always the same
“Ouch!”
I looked down at my foot. I had caught my toe on the table leg. It was starting to throb. I sat down to attend to my foot, assessing the damage.
As I put my hands on my foot, my thoughts wandered away from my physical trauma, into all the different kinds of trauma you hear about.
There are a lot of different applications of the word “trauma” these days. I could list them all out, but meh, that’s not what’s interesting to me. What I find more interesting is that…
No matter what the trauma, the body always reacts the same.
This is easy to understand with a physical injury. The injury comes into the system. Everything is chaotic and the body goes into contain mode. Cells come to stop the bleeding, the body makes a scab to seal off the injury, and then it compresses and contains, compresses and contains, and starts the work to heal.
Same thing happens in the physical tissues no matter which level sustains the (take your pick: physical, emotional, energetic, spiritual, etc) trauma.
It looks like this:
Black outline of body on great background, black squiggle tangle in the center. Black squiggle surrounded by red circles.
The big tangled black squiggly is the chaos that comes from the injury. The red circles are the body’s reactions to contain the chaos, compressing all around the area of chaos to wall it off from the rest of the body. Here’s what your body does next:
Your body ranks the severity of a trauma on a scale of “How close to death am I?”
Not very close? Easier to handle and integrate. Very close to death? That’s a pretty big deal. Keep in mind the body will often categorize “aloneness” as a type of “death.” So things that bring you into aloneness can trigger the same trauma body reaction.
Then your system will track what happens next.
As humans, we are hardwired to co-regulate our nervous systems. Think about a time you were upset and talking to a calm friend helped you calm down. That’s co-regulation of your nervous system. This is really important when we sustain a trauma, any kind of trauma. Our system is tracking if we are alone or connected as we are in pain. With practice, we can then develop the skills to regulate our own nervous system in times of dysregulation.
Finally, your body adds the severity ranking with what happens afterwards together to help it make sense of the experience.
Processing the sum of those two things, the body will then do one of the following:
regulate the nervous system back to neutral, and integrate the experience.
regulate the nervous system back to neutral, but not integrate the experience, leaving the body in a state of hyper awareness of when a similar situation will occur again, ready to jump back into fight/flight at any moment.
remain in the sympathetic fight/flight/freeze reaction until it feels safe.
I bring my attention back to my foot, remembering that what happens after the trauma is important to the body tissues.
I take a moment to really focus on my toe, touching it gently, softly murmuring “does it hurt here?” with each new place my hands land. My second toe is now a bit purple, and the pain is subsiding a bit, and when I test it out, I’m able to put my weight on it. “I’m going to be ok,” it reports back to me. This was a minor trauma in my system, and I was easily able to make sense of and integrate it.
How about you?
Think about the trauma mechanics in relation to something you have experienced. What did it feel like in your body? As you think through the steps, were there any you skipped over? Remember, this is all just neutral data.
Now take a deep breath.
In for a count of 4, out for a count of 6. We can co-regulate our nervous systems together, as you read this. Using a breath with a longer exhale reminds your brain that you are safe in this moment.
You are not alone.
All the trauma mechanics hugs-
jen mpt cst