Trauma Healing

Transcript of the Traum healing Video:

“Hello, my name is Prema Mckeever and I am a somatic therapist and Biodynamic Breath & Trauma Release System training facilitator living in Vancouver, Canada.  I’m recording this short video in hopes of answering some common questions about trauma healing and what we can actually do to regain our health, happiness and fall back in love with our lives.

Firstly I think it’s really important to understand that trauma is stored in our nervous system and in the memory of our body.  We are used to thinking that only events like war, severe car accidents, or assault.  But I think a more helpful way to look at trauma is that it can be anything that is too much, too soon or too fast for our nervous system to handle without being overwhelmed.  And that can be from any of a thousand different reason.  Anything like a child feeling bullied at school or neglected by their family at home, or adult realities such as severe work, financial, or relationship stress – anything that gives us a sense of being unsafe or even threatened.

Because during a traumatic event our body experiences, at the cellular level, a surge of intense fight or flight energy and stress hormones.  And we need to feel safe and our body needs to sense that the threat is over in order for our nervous systems to come back to a state of rest and balance.

Now if for any reason we don’t feel safe enough -if the stress is long-lasting, or the trauma is so severe and sudden – we can go into what is known as the freeze response.

Now, this state – the freeze response – it may look calm on the outside, but internally there is still this huge amount of fight or flight energy.  And this freeze response can look like dissociation, numbness, or even fainting.  Being stuck in that freeze is why we can still suffer from something that happened to us months, years, even DECADES ago

And this shows up commonly in our body as:

Panic and anxiety

• Hypervigilance
• Insomnia
• Addictions of all kinds
• Migraine headaches
• Digestive problems
• Chronic pain no matter how many messages we get
• Or a general sense of feeling disconnected, numb and depressed

And of course these sort of symptoms affects millions of us around the world, many of us don’t realize that it may be unresolved trauma at the root.

So healing trauma is about going from just trying to survive to actually thriving in our lives, it’s about coming out of that freeze in our body and mind, restoring the healthy flow of energy in our nervous system and returning to a place where we can connect with ourselves and others, we can feel safe, relaxed and present.

Now our bodies and our psyche are built to heal.  Our nervous system patterns can change, we can come out of a chronic freeze pattern and move towards health and connection no matter how deep or old our stress or trauma may be.

 

Now there are many different approaches to trauma healing – some are more psychological, some focus more on the body, while others prefer to focus on brain chemistry through medication.

I believe the best approach to healing trauma works with the wisdom and the innate healing capacity of our body.  And that is what we do with BioBTRS – through breath, movements, conscious emotional release and more we work on the energetic, the physiological, psychological, and developmental levels to come out of this freeze and restore a sense of safety and aliveness.

To find out more information please visit our website – biodynamicbreath.com – there you will find all sorts of free resources; videos, articles, as well as webinars, a practitioner directory and a list of our courses held all around the world so you can experience this deep healing work for yourself, and if you’d like learn how to facilitate this work with others.

Thanks for listening, I hope you have learned something valuable here and be sure to check out further trauma healing resources on our BBTRS website.  Thank you so much and hope to see you at a training somewhere soon.”

– End of the transcript

A definition of Trauma

Trauma is an injury that affects our entire system and often leaves us feeling overwhelmed, powerless, confused and anxious. The basis of these symptoms lies in a branch of our nervous system known as the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which is made up of 2 branches – the parasympathetic and sympathetic branches. It is these branches that are responsible for our body’s fight/flight/freeze response when faced with a traumatic event. The ANS can get stuck in the response to trauma, causing a wide range of emotional and physical symptoms and leaving us frozen in the past. The process of trauma healing is a resetting of the ANS, allowing the stuck trauma energy to begin to deactivate and discharge through the body.

There are different modalities of trauma healing, including the BioDynamic Breathwork & Trauma Release System (BBTRS), to help us process traumatic experiences and restore our natural instincts and flow of energy through our ANS. In our BioDynamic Breathwork & Trauma Release sessions we support the body to safely discharge the stuck energy, complete the held fight/flight response and to come out of any freeze that is held in the ANS. This highly effective means of trauma healing helps our clients develop resilience, a deeper connection with themselves and others, and live more fully in the present.