How is trauma stored in the body, and how to release it | With TikTok Therapist Micheline Maalouf

what is trauma what happens to our body when we experience trauma why are some people traumatized while others are not and how do i get rid of this drama stored in my body hi my name is michelee malouf i'm a licensed therapist and a mental health educator and an advocate and i'm here today to talk to you about all of these questions let's start by answering the first question what is trauma so in order to discuss what trauma is let me talk about the difference between trauma and traumatization so trauma can be defined as anything that causes us and our nervous system to react in order to protect us this can look like a car accident it can look like a breakup a loss of a loved one being bullied growing up in poverty or having a chaotic household being traumatized or having a trauma disorder is a consequence of consistently going through these things and then experiencing an overwhelm of emotions and a feeling of helplessness many of us will experience trauma but not all of us will experience traumatization traumatization depends on so many different factors not just the things that happened but rather what kind of support system did we have so these are called resilience factors those resilience factors play a big role in offsetting the trauma symptoms so what kind of support do you have what kind of coping skills do you have do you feel loved by those around you do you have extracurricular activities do you have a good job do you feel overall that your life is going pretty well or is your life kind of a mess all around so when we think about what causes people to be traumatized there are so many of these things to take into consideration and i want to give you this example let's assume that we have person a a child that goes to school and is bullied and then we have person b who is also a child that also goes to school and is bullied one of them ends up with trauma from this bullying while the other one does not why does that happen well if we take a look at what's happening in the home so say for instance that child a is being bullied at school but they come home and they feel loved by their parents they feel supported they feel like their parents understand them they validate them maybe they're teaching them skills and tools in order to respond to these bullies and child b comes home and maybe the parents are really overwhelmed maybe they're overworked or emotionally unavailable for many reasons maybe they have parents with mental health issues and they're not really able to give them that love and support and validation that they're needing so they're going from one chaotic environment at school to another chaotic environment at home and therefore they are not able to regulate their nervous system at home and the trauma continues and actually piles up so whereas child a experiences a break experiences co-regulation they experience connection with another human being that shows them that things are safe that things are going to be okay and disrupt that fight or flight response that they may be experiencing at school person b is coming home to another set of threats so what happens in our body when we experience a traumatic event when we experience something that is life-threatening or something that is really stressful our body goes into the fight flight or freeze response our fight response when we experience a threat intends to get us to get rid of the threat by eradicating it killing it fighting it off our flight response intends to eliminate the threat by having us remove ourselves from that situation and running away getting away from the threat our freeze response comes into play when we cannot use our fight response maybe we don't feel like we can actually kill this threat we cannot run there's nowhere to run maybe we're backed into a corner or are unable to see any way that we can escape or outrun this threat and so it freezes and the purpose of the freeze response is to slow down functioning all throughout our bodies it reduces oxygen flow throughout our bodies it slows down our heart rate really conserving energy and that happens so that we don't feel so much pain as the threat attempts to kill us as more of it as that sounds and sometimes that might actually happen not only so that we don't die in pain but also sometimes our body does this in order to maybe trick the threat if it was a threat that was actually threatened by us and that's why it was trying to kill us trick it into believing that we are dead and we are no longer a threat to it so maybe it will leave us alone keep in mind that our bodies make the decision as to which one of these it needs to use at any given time and it's not a logical thing because when we experience a trauma our prefrontal cortex our logical and critical thinking parts of our brain are shut off and are no longer needed and we go right into our primitive brain that's sole purpose is survival so your body and your brain do not make decisions based on how it's going to impact your mental health in the long run it's not going to say well you should fight this threat because you're going to feel really bad about yourself if you just freeze it happens automatically its sole purpose is survival again does not care about how we cope with it in the long run and its sole purpose is to keep us here right now this very moment when we experience a traumatic event we're supposed to be able to get rid of that energy from our body so if we look at animals in the wild when they experience something really traumatic if you think of a dog even when they experience something they bump their heads or something happens what do they do they shake right they let