31. Healing trauma

31. HEALING TRAUMA
The 5 Fs – Fight – Flight – Freeze – Fawn – Faint.
Recognising and addressing trauma is a complex process, as it can present in various forms, and individuals may have a range of coping mechanisms to conceal their mental health challenges, including addictions, eating disorders, among many others.

Understanding and healing trauma responses
Trauma can cause flashbacks, night terrors, depression, anxiety, and panic attacks. Physical responses include FIGHT, FLIGHT, FREEZE, FAWN, or FAINT. Often, once accustomed to these states; they just feel normal.

The impact of prolonged stress
When the body is exposed to stress for a protracted period, it can lead to physical consequences due to the continual presence of elevated cortisol and adrenaline levels within the body.

Origins of trauma and the 5F response
Real life-threatening experiences cause trauma, or what the body and mind perceive as such. To an onlooker, this response in another may seem to be disproportionately excessive, as this trigger reminds the body of a time when a real, threatening experience occurred. This caused the memory to become seared into the consciousness. Therefore, a similar experience can activate the 5F response.

When stress becomes overwhelming
While most individuals will encounter stress during their lives, it is when stress becomes pervasive and persistent that intervention is required. Recognising this mechanism is helpful, but the challenge lies in understanding how to heal from it.

Resilience and sensitivity
People possess different levels of resilience. Those who are sensitive or neurodiverse may find it especially difficult to develop resilience for managing stressful situations. For many in this group, navigating everyday life can feel like a relentless assault on the senses.

Steps Towards Healing
Once underlying issues are identified, reversing the damage is possible, but this needs a commitment to a gradual, controlled exposure to the trauma in a safe space, under a professional's expert supervision. Because the individual is not to blame, negation of any shame associated with the traumatic experience will probably need working with too.

Validating resilience and reintegration
By showing a willingness to engage with their internal struggles in a deliberate and measured way, an individual can positively validate their resilience and confirm that they are more powerful than the experience. An individual achieves this by consciously entering the pain and trauma as it peaks, troughs, and subsides. By doing this repeatedly, the anxiety trigger's grip weakens and vanishes.

Inner-child work and reintegration
Alongside this in therapy or with a friend you can also talk with the traumatised (inner-child) part of self, which felt powerless and remind them that whilst you could not protect your inner-child self then, they are safe now that you are an adult, and your warrior self can and will protect yourself. Feel the reintegration of the splintered-off part of self, which may trigger dreams as the reintegration process takes place.

Accessing Deeply Unconscious Trauma
Sometimes, for deeply unconscious traumatised responses, past-life regression is necessary to access stored genetic memory, which holds the unconscious memories from down through the family lineage!
Power prompt: Focus on one symbol to meditate upon.

Affirmation: I AM resilient, and my inner light is brighter than any negative experience.
Signposts: Number: 31 – Letter: E - Time frame 31 days.
Element: Fire - Aries, Leo, Sagittarius.