Trauma resolution

Trauma results when overwhelming life experiences cannot be properly integrated by the nervous system and the psyche. In the face of events that are experienced as “too big, too fast, and too soon” the intelligence of the mind/body system comes up with it’s own response - to compartmentalize, wall-off, or numb-out overwhelming experience outside of conscious awareness in the tissues of the body. Like an electrical panel in a house, an internal circuit-breaker is overloaded in response to a surge in life-threat survival energy, leaving one unable to assimilate or make sense of what is happening.

There are one time traumatic events like car accidents, rape, and acts of violence. We could call these big T traumas.

Then there are the small t traumas, less well understood in our culture, but much more prevalent, where the overwhelming events happened over time as part of the fabric of family life. Here the developmental needs of the young child were unable to be met, resulting in an overwhelm that could not be tolerated or buffered by the nervous system. Think of the constant stress experienced by a child growing up in an alchoholic family, not knowing when the next shoe was about to drop. Or the distress of a kid that comes home from school to an environment of neglect where he or she learns to fend for themselves, and that support cannot be relied upon. In situations like these trauma becomes walled off in the body’s own tissues, in what is called “implicit memory” where past events continue to give off a body-based signal of stress and unease outside of conscious awareness.

Trauma resolution happens by creating a relational container between client and therapist of care and attunement and then, by skillfully working with the implicit structure of memory held in the body so that holding patterns and activation from past can be safely released. traumatic events. Trauma is carefully allowed to dissipate and find resolution while internal resources are established and embodied that give clients a newfound ability to hold in a healthy way what has previously been experienced as too much. Life can proceed anew, open to new possibilities without being rigidly shaped by the dictates of the past.