Notice especially anything that feels good. Are there any parts of you expanding, relaxing, warming up, feeling good? Stay with that, let it be as big as it can be, linger with this. Don’t push, just allow. Stay here for as long as you like, allowing pleasantness to stay.
5. Capture your Insights. Journal a little bit about what you experienced. Expand, anchor, make as delicious as possible. This will help you signal to yourself that these are the types of experiences you want to amplify and focus on, going forward. 

I hope you were able to feel your Self in this exercise. Thanks for reading!

The classic AA slogan “This, Too, Shall Pass” has layers. Attributed to 12th century Persian Sufi poet, Attar of Nishapur, though quite possibly in circulation long before that, the phrase is popular both in and outside of recovery circles. In fact, our beloved sixteenth President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, paraphrases it in one of his speeches.   

Applied to the recovery path, “This, Too, Shall Pass” helps us understand that any given experience we may have to face can be counted upon to go away in its own right timing and way. 

The Trauma Lens: Will This Ever Pass?

For women with addiction patterning, impermanence is especially important to integrate into our mental understanding. That’s because trauma is what we call it when bad feelings get stuck in our bodies, where they are frequently triggered and reactivated in such a way that we feel like we can’t get ever really over it.

To realize that the suffering isn’t actually a permanent state is often a cognitive link that we need to make. No matter how frequent our trauma episodes are, there is always a break from them in between. At some point the energy does indeed shift and move (even if we have a tendency to return to that pattern). 

It helps when we can learn to gradually release traumatic experiences, the stress that was associated with those events, out of our body so that we don’t have to re-experience them so often. This is taking “This, Too, Shall Pass” more into our own hands, assisting some things to move along, perhaps through one of the trauma work modalities offered by Villa Kali Ma, such as EMDR.

Believe it or not, our trauma is finding a way to be released from our body, through constantly coming back to us seeking our attention and help, like a prisoner saying “Help me, let me out of here!” The energies, sensations and life force that got trapped and tangled up in those bad experiences still needs to be let out of the body. 

In this sense, “This, Too, Shall Pass” is also an affirmation, a decision that I will allow this experience to pass out of my experience, at last. 

Affirmation for “This, Too, Shall Pass”

You may want to experiment with writing yourself some affirmations to help integrate the wisdom of this powerful AA slogan. 

I lovingly recognize that my body is healing me and moving me forward. I know these feelings are here in my awareness today because they are passing on out of me and completing. It is safe to let go of these feelings. Thank you, Body. I do not have to keep the past with me as fear, anger, or stuckness anymore. This is a wonderful opportunity to be liberated. 

The Upside of Impermanence

When we realize that “This, Too, Shall Pass” is a chance to embrace the positive side of impermanence, we can see that the fact that everything passes on out of us sooner or later is a real comfort. We are evolving, we are growing, even if it’s hard to recognize in the moment. 

Try out the following exercise and see what it does for you.

Something that Did Pass

1. Think of a time in your life during which you experienced something that was very hard for you at the time, like a break up or disappointment. For now, don’t choose your deepest darkest moment, but a time when you do remember struggling.
2. Identify a moment in time that came after that event, at which point the event was totally done, including the feelings about it. It’s ok to give it a generous window of time – maybe it took several years, but pinpoint when this trouble was no longer a burdensome presence in your life. 
3. How did you get from #1 to #2?

Ob La Dee, Ob La Da!

You may realize in your answer to question #3 that you’re not sure how it happened. Somehow life moved on in that intervening time period. Perhaps you did specific things to take care of yourself, but often as not we were assisted by time itself. Sooner or later, bad things fade out and are no longer active as sources of pain.

“This, Too, Shall Pass” reminds us that life will resolve its own tensions and troubles over time, if we can basically trust and allow it to. It means that no feeling, no matter how terrible, is permanent. Thank you God, that life goes on!

A Trusty Recovery Toolkit

Women in recovery face the challenge of dealing with trauma and its residues in the body, as a necessity for overcoming triggers to relapse. 

