Your Wounding

Note: Seeing yourself means facing your wounds, traumas, and triggers. It can be uncomfortable and triggering. Remember to use your safety plan and the tools you have available to you, and to pause the video and take time to do this as often as you need to.

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Trauma is what happens when an event is too much, too fast, too soon, or we feel too alone in order for us to process it fully, causing the incomplete physiological response to that event is held in the body, unprocessed.

When this happens, we say, “The body keeps the score”. Even if we don’t fully remember what happened, the body does.

Trauma tends to happen when we don’t have co-regulation: the presence of another regulated nervous system to help us feel safe and supported in processing the physiological surivival  response of that event.

Therefore, we often need someone who’s safe and supportive to help us feel safe again. This is especially true for children and infants.

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In this video, we talked about two types of trauma:

Acute trauma: A single, time-limited, overwhelming experience that is too much for the nervous system to process. Also known as “shock trauma”. ie. being attacked, hit by a car, or punched from behind.

Relational development trauma:  Emotional neglect towards an infant or a child from its caregivers, or throughout the lifespan. These are moments of failures in human connection and attachment where we feel we aren’t getting the sense of care, love, belonging, or dignity from another person that we need.

Relational development trauma is a major focus of this course, as it relates to the boy within that we are working to heal.

Trauma distorts how we perceive reality and relate to others and the world.

When a child consistently experiences emotional neglect, he becomes severed from feeling, and his sense of feeling becomes separate from his sense of self. Those feelings still exist, but we have learned to believe or pretend that they aren’t there in order to protect ourselves from further trauma.

Trauma can affect communication between the left and right hemispheres of our brain. While the left side focuses more on analysis and logic, the right side focuses more on sensation and emotional processing. When we have healthy connection between these two sides, we’re able to process our experience effectively and have empathy towards others.

When left-brain communication is affected by trauma, we can end up with left-brain dominance: being controlling, manipulative, and easily aggressive. These are all signs of trauma.

When we're traumatized, we see the world differently. We perceive things in ways that aren't true. Our emotions become the meaning through which we see our partner and how we behave, even when they don't have anything to do with her.

We unconsciously tell old stories based on unprocessed trauma because we never received the support we needed to process those past experiences.

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The roles of our parents:

Our mothers are often engaged more in nurturing and emotional support, whereas our fathers are often more engaged in play and physical challenges, things that help us to develop more of a sense of exploration and independence, and trusting ourselves.

The inner mother gives us our sense of self love, of self nurture, being able to soothe ourselves and feel our emotions, whereas the inner father is more giving us that sense of, I'm grounded, I am confident. I trust myself.

When we received too much or too little of either of these, it causes distortions in how we relate to ourselves and our own capacity for healthy inner mothering and inner fathering.

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Reflection questions:

1. When I hear the definition of relational development trauma, what do I think of from my own upbringing, and key relationships throughout my life?
2. Are there things my parents, teachers, past or current partners, or other people who took care of me did that I remember as hurtful or neglectful?
3. Might I have been over-mothered, over-fathered, or under-mothered, or under-fathered? What impacts might this have had on me?
4. What patterns do I see in myself now that could point towards trauma from earlier in my life?
5. What do I feel like I needed more of as an infant, child, and teenager, from my parents or other supportive adults?
6. What feelings, emotions, and sensations arise as you watched this video, and as you have been writing and reflecting on these questions?
7. Who in my life gives me a sense of feeling safe? Who do I practice co-regulation with, even if we don’t talk about it?

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Further resources:

The Body Keeps The Score | Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Book): https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-Trauma/dp/0143127748/

For those who want to nerd out, check out Sharon Stanley’s book on relational development trauma and how to heal: https://www.amazon.com/Relational-Body-Centered-Practices-Healing-Trauma/dp/1138905968