The 2 blogs are pretty long but pretty important to know so if you can just read through slowly, it will be ok and you won’t be overwhelmed!!!🤣🤣
It is important to understand from the outset that trauma and stress are 2 different things.
Stress is actually energy, as in your body is working to match the demands of an experience. So you’re responding to a work load whether it be digestion, cellular processes, movement/exercise, mental/emotional processes and the environment - whether acute or chronic. Stress is actually good if it follows a work/rest pattern.
Trauma is when an acute or chronic experience becomes overwhelming to the body. Trauma is the switching off of supplying energy and optimal function and is the body’s safety mechanism to say “red zone danger - switch off”. Or you can call it SHOCK, or FREEZE.
Trauma is actually physical, it’s not a mental/emotional phenomenon. The root could be mental/emotional/environmental but the body will always SHOW it.
The freeze/trauma response is the pathway taken by the nervous system when fight or flight (stress response) is not possible anymore.
Whether acutely or frequently, the shock/trauma/freeze response signifies to the nervous system a message of overwhelm and a perceived lack of resources to cope, survive and have energy. The body says FREEZE. I prefer the word STUCK.
It’s exactly like an electrical circuit breaker - a switch that cuts off the circuit whenever the current jumps above a safe level. Freeze is essentially an energy conservation and safety mechanism.
Sometimes the nervous system becomes primed to just automatically freeze because it’s gotten so accustomed to overwhelm so it’s lost the ability to know what’s really a threat and what’s truthfully not.
So everything is a threat.
There are 3 kinds of overwhelm:
As examples, (1)acute can be if a car accident occurs and the impact causes trauma to our body. (2)Chronic is a symptom and for the purpose of this blog, I’m focusing on weight gain as a symptom of a trauma response. (3) overreaction.
How is weight a trauma you ask?
When bodyweight changes WITHOUT the usual explanation, ie
-over/undereating,
-excessive or no exercise,
-extreme/poor habits
-restricted detox pathways
-little sleep/rest…
…it may then be a result of the nervous system's survival mechanism.
Weight is a SYMPTOM of something going on in the body. It’s a storage of something either to save for a perception of a threat or getting rid of a threat. But that threat can actually be a threat we haven’t connected to the symptom, or it could be a misguided perception on the part of the nervous system.
So therefore a very possible explanation for weight gain/cellulite/ etc is your nervous system sensing threat AND/OR there WAS trauma that you think you’ve dealt with but the body hasn’t got the message. So then when any other little stress comes along, it just tips the scale - literally!
So the short of the long is, if you’re feeling frustrated and annoyed, never despair. There is hope and tools because the body is DESIGNED to regulate - we’ve just got to remind it how to do it.
Stay tuned for 2 of 2 (sorry there’s too much for one post!!)
In the meantime start to think about all the possible stresses from past and present that could be causing the trauma response in you.