“Memory of one kind or another is at the heart of all life. What else is DNA but a way for life to remember its own blueprint for reproduction?”
-Neuro Fitness: A brain surgeon’s secrets to boost performance and unleash creativity by Rahul Jandial MD, PhD (p. 29)
This is why I believe it is crucial for humans to sort through their memories for healing and reframing, until you find peace within your body. Because memory is at the heart of all life. Memory rules our worlds whether we want to admit it or not.
Trauma has a heavy effect on the memory of your nervous system; piling up until the proverbial disk is full. There are many ways of retraining this memory, but at some point mental, emotional, and somatic memories will surface. When your brain + body feel too overwhelmed by the task of processing what is happening to you, or has happened to you, or they feel the need to protect you from your circumstances they will store your memories within your body + brain. These memories will surface when your body + brain have decided that you are capable of processing them at this time.
This is how “triggers” are meant to be our teachers. Triggers are not thing to run from, but to learn how to approach consciously, graciously, and consistently. There are about a thousand ways to reduce a trigger, but all of them involve dealing with it in some capacity. When we choose to practice ignorance and/or avoidance in our lives we get locked into nervous system disregulation.
The cycle goes a bit like this:
Event happens
Your reaction to event is big, emotional, or turbulent
You feel in danger, overwhelmed or otherwise handicapped in dealing with event
Your self-preservation instincts kick in and you fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or flop [i.e. you prioritize immediate protection over long term protection]
Your reaction to this event traumatizes you
Your brain may choose to dissociate, “forget” or ignore the event as your body stores the big emotions in your cells + tissues to be felt at a later date
You work towards long term self-protective goals, until you begin to feel safe again.
Your brain + body take this safety as a cue that things have calmed down enough to process the Event— triggers arise, potentially everywhere.
At this point in the cycle you have a few choices:
You can choose to suppress the event + continue your life.
If you choose this option you will continue to live with unprocessed memories, feelings + emotions in your body + mind. This is collectively labelled “trauma.”
If you choose this experience it is more than likely your triggers will continue to arise throughout the remainder of your life.
You can choose to sit with the feelings as they arise, bearing witness to the way they move through you.
If you choose this option you may experience a range of sensations including, but not limited to: crying, sobbing, convulsing, twitching, moaning or other guttural involuntary noises, pain near the site of the trauma [if physical] or near the corresponding emotional site [as in: broken heart= heart pain, or palpitations; psychological abuse= headaches, brain fog, confusion, etc. *direct and obvious correlations are useful here.]
It may be helpful to try to remind yourself that these reactions are normal. This is sometimes how your body expels or dislodges stuck emotional states, and you will feel better after. Maybe not immediately, but you will.
This is not a one and done experience, it’s ok to have multiple iterations of this type of experiencing as you heal. There is nothing wrong with it, or with you, and it will get better the more you are willing to allow this experience.
Remind yourself that this will end. This is not a permanent state.
Watch videos of animals twitching about to expel the energy of a traumatic encounter to normalize your experience. [This is what you are doing, too]
You can call a trusted someone [therapist, coach, partner, parent, friend] and request support as you feel these feelings.
If you choose this option you should be ready to communicate in some way [verbal, written, rain dance, etc.]:
what your needs are/how to care for you
what you are experiencing
what you would like their role to be
whether or not you are willing to talk about it
what to do when/if you shut down
nonverbal cues or signals for when it is time to distract you from the experiences
after care for both parties [unless working with therapist or coach]
Decide consciously which part of this trauma you are ready to explore, define your boundaries with yourself and anyone supporting you, and begin feeling.
If you choose this option it might help to:
have affirmations ready to combat negative thought patterns
write out your boundaries clearly, and have them accessible
prepare your space to be comfortable + safe before you begin
have a plan for aftercare, whether it be setting up a movie, making sure your partner will be available to hold you, or buying yourself ice cream or your favorite comfort food
write about (or record yourself talking) your experience afterwards from the stances of:
neutral observer
felt experience
inner child
future self
When you feel triggered try to let go of the negative emotions that arise first, while asking yourself curious questions about what you are feeling.
Observe. Question. Observe.
If you choose this option, try not to judge your experience.
Do your best to accept yourself. “I am here now.” is enough.
Remember there is no right or wrong way to feel something, there is only the way that you choose in the moment.
Remember that even though you are choosing to observe, you still have agency over yourself, and it is okay to take breaks, or stop at any time.
Express what you are feeling and experiencing with words, writing, movement, art, or however many mediums you feel called to.
Trauma in essence is merely a state of trapped memory. Trauma can be experienced from any event, regardless of other’s response to it, because trauma is about your experience of an event or experience not the ‘objective’ horror of it. This is why children who grow up in the same household still experience different traumas, or some may feel traumatized and others less so, or not at all.
Trauma is about your interpretation of the experience, which is why processing
the experience is what leads to relief of traumatized states. If you feel traumatized, then you are traumatized. The unfair truth of it all is that while your trauma is probably not your “fault,” it is very much your responsibility to resolve it. The way that you resolve it is through processing the events AND the emotions that accompanied them.