As people learning to help our bodies release trauma responses, we develop a personalized toolkit over time of things that really work for us personally.

Getting to know ourselves from a place of love, and learning how precisely we like and need to be cared for to thrive is an aspect of the recovery journey. 

As we learn and grow stronger in our sobriety, our collection of tools can be come as trusty and familiar as a handyman’s – something for every scenario!  

Help for Being Here Now

The following tools are about orienting towards the here and now moment you are presently in. 

More than a platitude about being present, these tools literally help you to become aware of the fact that you are in a present moment and not actually currently in the nightmare that you nervous system is telling you you’re in.

Hot and Cold Tools: Change Your Temperature, Change Your Energy!

Have you ever noticed how a mild, pleasant shock of cold or warm can help you “snap out of it” and return to the present? For example, splashing your face with cold water or stepping outside on a cold day help reset you towards safety in part because of the temperature change these create for you. 

Hot and Cold Tools rely on this grounding, stabilizing effect to help you get re-connected to the present. The goal is to create a focus-grabbing, yet harmless sensation in the physical body right now.  

How to use Hot and Cold Tools:

Anything safe that creates a temporary change in your temperature in either direction may be helpful for you. Experiment for yourself and see what seems promising. 

Remember to be gentle and kind, aim not to punish the body but to create mild, pleasant changes in sensation that help Body Awareness rise to the surface of your experience. 

Cold Tools

1. Hold Something Cold

Take a cold object from the refrigerator and hold it in your hands, just noticing the (possibly a little unpleasant) sensation and how it changes your focus of awareness. The positive change may only hit you after you are done holding the cold object, as the shifts in your body’s energy integrate.

2. Numb Yourself (Safely) 

If feeling very distressed, you can even try taking an ice cube from the freezer and holding it in your hand until it has melted. It will be shocking in a safe way to the body, and can help change the energy pathways. This technique is probably better used for times when you’re quite upset as it’s a little bit intense, but of course apply your own instincts here.

3. Wash it Away

Finally, you can try taking a cold shower. If this is hard to imagine kicking off, you can start with a warm shower and then end your shower with sixty seconds of cold water. The pleasant part of this technique kicks in afterwards, when you are wrapping yourself in a towel and noticing that your body has balanced itself through this exposure to opposites of temperature.  

Hot Tools

1. Warm Your Face

Run warm water over your hands and face. Alternatively, soak a washcloth in very hot water and, being careful not to burn yourself, lay it over your face and leave it there until it has gone fully cold. You may combine this technique with aromatherapy if you have a very gentle oil in a carrier oil, such as a drop of lavender in jojoba oil. 

2. Create Body Fire

Rub your hands together until they’re quite warm  (about 30 seconds), and then place your warmed hands over a part of your body, such as over your lower back, neck, head or heart. Take in the soothing sensation of your own loving hands helping another part of you feel more at ease. The fact that it is you who is helping you can be an important part of building trust in yourself over time, that you really will be there for you, going forward. 

3. Apply Heat Directly

Getting under the covers, putting on soft comfy layers and applying gentle warmth directly are important trauma and recovery tools. You can make yourself a warm pot of herbal tea and slowly drink it. If available, you can also use body-warming assists like hot water bottles and heat lamps. And of course, baths, especially when made extra detoxifying through the addition of magnesium crystals or sea salt, are a wonderful tool if you’re fortunate enough to have a bath tub.  

Remember to look out for easy, pleasing sensations and an overall effect of changing your state. Good luck!

Recognizing the Trauma Response

For those of us with trauma baked into our life experiences, it can be an accomplishment in and of itself just to learn to recognize when our trauma is triggered, and when it’s not.

It’s important to learn to recognize both states and the transitions between them, as this will gradually teach us how to more consciously choose which state to be in. 

Basic Bodily Happiness

When not currently in an emergency, our bodies will orient naturally towards feeling good (relaxed, comfortable, alert).