out that excess energy and they're okay but when it comes to humans we tend to kind of suppress everything internally we don't really allow ourselves to experience emotion our society has kind of set itself up in a way that it's really difficult for us to experience and process emotions there's a lot of shame involved um thinking of like an example that i think all of us have been through is maybe we encountered a almost accident on the road or maybe we even got in a minor car accident on the road maybe on the way to work or school one day and instead of taking time off and like composing ourselves and shaking and processing what just happened what ends up happening is we tend to say pull it together i need to go into work and we go to work and we're shaking we can't focus but we're not really paying attention to those feelings instead we're focusing on these tasks that in the grand scheme of things our bodies like i can't focus on right now because my prefrontal cortex our logical thinking brain is shut off and i have all this excess energy now that's one example and most of us experience multiple things a day and if you're experiencing things at home or things different things in different situations of your life then you're piling one thing on top of the other and that leads to an excess of energy unprocessed emotion in your body which leads to traumatization and as i mentioned earlier yes if you have resilience factors so if you have someone to sit down with you and talk to you about what happened with that car accident someone event to someone to help you release or maybe you go to the gym and you work out and you release that extra energy or maybe you have a really good work environment where you're able to just you know call off and say hey i'm not going into work today this was a really rough day i need to go home and just process and take care of myself then those resilience factors those additional things will help offset that trauma you'll be able to process your emotions and let out that energy but we all know that that's not typically how our society functions so what happens in the long term when we continue to accumulate these traumas well when we experience trauma our body releases hormones it increases our heart rate releases chemicals in order to get us out of the danger right and if we continue to experience these traumatic events and we're unable to process or release them then we have all these excess chemicals and all this excess energy running through our body and in the long term those types of situations have been shown to increase our chances for chronic illness things like fibromyalgia chronic fatigue syndrome have been shown to have links to traumatic experiences early in life i personally struggle with hashimoto's which is a autoimmune disease of the thyroid and my symptoms came about after experiencing three years of consistent trauma and many of the people that i've talked to with the same disorder have also talked about how their symptoms came about after a traumatic event your immune system starts to suffer your concentration your relationships you experience a lot of body aches and pains because we're always tense in that flight or flight response if your body's constantly thinking that it's under threat then there's all of this pent up energy and tension in your body um and it's just our quality of life diminishes significantly we might experience mental health issues so uh it'll start presenting itself as anxiety depression and ability to get out of bed addictions and people come to me and they say well what do i do like i can't like i don't know why i'm so depressed we look back at their history of what's been going on throughout their whole lives they've had all of these events happening that they minimize themselves but have been trapped because they didn't have to process them or they didn't have the resilience factors they didn't have the support they needed at that time so they bottled everything up and over time no matter how small you think this event was it adds up so what do we do what do we do if we realize that we have trauma stored in our bodies because we're experiencing all of this pain we're experiencing mental health issues now we're realizing that we've been through some things well the first thing is notice if you're in a safe environment now if you're not in a safe environment now let's say that the trauma is still going on in your household for instance then i want you to keep in mind that no matter what tools you use every single time you walk into this traumatic situation whether it be at work or within a relationship or a home you are going to naturally have a reaction and have a response to that if you're not in the trauma anymore let's say you were in a really bad relationship and now you're living on your own and you're safe and you're out of this traumatic experience then it's going to be a little bit easier for you to start working and healing on the past but if you're still in the situation be patient with yourself take your time implement those coping skills work on getting some resilience factors into your life some people that feel safe so that when you do go through really difficult times you can have something or someone or a group of things that can help offset that so as i mentioned trauma is stored in the body in forms of energy so if we are about to fight or flight then we might feel tension our heart rate increases our breathing uh gets really fast we might feel like we're hyperventilating it sounds like panic right sounds like anxiety right or anger that's exactly how it shows up it shows up as you know restlessness agitation anger irritability you know panic attacks that's how trauma stored in the body shows