Releasing The past

How would your life change if you could release the past?

Are you stuck in fight-or-flight?

You are walking alone on a mountain trail at dusk, returning to your car a little later than you'd planned. You've always known it's bear and cougar country, but you've never had a bad experience with a wild animal, so you're not concerned.

Suddenly, you hear a loud snap of a twig behind you. Your heart rate increases; eyesight and hearing become more acute; your head whips around towards the sound, and your muscles tighten as blood flow to them increases. Without conscious thought, you instantly assess the possible threat and choose to flee or fight.

You may have picked up a stone or limb as a weapon or begun to run before you even think. Reading this you may have noticed increased heart and respiration rate, a tingling of the skin, increased perspiration, and a sense of alertness. Your imagination just now may have offered images of escape routes or ways you could fight off the imagined attack.

Highly stressful or life-threatening experiences arouse vast amounts of survival energy and emotion — the well-known fight-or-flight response, shared with all animals. Our lower or reptilian brain and sympathetic nervous system arouses instantly to maximize our chance of survival. Merely thinking about such a situation activates the same responses. When it takes control, our bodies respond far more rapidly than normally to assess the danger and to flee or fight.

Animals know something we've forgotten

But there is a difference between such responses in modern humans and animals. Even though animals in the wild routinely experience life-threatening situations, after the danger has passed, they quickly return to normal, whereas humans are sometimes traumatized, or, in other words, stuck in some combination of the nervous system's fight-or-flight or a freeze response. It is like having both the accelerator pedal and the brake pedal pressed to the floor at the same time. The person may think they got over the experience, but if they were unable to avoid the danger and didn't have support to shake off the strong charge of sensations and emotions afterwards, that vast amount of survival energy can become stuck in their nervous systems. Weeks, months, or years later, often without even a conscious connection to the traumatic experience, symptoms may appear, possibly including:

• Restlessness, obsessive thinking, or anxiety
• Depression, drowsiness, or low energy
• Reactivity with fear, guilt, or anger
• Panic/anxiety attacks
• Relationship and intimacy difficulties
• Pains or disease with no apparent cause
• Addictions

These symptoms are normal for a person with an over-stressed nervous system. They have lost resiliency, the natural ability to flow easily between the many moods and energy states necessary to live a full and rich life.

What May Traumatize

Trauma is not simply a type of experience. Something can traumatize one person but not another. Trauma is the
effect of a threatening experience on a person’s physiology and nervous system. This depends, in part, on how severe the threat was felt to be, whether
the individual was able to take any effective defensive action, and whether they had support afterwards to move through the powerful sensations and emotions. For example, I knew a person who experienced a home invasion and attempted rape. She effectively drove the attacker out of her house by screaming and ferociously striking, and although she was, of course, extremely upset at the time, she suffered no long-term trauma due to her experience of successfully defending herself. Obviously, this has not been everyone's experience. Sometimes we were simply overpowered by the force, speed, or repetition of what happened to us.

As you review this list, try to be aware of any sensations or discomfort which may be triggered by the reading. This could be a helpful indication of where to start your healing work.

Events which may lead to trauma include:

• Inescapable attack, including rape, animal attack, war, physical abuse, incest, and molestation
• Physical injury, including wounds, surgery, amputation, burns, poison, and prolonged hospitalization
• Forceful impact, such as falls, auto accidents, other high impact accidents, and head injuries
• Emotional trauma during development, such as severe neglect and abandonment, or ongoing verbal, emotional, physical, or sexual abuse
• Severe illness, loss of relationship, or other emotional loss
• Natural disasters such as fires and earthquakes
• Horror, including seeing an accident or witnessing violence
• Massive overstimulation such as near-drowning, suffocation, electric shock, hallucinogens
• Pre- and peri-natal distress, birth-related trauma

Now, remember, in case you were triggered reading this list, it is never too late to get "unstuck", or to heal trauma. The stuck energy of these emotional and/or physical wounds can be released. For more encouraging words, or to learn more about Somatic Experiencing, click here.

"Before I came to Paul for therapy, my life seemed to be controlled by my emotional reaction to every situation that triggered uncomfortable past memories.  Now when a situation brings that emotion to the forefront, I am able to feel it and quickly dismiss it."

— S.A., 48 year old saleswoman