SOMATIC STUDIO
What is Trauma?
Contemporary understanding and traditional wisdom.
Trauma is any experience that sets you outside of your nervous system’s comfort zone.
Technically, ‘trauma’ is how you react to the experience, rather than the incident itself. Different people can react very differently to the same situation.
When the fight-or-flight response gets activated, there are several changes in the body including the chemicals that get activated, the heart rate, tension in the body, focus, temperature etc. Normally these energies have the chance to be released through the fight-or-flight response.
However, when the cycle gets interrupted, these
energetic holding patterns can remain stuck in the body, often for many years.
Our aim is simple: to facilitate the relaxation, the unwinding, of tension that we may have been holding for such a long time.
The body wants completion. That is exactly what we enable.
Who you are, what your purpose is, how you can best share your gifts with the world... These are all big questions, verging on the spiritual. I believe it is each of our lifetime’s work to answer them as best we can. So that we can be free to engage with a spontaneity and freedom that is our natural birthright.
"Complex PTSD is a learned set of responses and a failure to complete numerous important developmental tasks. What is learned can be unlearned. What was not provided by your parents can now be provided by yourself and others."
Pete Walker
Author: Complex PTSD, From Surviving to Thriving
Fight, flight, freeze: How it looks in animals
To support your understanding of the body's natural reactions when releasing trauma, these videos depict the natural process as shown occurring in nature. Trauma occurs when this cycle gets interrupted. Notice how the animals react to danger and what it looks like when the natural cycle is completed.