One of the things that happens in somatic work – is that I see people who have avoided therapy, talk therapy, traditional therapy because they don’t want to re-live the trauma they experienced in the past.

Here’s the secret you may not have heard…

You don’t have to re-live your trauma in order to heal from it.

We have been programmed with the no pain no gain idea. That may hold true for some things – such as fitness gains. I think that was where that term originated, although the idea seems to prevail across our culture.

Before we understood what we know now about the nervous system, trauma healing often included dramatic re-living, explosive, cathartic experiences. ‘If it didn’t look dramatic then you haven’t healed from it’ kind of idea.

The problem with this approach is 1) you risk getting re-traumatized and 2) your nervous system doesn’t learn a new way to operate.

Trauma is an inside job. What that means is that trauma is how you perceived what was happening in your environment. It’s not the event itself. It means in that moment it was all a little too much for your nervous system to handle. Or it was unsafe for you to express that big stress energy. So you took that big energy of stress and stored some of it as energy in the body. This programs your nervous system and keeps that big distressing energy sectioned off – to deal with later when its safer, calmer, better time to address it. We do this out of survival and often occurs in childhood.

Trauma is in essence ENERGY. Energy in the body that is ‘stuck’ so to speak. When we bring movement in a titrated fashion – that energy can move and in ways that is not too distressing for the human. That is what we do with somatic experiencing work.

We slowly allow the movement of that energy. The results are profound. Greater experience of aliveness, vitality, easier relating, less experience of stress, all things that can be explained by more capacity!

Our capacity shrinks when we are stressed or have experienced trauma or childhood challenges. Our world gets smaller, the things we tolerate, the people we attract, our work, our families, our community.

When we do this deep embodied healing we work on expanding all your experiences in a way that feels liberating and safe and good. Vitality comes online, intuition sharpens, and we have a greater sense of aliveness.

If you are curious to know more about this work – check out my empowered program. It’s a 3 week live online somatic program. We do this work in community & is supported by me – live! I run this twice a year – typically in March & October.

Let me know what your experience has been about healing WITHOUT re-hashing the past.

Love
Meaghan