Understanding Trauma
Trauma doesn’t just mean being in a war zone, or being hit by car - it can just as much be accumulated stress from a series of situations that feel like ‘too much.’ A difficult boss, financial problems, going too hard at the gym, your cat goes missing and BOOM you feel overloaded and can’t cope, so your body starts behaving as though it is in a life-or-death situation.
Trauma is when we get stuck in survival mode
When situations become overwhelming, our brain has ancient ways of keeping us safe. They are bits of the brain that were built to keep us safe from the sabre-tooth tiger.
In everyday life, we don’t encounter too many tigers anymore. But the body can still be very quickly switched into the ‘fight-or-flight’ nervous system if we don’t feel safe. Fight-or-flight is our ‘go’ mode - it’s how most of us cope with stress, and in modern life often looks like a racing mind, a feeling of constant anxiety or a sense that we can’t breathe.
Getting stuck in this ‘go’ mode can be extremely detrimental to our health - wearing away at our organs, making sleep difficult, impairing our immunity, our ability to recover, our capacity to think clearly and limiting our ability to connect with other human beings.
Craniosacral therapy is all about feeling safe in your skin, so it’s really helpful for recovering from trauma - if we send the body enough signals that it is safe to come out of ‘survival’ mode, then it will switch off ‘fight-or-flight’ and come back to health.
Healing trauma is about meeting the body - it’s very hard to think your way out.
In order to heal trauma, we don’t necessarily need to know what happened, or to understand it - it’s very hard to think your way out. But with the help of a Craniosacral Therapist you can use your body and your senses to orient and feel your way back to safety. The brain loves to feel safe. When we reset those old parts of the brain, we can slowly come back to the body and to living the happy, healthy life you were always supposed to live.