When I say our bodies feel good, I don’t mean high or with activated, intense sensations of pleasure, per se, as we might be used to from our addiction patterns, but something more like the pleasant neutrality. 

The body is basically happy to be alive, unless we’re currently in an emergency OR thinking over past events in such a way that it feels like that emergency is still happening now, even though it’s actually over. 

This is a clue to check with your body – if you’re starting to feel bad in your body, it might be your trauma. But let’s start with focusing on feeling good in our bodies.

Basic Bodily Happiness

The following exercise can help you explore how much basic happiness exists in your body in the times in between trauma-reactivation episodes.

Journal: 12 Tiny Body Happinesses

Identify 12 subtle tactile, physical body sensations that are neutral or mildly pleasurable at the body level, that you have enjoyed recently. Spend a little time describing each one.

Here’s one from me:

1. This morning I woke up early and noticed that I felt a little chilly, and then I pulled the covers over my shoulders, which felt comforting and good. I felt warm and safe.

Look for easy wins: when you’re in the shower, when you drank your morning coffee, or when you splashed your face with pleasantly cool water. It’s the little things! It can be helpful to go through each of the 5 senses and identify pleasant things in each category. 

My body likes the sound of rain on the roof. My body likes the scent of new marigolds.

Feeling Bad is a Clue

Unless you are currently in a life-threatening emergency your body “should” not be responding to life as though you are. If, technically speaking, your life is not at stake, but any of the following apply, you may be re-experiencing your trauma energies that actually belong to a previous event, but are coming up for witness now:

1. You feel very, very bad, such that you feel like you have to change something right away or else it feels you’ll die
2. Body is having a strong physical reaction, such as not being able to breathe, feeling mobilized like you need to move physically OR that you’re feeling numb and shut down (a little like a sort of quicksandy feeling)
3. Your thoughts are noticeably activated, perhaps speedy or especially negative, it’s hard to think clearly, or suddenly especially foggy

Trauma is basically leftover physical body reactions from past situations that we did in fact survive, but we didn’t have a chance to fully process. If you’re not dying but you feel like you are or you might if you don’t take immediate action, that’s most likely your trauma. 

What to Do if Triggered: Help the Body Return to Safety (without Substances)

If you recognize that your trauma is triggered, do your very best, with a lot of compassion and gentleness, to help your body return to feelings of safety. Do this by creating mild, neutral, pleasant feelings in the body (such as by deliberately creating some of the sensations on your Basic Bodily Happiness list).

It can be helpful to think about babies and what they need when they’re upset. They need to be responded to, held, soothed, sometimes rocked. Body needs the same thing and will respond to such things. 

Practice These Tools

1. Hold Yourself and use the Mantra “I Am Safe”

Create a strong embrace around your torso, by lifting your left arm up, placing your right hand on your left rib cage, folding your left arm back over that right hand, and then letting your left hand cross to the right side of your body where it can fall comfortably on your right arm below your right shoulder. 

This is a lot like crossing your arms, except your right hand is directly on your ribs close to your heart on the left side. 

Adjust for comfort, but you should feel firmly held. While hugging yourself this way, repeat out loud or in your head, “One, I-am-safe, Two, I-am-Safe, Three I-am-Safe”…all the way to the number sixty. Breathe and let yourself feel your own hug.

2. Hold Each Finger One by One

In this technique, you hold each of your ten fingers one by one, this time taking three breaths with each finger. 

Wrap the fingers of the right hand over the left thumb and feel what that’s like, breathe slowly and as naturally as possible, but with zero judgment about the quality of those breaths, three times, then move on to your left index finger, and so on. When you get to the right hand, you’ll use your left hand to hold your fingers. 

3. Lay Hands on Your Activated Body Sections

Finally, you can try placing your hands over places where you notice sensations of activation. These tend to be head, chest, heart, neck, and belly, but can sometimes include legs and back too. Wherever you’re feeling the discomfort, place your hands there and just keep them still, allowing warmth and sensation to seep into the part of your body that’s unhappy right now. 

