What Is Trauma?
“Trauma is a highly activated incomplete biological response to threat, frozen in time ... When we ... fail to discharge the tremendous energy generated by our survival preparations (fight/flight) ... The person then stays in a state of acute and then chronic arousal and dysfunction in the central nervous system.”
—Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger
Let’s take some real life examples of what this means:
Perhaps a fear response we had when we were small was simply so utterly overwhelming that we had to repress it.
Or our parents or caregivers couldn’t handle the intensity of our anger so they shut us down and we had to push that anger down.
Or we were unable to escape the situation that caused the response. Or the threat was almost continuous (because we lived in a threatening environment).
In each case, our body gets riled up to help us survive, but if we can’t discharge that survival energy (or have to repress an emotion), it gets ‘fixed’ in the tissues of the body leaving us stuck in a painful state of chronic arousal.
The body is stuck in a state where it feels that it is constantly under threat. The felt sense of past threats echo endlessly in the present moment, unable to resolve themselves.
Rather than being a temporary, passing movement, these survival patterns become a permanent STATE of being.
This is trauma.
And related issues are also.
Depression is (often) a ‘freeze’ response that is stuck in the ‘on’ position.
Anxiety is (often) a ‘flight’ response that is stuck in the ‘on’ position.
Irritability is (often) a ‘fight’ response that is stuck in the ‘on’ position.
People pleasing and approval seeking is (often) a ‘fawn’ response that is stuck in the ‘on’ position.
And it turns out that these stuck survival states are INCREDIBLY PAINFUL.
So then we have to dissociate from our bodies and get stuck in our heads in order to deal with the pain. And then we end up getting stuck in that state, too! Which is even more painful!
There are then several layers of pain:
The hurt of the initial wound (e.g. parent yelling)
The stuck survival response (fear that we couldn't feel/express)
The freeze/dissociation (the layer of numbness we have to create to cope on a daily basis)
As we go through life we accumulate these stuck or incomplete survival patterns.
At a deep, physiological level our body is holding many patterns that are responding to threats from the past.
By the time we are an adult, we have hundreds, if not thousands of these incomplete survival responses looping in our system.
This stuck survival stress is always operating in the background of our experience to a greater or lesser extent, even though we are largely unaware of it.
The result is that we live our lives with a constant background hum of suffering that is so normal to us we scarcely notice it: anxiety, depression, dissociation, irritation, neurosis and just a vague sense of unsafety, lack, ennui and blergh.
This is where addiction comes in.
Addiction is a survival adaptation that helps you to regulate these dysregulated, stuck, frozen states.
Addiction is a survival response that helps you cope with all the other survival responses that are STUCK in the ‘on’ position!
It’s a response to the trauma: the layers of survival responses that are stuck in the ‘on’ position.
Because the engine of our survival system is our nervous system, which moves between different states depending on whether we feel safe or threatened.
This means that trauma is a physiological issue.
And think about what happens when you are triggered.
Most people try to think their way out of trauma.
Bluntly, this isn’t possible. It’s like trying to think your way out of a broken leg. It’s just operating at the wrong level.
Instead, we need to go into the body. We need to meet these stuck survival responses - the anger, fear, shame and so on - and allow them to be felt fully so they can ‘unstick’ themselves, complete their cycle and relax their grip on our nervous sytem.
I help people to do just that. Learn more about my offerings.
