Dear Reader
I have been teaching about trauma for the last 15 years and have seen the dramatic evolution of how it is approached and acknowledged within this culture.
15 years ago there was so much secrecy and shame around admitting you have experienced something traumatic. Neuro-physiological research was in it's infancy, but slowly growing. A bit part of my job as a therapist was creating a trustworthy enough space that someone would be willing and able to disclose what they had gone through. Art would help a lot with this process.
The other part of my work was to make the distinction: Trauma was something that happened to you, was not a part of you, and you were not alone in feeling the way you did.
I had to de-mystify how the nervous system works and help identify the reactions that were physiological (to eliminate blame). I would tell people: "your body was doing the best it could to keep you safe".
Fast forward to today, thanks to social media and people opening up to talk about their experiences, live and online, trauma has become a common topic of conversation. People generally understand more about it, will talk more openly, know where to go to find information and feel less alone in their experiences.
We are more trauma-informed and focused than ever. And we have also come to the place where everything has become traumatic and triggering.
And it a way it is…
What many early trauma researchers were pushing for and still are, is to include the traumatic narrative as part of living and growing up in this world. In other words: trauma is normal.
Experiencing trauma is a part of life, and there is nothing that you can do to prevent this no matter how “safe” you try to create your world.
So what does this require of us?
Trauma is prevalent in day to day life because it is essentially your normal physiological stress response that is amplified to various degrees depending on a variety of factors.
It is the response to an event that is overwhelming, which then becomes a pattern that is encoded in your nervous system. This pattern is what sets the traumatic symptoms off and gives you the feeling like you don’t have any control when they arise. There are variations from person to person in how intense it feels.
Trauma is not “just in your head”, it lives and is stored in your body, notably in your breath (as the breath is the basis for initiating the stress response). When we work somatically (with the body) and with the breath, we are able to set new patterns of calm and healing in the nervous system, leading to a lessening of the traumatic reaction pathways.
Trauma is a pattern, but so is calm.
In the past we could pretend that trauma happened to someone else and ignore its effect. Denial has been and continues to be a powerful mechanism of oppression, keeping traumatic experience ‘under wraps’, under the guise that nothing was happened or happened. It’s obvious that we cannot ignore it any longer. As we see by current events; one person’s traumatic enactment has the ability to negatively impact thousands, if not millions of people.
Understanding trauma and its effects, not just on an individual level, but historically and culturally, is imperative for the times, as we move into an age that demand us to be more present, more engaged, more embodied and connected to one another.
We need to develop healthy and resilient nervous systems so that we can handles the challenges around us to uplift and serve all the people who we live and work with.
This is the call.
For those of you in Montreal, I am teaching a 10hour Trauma Informed Practice Intensive at Studio Mile End THIS WEEKEND! While this is geared for yoga teachers or health care practitioners, it is open to the public who want a deeper understanding on how trauma manifests in their body. For more information and to sign up please click here and scroll down to the TRAUMA course on April 13/14.
For those of you who live further away… the
Nervous System First Aid Kit begins Wednesday May 8th @ 6:00pm EST.
This is your first stop to understanding how your nervous system works, how stress and trauma affects it, AND gives you a number of effective breathing practices to help calm, balance or energize your nervous system (video and audio format). I will be teaching it live online twice a year (so you will be able to take it in the fall if you can’t this time around) and the asynchronous online course will be available from June 1st. It is covered under insurance for those of you living in Ontario or Quebec (please message me for details). For more information and to sign up, please click here.
Sending you all the best,
Esther