I have an example of this experience from my own life. When I was 14, I got hit by an SUV while crossing the blistering hot asphalt of an unmarked crosswalk barefoot during a holiday weekend carrying a 7 ft. long white surfboard. Upon impact I was lifted up over the SUV, rolled off the roof, hit the pavement and continued to roll under another car parked on the side of the road.
I awoke pinned under this car, lying face down in a pool of blood with my knees bent so that my feet were touching my back. Something from the car was jammed into the flesh in my knee, and there was blood in my vision. I couldn’t feel anything yet from the adrenaline, so I tried to roll over. That’s when I discovered I was stuck. So I gathered momentum, ripped my knees sideways and rolled onto my back. That’s when some firefighters grabbed my head and neck and instructed me not to move. I was life-flighted to the hospital. I like to jest that I flew twice that day.
Obviously, this event should be traumatizing to a 14 year old child, but not to me! I thought. For 10 years I got away without processing the trauma of that situation. I mostly stopped surfing after that, stuck to long-boarding and white wash. But I didn’t believe I was traumatized. Other people would be horrified at the story, but I just figured I’ve been through worse. Because I had, and because my physical traumas have never felt as serious as my emotional ones. So I lived the next 10 years as if it never happened. It still feels more like a story that happened to someone else, even though I still have the scars to prove it.
Fast forward now to 10 years later. I’m 24, I’m living in Juneau, Alaska. I’m on a hike with a friend who has a baby, and a large dog while my housemate is out ice climbing with her husband. Her dog is still puppy-ish in behaviour, but gargantuan in size. We also had my dog with us, older and really well behaved, and her baby was in her backpack. As we’re hiking we notice a few bears on the trail, so we grab the dogs by the collars, and hold them by our sides. We didn’t use leashes in Alaska. The dogs were going crazy and it was getting stressful to hold them so we decided to turn back.
Once we got the bears out of sight out of mind for the dogs we let go of them. This particular trail had parking across the road from the trailhead. So as we’re crossing the road we have the dogs beside us, but still off leash. As we reach the other side her dog sees a creature on the other side of the road and shoots back across the road to chase it. We call him back, but he’s not obeying. Then abruptly he darts back across the road just as a massive truck is driving past. We watch helplessly as her dog gets run over BUMP BUMP by the front tires, then the back, shrieking and whimpering.
My friend begins scream crying and crumbles to the ground. I grab her baby backpack and try to take it off, or at least support it upright as the truck screeches to a halt. For a moment, time stops as we wait to see if the dog is alive. He slowly gets up and makes his way over to us, whining and limping and bleeding from his head. The driver helps us pack him up into the backseat of their truck, I call the emergency vet, the husband and my housemate and send her off with the dog. I put my extra shirt over the dogs bloody hole in it’s head, and tell her to hold pressure and not to peak. I take the baby and go back to our cars.
We all meet at the vet, and wait. Miraculously the dog ends up being fine. I drive us all back to her car, and then my housemate and I begin to head home. After a few miles on the main road, I find myself dodging another animal darting into the road. But to my surprise, I begin to lose it. Sobbing uncontrollably. Guttural, heaving sobs. I’m trying my hardest to reign myself in, but I keep seeing it happen again and again. BUMP BUMP. A few miles from home the memory begins to shift, and I begin to see myself as the BUMP. I begin feeling my body being impacted by an SUV.
My memory begins to distort.
I pull into our driveway. My housemate, sufficiently freaked out exits the car immediately without a word. I stayed in the car for two hours sobbing, convulsing, screaming, wailing, shaking, vibrating, gasping for breath. All the while flashes from my own car accident are emerging, moving through my body, tingling, and taunting.
And that is how I learned that I was traumatized by being hit by a car 10 years after the fact. Other memories of other physical accidents popped up here and there, but overall I felt the impact of what I had just witnessed magnified by my own prior experience being the one who was run over.
After this experience I had a few more, much smaller, much easier to handle cries to dislodge the remainder of my stuck, unprocessed feelings. Each time I felt more peace with what happened to me. I also wrote about it in several different ways, and I made a point to revisit my other physically damaging experiences as well. I told one or two trusted people about it, and I did plenty of shaking, dancing, or hiking around it.
This was one of my most impactful experiences into understanding my trauma, and how to heal from it. Obviously neither of these experiences were my fault, but they both required my willing participation in their resolution. The longer I ignored the processing of these experiences the more they spilled out in my daily life.
During that 10 years of avoidance and denial I had many instances where I burst into tears and ran out of the room from watching a similar car accident on TV or in a movie. I stopped watching action movies after this [there are so many scenes of people getting aggressively hit by vehicles in movies!!]. I only crossed at designated crosswalks with a light when I was alone. When I was with people who jaywalked I would sweat profusely and sometimes get so anxious I would be nauseous the rest of the day.
In other words, the trauma was finding ways to come out, so that I would have the chance to process it and move on. Since I was in denial, and afraid of admitting my “weakness” of being affected by such an event I was constantly faced with triggers. Even when I wrote about it my heart would race, I would sweat profusely and I would lose my appetite to a state of fear + anxiety.
This story is in stark contrast to my reality now. Having processed these events time + again, and I no longer worry about crossing the street, or watching various media. My body doesn’t tense at the thought of or retelling of these experiences. In fact in writing this account what I feel most is a sense of relief, at how far I’ve come from that terrified person I was before.