The body is equipped

I'm going to leave off with who permitted what. I want to focus on the body's ability to heal. Stress is an autonomic cycle that has a beginning and an end. An activation phase, and a deactivation phase. Most of us have no idea what the deactivation phase is. I've even heard one "Dr." say that there isn't one. Silly man. Evolution isn't as dumb as that. It has one because survival demands it.

Many of the body's survival processes are autonomic. Your pH balance, heart rate adjustments to meet demand, and the stress response to name three. With the stress response, a lot happens very fast, and all at once to respond to a threat. In survival, that is the necessary word - threat. It requires no thinking or action necessarily, until the your brain hit's the "threat" button. Then the autonomic part takes over.

Into fight/flight we go, and that is what we call the activation stage. This image by the way is what is commonly used to illustrate the stress cycle, and with a Polyvagal theory perspective.

The blue circles represent various states of trauma, because trauma is when we have accumulated stress cycles that never complete and are discharged from the body. Yes, the body. Not the emotions, or the thoughts. From the body. Trauma, and stress for all that matter, is heavily neurophysiological and autonomic. We can be stuck in chronic fight/flight, or freeze, or like the wavy line, move between them all day, every day. "Functional freeze" is what we call it in the field. That's where I was. We might look functional on the outside, but the insides are a maelstrom. Almost a 24/7 maelstrom. There are somatic, emotional, and cognitive symptoms of trauma. All because we're stuck in this autonomic state of incomplete stress cycles. We get activated into fight/flight, and if we don't flee or physically fight, what do you suppose happens to all that energy?

If you cut your finger, doesn't it heal itself? We put Bactine on it, then a Band-Aid, and we let the body do the rest. Break an arm, we set the bone if need be, then put it in a cast, and let the body do the rest. In the case of a stroke maybe, like Jill Bolte Taylor's, they had to release the pressure of the bleed, then stop the bleeding, and then put her back together and let the body do the rest. It's quite an amazing story.

The body is equipped to heal autonomic trauma because the deactivation phase, also autonomic, is built into the body of mammals. Part of the reason that wild mammalian animals don't get traumatized is because they just do the deactivation phase by instinct. There is a video of this phenomena on my website, the very first one, "Tremoring in the wild" being it's title. You'll see a pattern of restored breathing, and then the shaking. It later gets up and off it goes, not to be traumatized. Completed, discharged, and back to normal, and maybe equilibrium is a good word here. We have that same deactivation process.

It is what I teach people to use to heal their trauma. Your body, as you sit and read this, has this capability. Your partner, kids maybe, your pets. Your neighbors, and you get the picture. All these bodies equipped to heal their own trauma. I find that amazing!

Suffice to say for now, trauma healing is not a DIY project, or a one and done like in the video. That animal in the video didn't have any accumulated stress cycles. I had 58 years of them when I learned about this. Quite a few. What that means in healing is another post, right now I want you to realize that your body is equipped to heal not just the body part, but everything that trauma touches, the artful use of tremoring can heal, and set onto a path of very profound growth. The trauma will be done. The growth just begins.

If you'd like to know more, DM me here or email me at [email protected].