If you do these three exercises repeatedly, your trauma activation will have a good chance of exiting your body system. But even if you aren’t fully successful in soothing yourself in the moment, you can trust that sooner or later your body will return to a non-traumatized state, so it’s mostly about getting through the activated episode somehow, someway, without using. You can do it, sister. 

Someone who has experienced a lot of trauma may find their world becomes colored by a dichotomy of power vs. helplessness that’s always more heavily slanted toward their experiences of being out of control. It doesn’t matter if it’s addiction, childhood trauma, or hurt that is pervasive across many stages–pain of this nature can seep through your defenses. When you’ve been hurt, abused, or disempowered throughout your life, feeling helpless can become a default. 

What is a victim mentality?

In general, a victim mentality is born of the repeated sense that you are at the mercy of the happenings in the world without any real say in the outcome. While this can produce frustration at failed attempts to bring about change, it also absolves you of any responsibility for doing so. Excuses for why you can’t change come readily, as does a list of external factors at fault for the current circumstances in your life. 

The refrain of not being at fault is a coping mechanism and a truth: you are not at fault for the things that have happened to you. However, a victim mentality is the manifestation of that coping mechanism on a scale that eclipses your sense of control over your life until you can’t feel it anymore. 

Self-pity vs a victim mentality

No one plans to become addicted to being a victim, but for many, it begins as a culmination of bad things in the world feeling like they’ve outweighed the hope. When your reality has been re-written by trauma, you are the victim. When your reality is re-written time and again by pain, you become powerless against your victim status. 

The difference between being addicted to being a victim and self-pity is somewhere between the two. Self-pity is a short-term expression of the pain of trauma; it’s you feeling sorry and hurt for what’s occurred to you. When you begin to wear that hurt as an identity, it’s a victim mentality.  

3 Signs someone in your life has a victim mentality

So what does a victim mentality look like? There’s a certain power in being a victim, and when someone is used to being hurt, that power feels alluring and protective. Here are some signs that may be of concern for someone struggling with a victim mentality. 

1. Blame without accountability 

Impressing the reminder that you are not responsible for what’s happened to you can take on a new life if it begins to bleed out to the parts of your life where you retain your agency. Being unable to take responsibility for the actions you take, while feeling entitled to let others know when they’ve wronged you or been wrong can be a slippery slope toward victim addiction. 

2. Living in the past 

When every attempt for others to remind you that hope and brighter days are ahead is met with contempt because all you can see in the past, it’s time to take a long look at the shape of your healing. Reliving your trauma can be deeply painful, but doing so on a stage that helps you to feel validated and supported can become addicting. That hit of dopamine that comes from receiving attention for your strength may make it difficult to move on from that trauma. 

3. Negative self-talk

The voice that leads your inner narrative is cruel. A hurtful internal voice can stand in the way of healing. When you feel sorry for yourself, and others feel sorry for you as well, it’s difficult to be anything more than worn down by the pain you feel. Negative self-talk perpetuates abuse of yourself and gives power to the pain that made you feel helpless to begin with. 

How do you break an addiction to being a victim?

It might feel shameful to even consider that you could become addicted to being a victim, but there are lots of things that feel like perks in victimhood. When you are hurting, there is freedom and validation in expressing that hurt. It can help you heal, but when the hurt keeps coming, it’s easy to blur the lines. It carries a secret power, but that power has a price that will destroy your determination. We want to empower you to find your way back to healing from helplessness. 

3 Ttips to holistic recovery 

A victim addiction is a learned behavior which means it can be unlearned. Through the process of unlearning the coping mechanisms that insulate a permanent victim from the pain of the world, they can reclaim their sense of power. Support through the process is critical, and many of our holistic programs are designed to engage your empowerment in your recovery. 

1. Let go of grudges and comparison 

Constantly holding yourself to the standard of comparison for others will reinforce a victim addiction quickly. Let go of the concept that you must feel or heal like someone else and begin to accept curiosity in your healing instead. 

