"I know everything about my trauma- So why am I still stuck?

What happens when you have done all the research, understand all your patterns, and can explain your trauma better than anyone- but nothing seems to change?

Trauma isn't just a story held in the mind, it's an experience carried in the body.  Sometimes the next step isn't to learn more. It might just be to feel more.

In this episode, I explore the risk of becoming an expert in your trauma and forgetting that safety might be the only thing that can get us to feel normal again.  It's important that the imprint our experiences leave on us don't hold us back from the present moment.  That is what I love about somatic work.  You don't have to relive your experiences, you just get to create new ones that make your body feel safe and then you can begin to heal.  I hope you enjoy this episode.

https://www.epidemicsound.com/music/tracks/5dda51f8-8388-3b50-8373-4be6fbf6aa7f/

Transcript

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We're back with the grounding room, and today I am so excited because I got my very first email and it was a question that I'm gonna try to answer the best I can today. So this email is from Sarah H in Boardman, Oregon. And Sarah wrote in, I have done so much work on myself. Years of therapy, journaling, self-help books, trauma education, you name it, I've done it all. I understand my story and where my patterns come from, but I don't feel free from them. It's frustrating me because I keep thinking that if I just learn one more thing, maybe something will click. Instead, I feel like I'm carrying all this knowledge without experiencing the transformation that I expected to experience long time ago. Can you help? Knowing that I've done all the inner work, but I still feel stuck. So, first, what I'd like to say is thank you so much for writing in. That means the world to me. I've been hoping for an email for quite some time right now. So thank you, Sarah, and hopefully I can answer this the best I can. The first thing that I would say is that knowing your trauma isn't the same as feeling safe in your body. So knowledge doesn't always bring you the feeling that your nervous system isn't dysregulated and on high alert or in fight or flight. We have gotten incredibly good at learning the language of our trauma. Uh, we hear it on social media all the time. And in many ways, uh, we can explain our childhood patterns and behavior with almost clinical precision, really. But that might actually be what's keeping us stuck. Uh, we hear people often say things like, I'm dysregulated, or I'm dissociating, or I'm isolating, but I feel like the survival mode has become somewhat of an identity rather than a vehicle for adapting to life and learning how to feel safe again. I know this because I was also doing this. And I want to tell you, you're not alone. I could pretty much give you a dissertation on my childhood trauma when I started my path into being a somatic practitioner. I could break down and analyze both of my parents, how every choice they made, everything they said affected me for over a decade. And I lived that story. One day I realized I didn't know where to go from there. And I had told the story so many times that it actually became who I was. But what got me out of it were just two simple words. Now what? Once I really focused on these words, well, now what? You know your trauma, you know your parents kind of messed up, you know that you've moved on, you still are functioning in society, but things just don't feel right. And you sit in therapy every month and you kind of just say the same things over and over again. What I realized was healing is not just processing my pain. It's developing the capacity to experience life beyond the pain. You're not dishonoring your trauma by becoming more than it, and you're not betraying your past by healing. You are actually allowed to become someone whose entire personality is not organized around your trauma or surviving it. Even though I feel like an expert in what I went through, my goal was not to become an expert in suffering, but unfortunately, that's what I did. And it sounds like that's what you're doing too. Now my goal is to become safe enough to actually live life. No matter what happens, now I can trust that I can and will get through anything. The small, simple exercises I add to the end of these podcasts are exactly how I did it. I won't lie and say it was easy, and it took a long ass time. For me, some of the childhood things that I brought into my adulthood, uh, I grew up with an alcoholic father. And now I can be around people who are drinking, and I'm not on high alert anymore. I can simply remove myself from any situation without feeling any guilt at all. My mom, who was in in and out of abusive relationships for my entire childhood, I can see a woman struggling with an abusive relationship and let her know I'm here if she needs, but not force my help on her as though it's my job to save her. When I was a kid, I got made fun of a lot. And now I can be made fun of and not think everyone hates me. I can lose friendships and instead of being hurt or mad, I can be grateful for the time we had and not feel abandoned. I have controlling people in my life, and now I assertively stand up to them, softly teaching them I can't and won't be controlled. When you've been in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn