Releasing Your Trauma Isn’t What You Think It Is
It’s become common language to talk about ‘releasing’ trauma, but this language reveals a common misconception about trauma.
Trauma is not some monster that invades your body. Trauma is actually the adaptations your body adopts to protect yourself from experiencing something extremely overwhelming and destabilizing again.
Real healing isn’t getting rid of what’s happened to you. It’s building capacity in your nervous system to:
Honor your protective adaptations
Grieve what’s been changed or lost
Complete the stress response cycle
And learn to discern more accurately when the stress response is actually necessary
Why So Many People Think You Can Release Your Trauma
The idea of releasing trauma - in pop psychology - is built on a very simplified understanding of what we know about single incident traumas. During single incident traumas, the nervous system generates a stress response, but is often unable to complete the stress response cycle, which means all the activation generated in that moment stays active and vigilant until the body feels safe, supported, or successful to let it metabolize.
Certain trauma methodologies, like Somatic Experiencing and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, have developed thoughtful procedures for discharging this activation, and they are far more complex than just massaging out the trauma from your hips.
Decontextualized Complex Trauma
But the reality is, very few people in this world actually have ONLY single-incident traumas. We live in a world that is constantly stressful and pretty consistently traumatizing. And the pervasiveness of these traumatic events often means the trauma becomes decontextualized.
Resmaa Menakem, somatic therapist specializing in racialized trauma, says, “trauma in a person decontextualized over time can look like personality, trauma in a family decontextualized over time can look like family traits, trauma decontextualized in a people over time can look like culture.”
What Resmaa is describing is complex trauma, manifested in our relationships and culture. Complex trauma results from long-term, repeated exposure to stressful or dangerous events, such as childhood abuse, neglect, bullying, poverty, state violence, war, and so on. With complex trauma, the effect is not just physiological, but also psychological – certain worldviews are constructed to help navigate life, certain core beliefs about the self, designed to protect you or keep you connected to others as a protective mechanism.
Working with the Whole System
The result is that trauma does not just live in one area of your body, like your hips, it actually shapes your entire bodymind system - physiology and psychology.
And because trauma is an adaptive mechanism, it’s often an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to how the entire body system functions. This means that we can’t just get rid of the adaptation. Doing so is not always sustainable; the body may bounce back into it’s trauma shape – sometimes with more intensity – or otherwise feel destabilized and further stressed.
The methods I use help us approach the system as we would a group of individuals, attempting to work together toward a common project or goal. We would not enter a group of people, force some of them to change, and expect that to work out smoothly. This means we need to actually build relationship with each element of the system – we need to understand, appreciate, and essentially get consent from each element of the system each step of the way.
When we work this way, we are building capacity in your nervous system. Think of it like strengthening your psychological muscles to hold the various elements of your inner system.
When we use this approach, over time there is generally a softening in the system because each element feels held, seen, and validated. This organically allows for more ease and flow, both psychologically and physiologically. On a neurobiological level, what’s happening is that the brain is moving toward more integration, meaning that the mind is less fragmented, the trauma is no longer in the drivers seat, and all the elements can work together with more clarity and ease, so that life feels better for you.
How Somatic Therapy Can Help
What I find helpful is to actually think about what you hope to gain by “releasing” your trauma. What will it look like or feel like on the other side of that? That information helps us approach trauma work more intentionally.
From there, I employ an integrative approach that combines talking, mindfulness, movement, touch, and other methods to help you achieve your goals.
A great place to start is by scheduling a FREE 20-minute consultation, where we can talk about how somatic therapy can help you and if it's the right fit for you right now.
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