Big T and little t trauma. What is it and how does our body react to it?
What is trauma? Have you experienced it and what impact does it have on your body?
When we think about trauma, we are pulled to consider the big events that happen in life. The ones that feel huge and engulfing and often, we think about them only in terms of the impact they have on us from a psychological perspective only. Trauma doesn't have to be just the big T trauma, like a car accident or the sudden loss of a loved one. Trauma can also come in the form of little t's. A little t event is one experienced as traumatic at a personal level such as a relationship breakdown or the loss of a pet.
Trauma can come from human made experiences such as war, sexual violence, or witnessing harm or to another, or trauma can be made from natural events like a flood, a hurricane or a world wide pandemic. Trauma can be either a one-off event or ongoing. It is widespread and can be deeply harmful for both individuals and communities.
How does trauma affect us?
Trauma is an emotional response to a stressful, frightening or distressing event. Traumatic events can happen at any age and can cause long-lasting harm. We all have different responses to trauma. These can be instantaneous or they may not show for a long time after the event. As further trauma occurs, we can find ourselves reacting to and starting to be affected by past events.
Our experiences all shape who we are. No one can say what one person will find traumatic and no one can know how you feel about your own experiences. Your experiences may be similar to those of other people, but your reaction may be very different. Trauma is deeply personal.
Trauma can arise, for example, from feeling threatened, rejected, abandoned, trapped, ashamed, powerless, unheard, unseen, unsafe and unsupported.
How does our body respond to trauma?
When we find ourselves in stressful or threatening situations our body prepares itself for fight or flight. Cortisol and adrenaline are automatically released to prepare us for action. The nervous system finds itself in a heightened response state as an automatic response to perceived danger.
This can produce a number of different responses:
Fight - protesting, struggling, fighting
Flight - running away from the perceived threat, or hiding
Freeze - feeling stuck, paralysed and unable to move
Flop - doing what you are told without protest
Fawn - trying to please someone who harms you
Research has shown that this doesn't just happen at the time of the perceived threat; stress signals can remain for some time after the event is over, and this can impact how you think, feel and behave.
You may find that, as a consequence of trauma, you feel things more intensely. You may dissociate, you may find you experience flashbacks or panic attacks.
How might trauma show up in the body?
You may be starting to appreciate now that trauma doesn't just affect the mind, it also affects the body. The automatic physiological response that occurs to the nervous system during stressful and threatening events impacts the whole of us. With prolonged repeated stress hormone release we can find ourselves living with symptoms of anxiety, depression or PTSD. We might also experience bodily aches and pains from the constant tightness held in the body, chronic fatigue, insomnia, intrusive thoughts, back pain, headaches and migraine...there are so many ways that trauma can be stored physically within the body.
You are not alone
Know that, whilst you may often feel isolated in your experience, you are not alone. Everyone experiences trauma of some kind and there is hope for healing. By beginning to move towards more trauma informed practices, many people can begin to find a richer sense of safety and healing within their body. Trauma informed yoga can help to provide tools and resources to support regulation of the nervous system, support restoration and ease of symptoms and ailments associated with trauma. Trauma informed yoga can work well alone and can be extremely effective when combined with talking therapy.
If you'd like to discuss further how trauma informed yoga can support you, please get in touch via the homepage contact tab in the main menu and we can talk some more about how my trauma informed yoga classes in Nottingham can support you.
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