up that's how it's diagnosed as anxiety or panic sometimes and if that's the case if this is the type of symptom that you're experiencing you need to work on slowing down and one of the ways that you can do that is to allow yourself some time throughout your day to sit and be still and do this by looking around and you can use the five four three two one technique which i'm sure you've seen online but if you haven't it's the technique where you look around the room and you name five things that you can see you walk around the room and you touch four things try to find things with different textures and temperatures and feel them and really intently feel if they're cold if they're warm if they have ridges and really use your sense of touch then you listen for three things in your environment it could be music maybe the wind outdoors maybe an airplane you listen and you name what you're hearing two things you can smell and you can again walk around the room pick up a few things to smell it could be your own hair your shirt perfume doesn't matter and then one thing you can taste this one's usually the hardest one for people because they're like what do i taste in this room i recommend having you know go getting some sour candies or sweet candies whatever to keep with you at all times it could even be water coffee tea juice it doesn't really matter just engage that sense of taste you do this all at once what you're doing is you're introducing that prefrontal logical awareness here and now part of the brain and if you're in the here and now you cannot be in flight a fight or flight at the same time um so this will help your brain realize that you're not actually you're not actually in any danger right now because if you were then you wouldn't be able to do this activity right so you want to do that and at the end of this this is the stuff that a lot of people miss is i want you to say i am safe like notice that i am safe safety isn't what could possibly happen when you meet your boyfriend after you finish watching this video it's not what could happen uh tomorrow when you go to work or what this person might be saying about you or any of that stuff right safety is what is happening in this very second right now if we need our fight-or-flight responses they will be activated in the moments where wherever those what-ifs in your mind are happening if you were to be encountered this person that might be dangerous after you finish watching this video then that response will come up again and that's okay what we're trying to do is interrupt that response right now in this very second so am i safe this very second take a breath release tension from your body you have to do this over and over and over and over and over again every single time you catch yourself having tension in your body you need to do this it did not the traumatization did not happen overnight most likely so the reducing of the symptoms will not happen overnight you have to be consistent now if you're on the opposite end of the spectrum dissociated depressed no energy so there's no agitation you can barely get out of bed you don't even feel your body your emotions are numb then the opposite of that is what we need to introduce into your body is movement so you can do a few things you can stand up and shake shaking your body to start moving the blood flow introducing that energy so you can do what i'm doing with me right now when you release you can feel the tingles and the blood flowing throughout your body you can dance you can do this put some music on and dance and shake shake it off a few minutes a day if you have time do it for longer you can tap so there's in qigong there's this activity you know activity but you tap up and down your your arms you can just tap up and down that makes it easier if you don't like the shaking you can give yourself a gentle massage just feel your hands massage up and down your arms if you're okay with gentle touch obviously if you have trauma around touch and this is triggering for you then don't do it the key here is to notice the physical sensations and start that mind-body connection because when we freeze what happens is we're disconnecting our mind from our body hence dissociation so we disconnect so that we don't feel that pain and sometimes that just lingers for a very long period of time so our goal now is to reintroduce that connection and these are really good ways to do that again same as now for the people that are stuck in fight or flight you can uh you need to do this frequently another part of it of healing would be summary parenting and inner child work that is a whole different video that i will do in the future but for now i hope that you found this video helpful i hope that you learned something new and if you have any questions let me know know down in the comments below let me know if there's something that you want me to dig deeper into if something i didn't say me didn't make any sense so let me know what you would like to hear from me next time and if you have not subscribed to my channel please go ahead and do so and i will see you next time

Channel: Micheline Maalouf

Views: 11,647

Keywords: Mental Health Over coffee, Micheline Maalouf, Serein Counseling, anxiety counseling orlando, depression counseling orlando, anxiety therapist, depression therapist, Tik Tok therapist, Trauma in the body, how to heal trauma, trauma healing, fight flight freeze, trauma responses, trauma and chronic illness, somatic therapy, what is trauma therapy, traumatization, dissociation, how do you know you are traumatized?, viral tiktok therapist, mental health content, trauma counseling

Id: aN6GkgrCirw

Length: 17min 6sec (1026 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 27 2021