for years or even decades, a calm nervous system can feel incredibly uncomfortable. So I would say start there. Be uncomfortable, feeling safe. And what that means is practice. It's about being calm and safe in your own body and realizing that you are in control of the environment that you're surrounded by. Silence can feel threatening. Rest can feel like being lazy. Receiving love and care from someone can feel suspicious. Your body may just be saying things like, if I stop scanning, who will protect me? If I relax, nothing will get done if I don't do it. And if I stop giving of myself, will people actually love me? I don't know what your trauma is specifically, but I feel like these are common things that we all go through. This is why knowledge and awareness alone don't always heal the nervous system. The body needs consistent, repeated experiences of safety. Your body has to get comfortable in the parasympathetic nervous system and actually have a few moments to get out of the sympathetic nervous system. And I say start small with this. Small, tiny things that you do for yourself. This is not instant peace or healing. It takes time, patience, and practice. Trauma knowledge can create the illusion of progress because understanding what happens feels productive. And this is all wonderful. And I will not minimize the work it takes to go through all this. And what you've done so far is really great. Sometimes we explain our reactions to things as this is just how I am. I can't help it. And the truth is you can. While understanding reaction and trauma and pain is all important, that lives in the mind. And the other half to this is in your body. You can intellectually understand safety while your body still expects danger. You can accurately name your wounds while still organizing your life around protecting them. Oftentimes we wear our survival roles as though that's it. I'm the anxious one. I'm hyper-independent, or I'm a people pleaser. And there can actually be grief around the idea of healing this person. People may turn their backs on you if you start saying no or having boundaries. What I'm hoping by bringing all this up is that you might remember that your nervous system is adaptive. You learned at a young age to survive, and you can learn to feel safe too. This won't happen overnight, and it might get really messy. But with repeated feelings of calm and safety, it is possible. I'm hoping that we can take the question from why did this happen to me to what makes me feel alive right now in this moment. So I'm gonna give you two exercises, Sarah, to try today. And we're just gonna start there. If they feel uncomfortable while you're doing them, that's okay. Plus, with each episode, I'm gonna keep adding more and more exercises. We're just getting you out of your mind and into your body. This is just about learning safety inside the body. So these are just two practices that you can try. You can do them every day, you can do them at any time, doesn't matter. So the first one, you're gonna take the palm of your hand, put it directly on your chest in the center, and you're gonna slowly make circular motions. Do this for about a minute and then start soft tapping your chest with the same hand. This will help clear emotional stagnation. And while you're doing this, you're gonna take really deep breaths in and long, powerful exhales out. I would say anywhere between eight and ten breaths should be a good starting point. Once you feel calm and safe, place one hand on your heart, holding your heart with tenderness, and just sit like that for a minute or two more. And see if you can notice anything physical in your body that's slowed down, whether you feel like your blood pressure, your heart rate dropped a little bit, or maybe your shoulders don't feel as tense. The second one is something simple called rocking. So, what this can look like is you can sit in a chair and just simply sway back and forth. This is gonna give your nervous system a feeling of safety. You can also do this in child's pose if you like yoga. You can get in a child's pose and simply rock back and forth. So, taking a few moments a day to try those, those are very small exercises that don't have to be overwhelming, that you can try every day and see if you feel something changing in your body. I will reiterate that this is not gonna happen overnight. But if you feel like you've been in overdrive or overwhelm or you're just talking in circles about the things that happened to you, this is a great way to calm your nervous system and to re-regulate yourself to feel safe. So I'm gonna end this podcast with be patient with yourself. Talking about things and being in your mind is wonderful and it's helpful, and you can learn a lot about your patterns. But the other part of that is your body. And you have to realize that there's parts of your body that need to feel safe again. So no matter what you know, that doesn't always equal feeling safe. We just want to be able to live in this moment without being worried about every possible outcome. Please feel free to write in any emails or questions that you have. I absolutely loved getting this one. And we will be back next week with another episode. Also, I'm following this episode up with the first root chakra meditation. So definitely give that a listen too. Have a great week, everybody, and we'll see you soon. Bye.