What is Trauma?
Written by Jennifer Aldoretta, founder of Groove
First, let’s get one thing straight: we all have trauma.
Yep, even you. If you are human, you have trauma. Trauma can range from being bullied as a child, to experiencing physical or emotional violence, to sudden or chronic illness, to the death of a family member, to a car accident, to an intense and scary experience.
If you’ve struggled through a painful life experience of any kind, it very likely resulted in trauma. Read on, and I’ll explain why…
“Everything is energy, baby!”
Not long ago, a phrase like this would have sent eyes rolling up into the heads of all who witnessed its uttering. But today, fields like Quantum Physics are now beginning to understand that everything we perceive (and everything we can’t) is, indeed, energy.
There are several basic properties of energy. Put on your nerd pants! The first law of Thermodynamics tells us that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Another basic property of energy is that it naturally wants to move. (Shoutout to my mechanical engineering background for forever forcing me to remember the laws of thermodynamics.)
Trauma, like everything else, is (at its core) just energy. Painful and difficult energy, yes. But it is energy just the same. Evolutionarily speaking, traumatic experiences serve an important survival purpose. A wide array of information about these experiences becomes coded into our minds (and our DNA) and is stored within us (and passed to offspring) to improve chances of survival in case something similar is ever encountered in the future.
Unfortunately, because of this world we have created — including social norms, conditioning, and patterns that go against our natural biological impulses — we now experience trauma in a different way than our ancestors did.
Energy in nature moves in cycles: birth to death, creation to destruction, day to night, wake to sleep, transpiration to precipitation. The entire reality that we perceive is built in cycles. Stress and trauma are no exception.
Trauma results when we become stuck in the middle of a stress cycle, and, rather than being allowed to move through us, trauma energy becomes trapped, causing all sorts of physical, mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual ails.
When we experience stress, there is a natural cycle occurring, whether or not we’re aware of it. This cycle, like all other cycles, naturally wants to complete itself.
When the body experiences a stress (or trauma), we respond without thinking…
The body’s natural, default response to stress (or danger) follows a specific pattern:
become activated by the stressor (or the person/thing creating the stress), meaning our body is flooded with stress hormones to prepare us
mobilize in order to protect ourselves from the stress (ideally, going into a FIGHT or FLIGHT response)
become de-activated, meaning the body comes out of this heightened state and the flood of stress chemicals slows or ceases once the stressor has passed
restore ourselves to a state of homeostasis, or equilibrium
All of this occurs without our conscious awareness. The fight-or-flight response in the body is a powerful one. Fighting or fleeing until the danger has passed allows the body to physically discharge the trauma energy that is naturally trying to move through the body.
But there are two other instinctive responses to stressors that aren’t as commonly discussed: freeze and fawn. When the circumstances of the stress become so dire that our physiology knows that we cannot fight or flee, it drops into the most primal response there is: freeze. Essentially, play dead and hope you get through it. The fawn response means we try to appease the stressor and “play nice” to make it through the trauma.
Most of the trauma we carry as adults occurred during childhood, when we were too small to defend ourselves. We live in a society where we become conditioned to act in ways that are “socially acceptable”. Fighting and fleeing — especially if the stressor is a parent or adult — is often not possible as a child. So, out of self-protection, our small body goes into a freeze or fawn response.
Animals instinctively do something very interesting in order to deactivate and restore the body after a freeze response. They SHAKE.
When allowed to naturally do its thing, the body RELEASES the trauma energy, allowing the stress cycle to complete. However, if we’re in a chronically stressful environment, if we grew up in a household where we were not encouraged to feel and process our sadness or our fear, or if the danger has not actually passed (because, say, we live with the individual causing the stress or trauma), the stress cycle is unable to complete.
The natural cycle is interrupted, and the energy does not get discharged.
So trauma energy stays in the body, spinning inside of us, waiting to be released.
Before long, we completely cut ourselves off from the painful feelings and energies swirling inside of us. But because energy naturally WANTS to move, it resurfaces periodically because it wants to be discharged. So then what happens when we’ve cut ourselves off from these painful feelings? When we don’t allow ourselves to feel fear or sadness? Or when we don’t fully surrender ourselves to a physical discharge of the energy?
We RESIST. When we resist this stress and trauma energy, we use up our own precious energy because we’ve either been conditioned to do so or because we’re afraid of the pain we may experience as a result of fully processing it. We’re pulling from our own energy stores in order to resist the stuck trauma energy.
As we’ll learn in Why Heal Trauma?, stuck trauma energy is a recipe for disease and imbalance of the mind, body, and spirit.