2. Self-forgiveness 

When you let go of the pain at the core of your helplessness, your strength will begin to turn inward as well. The truth is: you are already so incredibly strong. Release that strength from the shackles of contempt by finding the forgiveness you deserve. 

3. Make space for small victories 

Risk feels really scary when you’ve experienced a lot of trauma. Instead of jumping to the need to overcome huge hurdles in the blink of an eye, let your expectation for wins focus on the here and now. Find small victories that help you to feel empowered as you build up your competence in confidence. 

When you are healing trauma or substance abuse, confronting victim addiction in yourself or someone you love can feel overwhelming. Call (760) 350-3131 to get the help you’re craving today. 

Trauma is not a mythical mystical thing that once was or that only happens to someone else. Trauma can happen to anyone, and any chronic or significant stressor deserves the title. We as humans experience trauma in many ways: it occurs in the moment in which we stop being able to handle the experience we’re having and the emotions it brings up. 

Once trauma occurs, particularly if it happens to us when we are young, it can linger well beyond what you’d expect. 

What happens when you have unresolved trauma?

If you read this article title and can cast your memory back directly to something you recognize as trauma, you are likely thinking “not this again”. It’s easy to think that if we’ve done all the right things—acknowledged the trauma, gone to therapy, followed our self-care checklist, let time heal your wounds—they should stop affecting your life. 

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Unresolved trauma can linger in every day life in ways you may not even realize are connected to the things that once hurt you so deeply. 

Here are ten ways that trauma may be running your life without you realizing it. 

1. Sleep difficulties

Whether you find yourself unable to fall asleep, or frequently being woken from a nightmare or without being sure why you’re awake, you’re not getting the rest you need. On the other end of the spectrum, perhaps you’re experiencing the urge to sleep through the responsibilities that need your attention because it’s easier to just not be awake. 

2. Edginess 

From constantly being prepared for danger to jumping at the mere thought of a risk that could be around the next corner, unresolved trauma may have you wound tighter than a spool of thread. 

3. Isolation

Feeling lonely even though you’re alone by choice, but you really can’t motivate yourself to reach out to anyone in order to fix it? While choosing a solo life can be a healthy choice for some, it’s never a healthy lifestyle if it doesn’t feel like one you chose for yourself. 

4. Conflict Intolerance

No one actively enjoys conflict, but there might be something more to your avoidance if every raised voice or sudden gesture has you looking for the emergency exit. 

5. Dissociation

Does everything feel mildly detached from reality, as if you’re observing a story being told to you? This separation from emotion and experience could be a signal that trauma is writing your life script instead of you. 

6. Substance abuse or eating disorders 

The urge to numb or escape the things that hurt you may combine with other risktaking behavior to culminate in a dangerous relationship with food or substances. 

7. Intense emotions 

Anger, anxiety and shame are often the emotions that stand out in stark contrast to your standard emotional landscape. If you feel these sharp feelings with a magnitude that far outweighs your other emotions, you may have a reactionary relationship with them.  

8. Numbness

On the flip side, perhaps you’re feeling nothing at all. No anger, no sadness, no joy. For some people, unresolved trauma leads to a sense of apathy that just feels like detachment from the world and those within it. 

9. Flashbacks 

Experiencing unwanted returns to a time and place you’ve long since left can be a powerful indicator of trauma that’s still impacting your life. Flashbacks may occur alongside dreams, memories or other triggers but they can also occur without any warning at all. 

10. Shame 

An emotion that feels so much heavier than any five letters should be able to bear, shame is a sense of humiliation or distress attached to your experience of a memory or behaviour. When you feel shame powerfully in your life with no real root for what’s brought it on, it can color the way you make decisions and process memories. 

Can childhood trauma still affect you as an adult?

Adverse childhood experiences, also called ACEs, are the events that become trauma when the world moves forward before you can process what’s occurred. For most children, that is any major event. 

The things that happen to you when you are young are often ones that sink into the foundation of your being. It’s not they are more important or impactful. It’s simply that they occur at a time when you didn’t know how to be anything else; so you grew with the responses to that trauma ingrained in the way you respond to the world around you. 

