Trauma and the Nervous System
Trauma disconnects us from ourselves and the world.
What does this really mean? In the decades that I have witnessed and worked with survivors of trauma, the most difficult thing we all experience is disconnection. That feeling that we can’t quite connect into ourselves. We’re unsure of what we are feeling, untrusting of our decisions and we just don’t feel quite solid altogether. We try to meet life’s challenges with this disconnection in the background, managing the best we can. It’s never easy. We think we have healed a major issue we’ve been dealing with for years, only to find the next layer awaits us. It’s like peeling an onion, painful and often distressing. It never seems to end. Not only has our trauma robbed us from real happiness but we also seem to never get to the end or find the all-in-one cure.
We can spend years in therapy going round in our thoughts and emotions, trying to figure out why we get so distressed and triggered and why certain things just set off a trail of endless emotions I call ‘the downward spiral’. And yet I have also witnessed the enduring strength and utmost courage that every survivor has shown despite having little self-confidence and esteem. It’s as though something deep in us knows that there is something remaining untouched by all the battery the world has thrown at us. Even though we’ve managed to bandaid ourselves together with little resources, we somehow manage to stand our ground with our bodies and minds exclaiming ‘I am still here”.
We deserve to feel happy and experience healing. The kind of healing that nurtures our soul deep within. Where we feel entirely whole and wholesomely loved. We may hold many emotions of painful shame, outraged anger and feel broken and lost. But it wasn’t our body that let us down, though it may feel that way. We deserve to be connected once again to ourselves.
This reconnection can happen at the heart of who we are, between our body and mind. We can piece together what was torn apart, what was broken to make us vulnerable. We can reclaim our vulnerability and feel loved from the inside out. It can be a slow process reconnecting but we will be building a solid bridge back to ourselves. A bridge of trusting ourselves again, trusting our body, our heart and that we have survived.
Giselle Lamberth
Embodiment Institute Somatic Healing Programs
Clinical Social Worker, Somatic Psychotherapist