How To Release Trauma Stored In The Body

welcome to this video where we're going to be exploring how to release trauma stored in the body so trauma stored in your body let's start off with how do you recognize that that's happening in the first place so often when we have stall trauma we may not be aware of the trauma or we're often aware of is the symptoms which are the expressions of that trauma so for example we can be aware of living in a constant state of anxiety that's our nervous system speeding up to try to get away from the feelings of trauma or we can become aware of our addictive Tendencies our ways of trying to State change how we feel or we may be aware of feeling low mood or depressed that the numbing protective effect of our nervous system means we don't feel our trauma but we also don't feel our joy and our happiness in life so when we have trauma stored in the body the first thing is to be able to recognize that's happening the second thing is what have we learned to do in response to that you see to release the trauma that's stored in our body we firstly have to be able to get closer to the feelings and the emotions that are trapped and often what we do part of the wisdom part of the intelligence of our emotional body is that we learn to not feel and in the therapeutic coaching methodology we talk about six emotional defenses six different ways of learning to not feel our feelings and emotions so these are things like avoidance and distraction always being so busy that we don't slow down enough to really be able to feel the second is State changing sex drugs alcohol exercise these things aren't necessarily all bad but when we're consistently using them in a way where we don't feel we have to first undo that or rationalizing trying to think our way out of how we're feeling the other emotional defenses include blaming others for our feelings being overly empathic and taking other people's feelings on as our own or summertizing our emotions as physical symptoms so to release the trauma that's stored in our body we first have to break out of the habit of these emotional defenses it can be challenging to do so because these are the ways that we've learned to try to keep ourselves feeling safe this is why the next key step is we have to build safety one of the reasons why trauma gets stored in the body in the first place is we didn't feel safe enough at the time the event happened to be able to feel those feelings and emotions so what may have happened to take an example is let's say something distressing happened at school and one day we came home and we were feeling upset or worried and maybe angry and the way that our caregivers most likely our parents responded is by trying to just make us feel better by getting us to focus on positives or getting us to go do something that we like to do what we didn't get is the reassurance the whole day that it was okay to feel the way that we felt and so when that trauma becomes locked when it becomes trapped in our body to be able to begin to release it we have to learn to give ourselves that feeling of safety and it's that feeling of safety that allows our system to settle and relax enough though we can start to unlock we can start to get closer to those feelings now the way that we get safety as a child is our nervous system co-regulates with the nervous system of our parents or whoever our caregivers were and it's the safety in their nervous system which teaches our nervous system that we're safe this is called co-regulation this is where our nervous system co-regulates with that other when we don't get that is children one of the impacts is that we often lock and store trauma because we're not able to film it at the time but also we don't then learn how to self-regulate our nervous system for ourselves and so for example we get an impact or a shock and that capacity to self-soothe to calm and settle our own system is not so natural it's not so inherent for us in fact this is one of the reasons why practices like meditation yoga Tai Chi Qigong and so on have become so popular over the years because they're ways for people to learn how to self-regulate their own nervous system to recap what we've got to we need to recognize we have trauma held in our body we need to then understand the emotional defenses that are stopping us from feeling it we then need to build that inner safety through practices such as meditation yoga Tai Chi chigang and also particularly working with a skilled therapist one of the things that they will do is the safety in their nervous system their capacity to sit with and be present with what we're experiencing can help model for us what we need one of the most important things that you can learn to do on your own trauma healing journey is how to self-regulate it can be a conduit for a while with a skilled therapist but ultimately we have to learn that capacity for ourselves so we learn to self-regulate that allows us to build that inner safety that we can start to get closer to our feelings what we then have to do is we have to allow those feelings and emotions that can take some courage but it should never feel enormously unsafe and impossible what it should feel like is we're just going the next step and so over a period of time it might be days it might be weeks it might be months it can be years but we learn through building that safety that we get closer to being able to gently feel those emotions now as we learn to feel it's really important that we go gently the tendency we can have if one of our ways of of avoiding feeling our trauma is to push push go go if we do the same when it comes to feeling our emotions everything will lock up again the way you've got to think about it is that we responded to those traumas by building walls of Defense now those walls of Defense have now become the walls of our prison that keep us trapped but to get free from those walls we need to go gently we need to feel safe and we need to support ourselves in that process and then what to expect so what happens if we've recognized we have stalled trauma we've worked through those emotional defenses we've built that safety and we've started to feel often the fear is it can feel like we're on the edge of an abyss and if we start feeling those feelings and emotions we're gonna the disappear into that abyss and we're never going to come out of that that may be how it feels that doesn't mean that's how it's going to be there is enormous wisdom in our emotional body by the way that's how it learned to store all of this stuff that you didn't feel safe with at the time you didn't do that consciously there's enormous capacity and wisdom so as we start to build that safety that wisdom also starts to kick in again and so then we start to feel that this is the next bit and our unconscious will start to present the pieces that we are safe the pieces that we're ready to start to feel now store trauma can come out in different ways it can come out in a shaking it's like the energy starting to release it can come out the way it went in so if we didn't feel our sadness it can come out as sadness so we didn't fill our anger we can find ourselves feeling a lot of anger the important thing here is we're allowing ourselves to feel the emotions but we're not acting out the emotions on other people so if we're feeling a lot of anger we're not going to start being angry at people and expressing their anger at them we're feeling the energy of that emotion and letting it process and letting it move and letting it digest in our system and as much as it can be painful it is also enormously relieving like there can be a real sense of just relief on the other side and by the way emotions don't always come out the way they went in sometimes what goes in is a lot of anger and sadness and grief and what comes out is laughter like trust the wisdom of that process go gently go at your own speed get help and support when you need it but most importantly trust the wisdom of the process the emotions were stored because that was the best thing to do at the time we pay a price for that and it's really important to process and move through but trust the guidance of your emotional body in doing that so to recap recognize that you've got school trauma understand the ways that you've learned to not feel it your emotional defenses build that inner safety allow the feelings and then be curious as to what happens the fruits the gifts of doing this inner work are incredible those those symptoms that I mentioned at the start anxiety depression addictions self-esteem issues and so on they can radically change as we move through this stored trauma so if you found this video helpful please do like the video please do subscribe to my channel and also I'd be really curious in the comments below what do you find helps you build inner safety I feel we can learn a lot from each other so share what helps you and also discover what has helped other people thanks for watching foreign

Channel: Alex Howard

Views: 73,063

Keywords: How to release stored trauma stored in the body, release trauma stored in the body, release trauma from your body, heal from trauma, trauma stored in the body, Trauma, trauma trapped in the body, trauma memories stored in the body, trauma stored in the nervous system, trauma and the nervous system, Alex Howard, unprocessed trauma stored in body, how to release trauma, release unprocessed trauma, release trauma from the body, release trauma trapped in the body, how to heal trauma

Id: NcCdoOkWPI0

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 09 2023