Just because it happened in the past doesn’t mean that it will stay there. When your unresolved trauma begins to seep into your daily life, it can be difficult to stay ahead of the sinking feeling and maintain any sort of wellbeing. 

If you are struggling to overcome the impact of trauma on your daily life alongside addiction, our comprehensive programs at Villa Kali Ma can offer you a trauma-informed opportunity to heal more wholly than you ever thought possible. 

Call us today. (760) 350-3131

Trauma is a global phenomenon. It does not discriminate by the money you have, your education, or even the value you place on the world around you. Trauma can happen to anyone. Once you’ve navigated something traumatic, you may feel you’re on the up and up—looking toward a brighter future. But trauma can linger, creating impacts that extend into any facet of your life. 

So what are the mental disorders caused by trauma, and how can you recognize them? Read on to learn more about five trauma-related mental health disorders, their co-occurring risks, and how you can help yourself (or a loved one). 

What happens after you experience trauma?

Trauma is any event (or series of events) that overwhelms your ability to cope. From catastrophe to heartbreak, there is no limit on the spaces or reasons in which you may experience trauma. 

When you’ve been traumatized, your brain begins scrambling for ways to make sense of something that is just too much to work through. During trauma, your body prepares to protect itself. After trauma, the mind tries to recover from whatever protection it couldn’t muster through coping tools that help numb or normalize what you’ve been through. For those who are in recovery, it’s likely your substance use is tied in one way or another to coping mechanisms you’ve used to try to overcome or numb that trauma. 

How does trauma affect your mental health?

In the days, months, and even years following trauma, the landscape of your mental health changes. How you feel your feelings and how you respond to them become foreign. You may no longer be sure how to relate to yourself or the world around you. Sensory and hormonal input are physical, but the way you feel them begins to feel like there’s a stranger in your thoughts, sharing your body. Many people seek the opportunity to evade that unsettling sensation, increasing the risk of developing unhealthy coping mechanisms. The impact of trauma can also increase the risk of co-occurring disorders that muddle your ability to prioritize it. 

There are several mental health disorders associated with trauma. Each is defined by a unique set of symptoms that responds to the universal desire to recover from (or reject the pain of) trauma. 

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Most well known in association with military veterans, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder has become characterized by flashbacks, rage, and insomnia. The lived experience of PTSD is much more varied, however. People who have experienced trauma on any level may develop PTSD. Symptoms do include the things listed above, but those experiencing PTSD may also have dissociative episodes, depression, a deep sense of shame, withdrawal, or destructive substance use. 

Complex PTSD 

Complex PTSD surfaces in cases where people are subjected to trauma over long periods, such as childhood abuse or wartime. The COVID pandemic may create an influx of complex PTSD cases. This disorder is characterized by a negative view of self, trauma-related amnesia, memory repression, detachment of self, and low awareness of core values. 

Acute Stress Disorder (ASD)

This disorder mimics the symptoms of PTSD in every way except one- Acute Stress Disorder occurs for a brief interval. Despite its brevity, ASD can have long-term ramifications if the coping mechanisms it brings about don’t depart with it. 

Secondhand trauma

A familiar disorder to those who have witnessed formative types of trauma occurring to other people, secondhand trauma is unique in its symptoms and expression. Being traumatized by watching someone else experience trauma may lead to feelings of helplessness, fear of loss of control, hypervigilance, amplified negative emotions, or chronic fatigue. 

Adjustment Disorders

Most often triggered by experiences that markedly change the way you exist within your life, adjustment disorders are much like they sound. If you’re struggling to find your way within the new landscape of your life, you may be suffering from adjustment disorder. This trauma-induced mental health challenge manifests in sleeplessness, a feeling of burnout, overwhelming feelings, heightened stress, lack of focus, neglecting responsibilities, and frequent sadness. 

While we have only covered a handful of the specific mental disorders caused by trauma, it’s important to note that many more exist. It’s also common that these disorders present as a combination of manifestations. Trauma-induced mental health disorders may also reveal themselves through the disorders that come from coping mechanisms you use to avoid their symptoms. 

