What is Emotional Trauma and How to Begin Healing with Sarah Baldwin
A while ago, I received a request from a Good Space community member to bring Sarah Baldwin, a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, and an Embodied Coach, on the show! So, this week, she joined me for a conversation I think we could all use, what emotional trauma really is, and how to actually begin healing it. We discuss how to know if you're dealing with your own trauma, where it can stem from, and how we can teach our bodies to feel safe again. Sarah also takes us through how our bodies carry trauma what can happen if trauma does go left untreated and gives practices you can use to begin your own healing.
Who is Sarah Baldwin?
Someone from The Good Space audience asked if we could have Sarah on and we’re so glad they did. Sarah Baldwin is a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and an Embodied Coach. She is also trained in Polyvagal interventions and is on the training team at the Polyvagal Institute. She specializes in somatic trauma healing, somatic attachment work, nervous system regulation and somatic parts and inner child work.
From Trauma to Somatic Work
It was her own healing that brought Sarah to her work, to help the world. When she was able to see what she “couldn't see before, we tend to want everybody to help everybody else do that. That's certainly how I feel. So I have a complex trauma history. And that just simply means it's trauma that happened continuously, not just a single event.”
Sarah’s childhood was full of unsafe and neglectful situations, but we as humans “find amazing ways to adapt to lacking safety, lacking love, to horrors that happened to us. And what I love is that neuroscience tells us the opposite is actually true that we are incredible survival beings.” She felt stuck for decades, she thought she was broken, filled with unanswerable questions like “Why did I feel so out of control in my system? Why didn't I remember anything? and so on and so forth? Why are relationships so hard? Why did I push people away? When I really wanted to have connection? Why didn't I know why could I be talked out of my truth in three seconds that I didn't really know what my truth was, and you know, so on and so forth. I could go on and on.” Then she found talk therapy and then somatic healing.
Somatic healing is “embodied healing. And if I could distill it down, it’s cognitive work. Cognitive Therapy is using our rational brain. When we've experienced trauma, or we have anxiety, depression, and so on. We try to tell ourselves that there's nothing to be anxious about or have felt like you've said to yourself, why can't I just feel the love of from this person? Or why can't I just step towards them or be grateful for my life or just go do the thing, and that hasn't worked? Well, it hasn't worked because trauma and dysregulation lives in our bodies, it doesn't live in our brain. And our bodies rather don't understand a cognitive language. Meaning we can't talk our way into this kind of healing. But what we can do is feel our way into it. And that's what somatic work is all about.”
When she discovered somatic work, Sarah started to feel like she was unstuck and that life was becoming easier. She was able to realize that “it's amazing how extraordinary the most ordinary things can be when you heal. How extraordinary just waking up on a regular Tuesday, and feeling good is. So in doing my own healing, and getting unstuck and feeling like what this is what life could be like, I had no idea that we could feel this way. And that relationships could be enjoyable and easy and not terrifying, and that I could just do the things I want to do and feel safe. I so deeply wanted the world to be able to experience that.”
Recognizing Trauma
First, I want to explain exactly what “trauma” is because there can be a lot of confusion about it. Trauma doesn’t always come with any type of event, “trauma is about how any event overwhelms my system's capacity to process it. So what might be traumatizing for one person might not be for another. There are things that we certainly know are traumatizing, like emotional abuse, physical abuse, neglect. And other things that are traumatizing, like being bullied, microaggressions in our work environment, and toxic work environments, having to move all the time as a child, our parents divorcing.” When we aren’t able to fully process the traumatic event, or we don’t have a safe environment afterward, “the trauma gets stuck in stored and locked in time. And that means that my system doesn't know that what happened is over, it thinks that it's still happening, or could happen again, at any given moment.”
So how do we begin to process it and show our minds that what happened is in fact, over? When a dysregulating event occurs, we go into self-protection mode, “things like anxiety, worry frustration, fear, panic, freeze, terror, rage, hopelessness, depression, dissociation, feeling in a funk, apathy, anything that doesn't register as good for you, is probably a dysregulated experience. So after a dis regulating experience, when we start to feel a little more here and a little better, I invite you to ask yourself, did my reaction match the circumstance?”
Sometimes events will trigger our past trauma and cause us to react in a way that doesn’t match the circumstance we’re currently in. It’s so important to ask ourselves that prompt and then get the answer. If your reaction doesn’t match, what does it remind you of? What was your unmet need at that moment? Then we’re able to “really delineate what's about the present, what's about the past. And then the second thing that I would invite folks to do is to begin compiling a toolbox of what's called regulating resources.
Now, these are things that support me to come back into the here and now back into regulation, that isn't me talking my way into it like rationalizing. For example, let's say I am feeling anxious. That means I'm in my state of mobilization my system wants to move. So I would invite folks to think about what are things that helped me when I have this fidgety energy to feel calmer? That might be like going for a brisk walk, jumping up and down dancing.”
Untreated Trauma
But what happens when trauma goes untreated? If we don’t have the resources or the “availability of trauma healing work, because not all therapists are actually trauma trained, it's a very different thing. When that doesn't happen, it becomes stuck in storage and locked in time.” Sarah gives the evolutionary response example of hunting and gathering and hearing a lion “maybe an eighth of a mile away. So a threat detector would say, oh, that's not safe. Because we have this receptacle of inflammation, meaning we have our generational trauma, I have a family member who was attacked by a lion. I've been taught that lions are dangerous. And so what is my system do without me even having to ask it says, I'm going to call upon something called your sympathetic nervous system.”
This is when our system recognizes the threat being an eighth of a mile away and that something can probably be done about it, “I'm going to try to run away from it. And when we're in this state, we shut down any sort of function that we don't actually need. In that moment, we shut down our immune system function, we shut down our cognitive brain, we open up something called our vagal brake, we get our heart rate super high, all blood flow, and forget about digestion because everything has to go to me getting away from this.”
When we go into self-protection mode, everything we usually need to survive is shut down, and when the situation doesn’t seem escapable, our systems say “I can't fight this thing, I can't flee this thing. It says I'm going to cloak you in something called your dorsal vagal complex is your state of immobility shutdown. And when you're here, you can actually leave your body. So you don't have to feel the pain of what's happening.” Sarah describes this reaction as our system showing us love. Oftentimes, when we’ve experienced things like trauma in our homes as a child or negative past workplace experiences, our bodies use our "dorsal vagal system” to escape in whatever way we can.
But we also can get stuck in that trauma, for example, the lion attacks but you somehow survive and escape, but still don’t find any safety, your system says it has to “mobilize all the time, it might say, let's go to that state so that I live in this sympathetic nervous system. What does that mean? It means that my immune system is going to be shut down long term means my gut is going to be my digestion is going to be shut down long term, it means that no matter how hard I try to read something over and over and over, I just can't seem to comprehend what it is in the world that I'm reading, because my prefrontal cortex isn't working my thinking brain.”
So when trauma goes untreated, our systems don’t realize that the attack is over, we won’t be able to come into safety because we think the next attack can and will come at any moment. In our lives, this means we’re stuck and can’t move forward to our purpose, to “the relationships we want, the being seen, known heard, etc, those things weren't safe. It looks like having autoimmune issues. Looks like getting sick a lot. Looks like not being able to process information. And that's not happening because we're broken. It's happening because our system is saying, I've been keeping yourself protected for 20 years, or five years or a year or whatever. So those are some of the things that happen when trauma doesn't get resolved.”
To listen to the full conversation click the links beneath the main photo to listen on your favorite platform!
Affirmation
I breathe in deeply to expand, pause to take this moment in, then exhale to release.
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