Any of these disorders may present with suicidal thoughts or instances of self-harm. These things are always an emergency, and you should not wait to seek help. Reach out to emergency services now. 

Recovery is possible. Support is available. If you recognize yourself in these words, please reach out. You are worthy of the possibility that awaits you. 

 

According to trauma researchers like Bessel Van der Kolk, author of the poignant and seminal book The Body Keeps the Score, the phenomenon of trauma is so widespread as to be epidemic, affecting whole generations and large swathes of the population. 

In all likelihood, you who are reading this are traumatized to some degree, as am I. So how come it’s so hard for us to fully recognize the markers of trauma inside of our own experiences? Why do we still withhold compassion and approval from ourselves, expecting ourselves to do better, and to be better at life than we are?  

Most of us have heard about the big, horrible trauma sustained by war veterans and car crash survivors – the type of trauma that freezes the soul and ties it to the incidents of overwhelm. We may know about the more dramatic and disruptive symptoms – nightmares, flashbacks, severe anxiety, a compulsion to reenact the events. But we may not be able to see that we ourselves frequently experience the same types of responses, in a manner more subtle and personal to us. 

For many of us, it’s a challenge to recognize the signs and symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder at play within ourselves, for the simple reason that these symptoms are baked into our personalities, our sense of who we are. What doctors might call symptoms we know to be our own selves – how we cope, what we avoid, what we move towards. 

How can we tell the difference between ordinary human suffering, and something we might receive a clinical diagnosis for? When it comes to human pain and at what point you can call it a disorder, we’re largely talking about a matter of degree. 

What’s more important than diagnosis is self-recognition. Receiving a diagnosis of PTSD from a professional trauma worker can be validating for those of us with a tendency to dismiss our experiences, particularly our suffering and our problematic behaviors. Many of us are so used to overriding the signals we get from within that we don’t even see it. Like water to the fish, trauma is an invisible aspect of the human experience for us. 

But even when diagnosis is helpful for us, the recognition we most need and long for is our own. It is us who need to see about ourselves that we have been hurt. 

So to me a good question for all of us might be: what do the diagnostic criteria of PTSD feel like from the inside? 

How might we notice when our trauma is afoot within us, so that we treat ourselves with gentleness and understanding, with approaches that actually work for trauma recovery? 

It’s important to understand that trauma isn’t in the event itself, so we don’t diagnose trauma by asking “How bad were the things that happened to you?” 

Rather, where we find trauma is inside the human nervous system. If the nervous system returns habitually to a pattern of being disturbed and stimulated long after the conclusion of troublesome events, we call that trauma. 

Anger, fear and dissociation are normal reactions to stimulating events, but a problem comes about if the body does not learn how to safely release these overcharged nervous system responses after the event is done. Stuck in our nervous systems these energies become toxic to the body as well as emotionally and mentally problematic. 

When we have trauma, our feelings of anger, fear and numbness are not waves that come and go only in response to events as they’re happening, but more like black holes that pop up out of nowhere and suck us in for a long time. 

The discomfort when trauma is activated is very strong – it feels like dying. Understandably, we may change our behavior to avoid people, places and situations that we start to associate with this state.

By this definition, maybe you can see that any time we are reacting with anxiety, aggravation, or fogginess, and we cannot understand these reactions as belonging to the now moment we are in, we may in fact be touching into our reserves of trauma. 

What to do if you realize you have come into contact with the trauma inside you? Proceed with extreme loving gentleness: the top cure for trauma is safety for every level of your being. 

Make it truly, genuinely and deeply safe for your body, your heart, your mind, and your spirit. When you are truly safe, you will know, because you will begin to unravel and relax, to let go, to stop fighting, to release the pent up fear, rage, and paralysis. This is the way forward for us all.

Because creating safety is easier said than done, you may need help learning how. That is totally normal and deeply ok. Villa Kali Ma is one place you can learn. You are welcome here.