Trauma, An unfinished tale

Photo Credit: Lakshmi Ambady

This fire within,

Burns like a scream. And a drop of tear.

Raging fire or molten lava, leaving a trail...

Quenched only by the liberating hands of expression.

But then how shall one express the sound of bottomless silence?

How shall one capture

the cosmos’ spectacle of colours?

Unless to grasp its dances and colours,

becomes one’s wild obsession.

“Trauma has become so commonplace that most people don't even recognize its presence. It affects everyone. Each of us has had a traumatic experience at some point in our lives, regardless of whether it left us with an obvious case of post-traumatic stress. Because trauma symptoms can remain hidden for years after a triggering event, some of us who have been traumatized are not yet symptomatic.” ― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

Trauma. For some it carries a lot of prominence. Some pretend it doesn’t exist. Or it is cryptic and obscure. Even tainted and layered. Or it happens to other people. But not me. This is how we try to disprove ourselves constantly. The truth is- we humans are a traumatized species. We all carry inside us incomplete stories. And these stories have been interrupted. Interrupted in our breath, in our belonging, in our feeling, in our expressions and responses. And hence fables in our physicality begin to unfold that are never allowed to end. Over time that incompletion starts to hurt.

Trauma is often misunderstood as an event — a car crash, a breakup, a war, a loss, a yell, a criticism, abuse, a fight, neglect…But trauma is not the event itself. It is none of these events at all. It is the body’s response to all these circumstances that are left hanging and not allowed to be completed.

Trauma simply is the survival energy of fight, flight, freeze and fawn that has nowhere to go. So, it stays in the body, hidden until a trigger appears or the body goes through periods of activation during the day.

When a person experiences trauma (physical or emotional), the body perceives a threat to its own survival and the autonomic nervous system (brain, spinal cord and rest of the nerves throughout the body) get activated. Danger is detected in the body. Memory is fragmented or distorted. The pre-frontal cortex (the forehead) shuts down reducing rational thought. The brain floods the body with stress hormones especially cortisol which increases blood sugar, suppresses digestion and the immune system and heightens alertness. Your muscles tighten. Heart rate increases. Pupils dilate. The body prepares to execute a survival response- fight, flight or freeze. But if this survival response is not allowed expression, this energy stays stuck in the system.  And you are traumatized. And all this happens fast. The nervous system stays stuck in high alert or collapse. If the trauma becomes chronic- there is inflammation in the body, aches, sleep issues, migraine, breath irregularities, unexplainable fears, digestive disruptions, sadness, PTSD and depression manifests in the system.

All these result from some unfinished actions in the body. Your body started something to keep you alive… but was not allowed to finish. Somewhere along the arc of evolution, we learned how to override our bodies — but not how to return to them. We can build rockets and complex programs, but we still don’t know how to fully cry. We can code AI, send spacecrafts to the edge of the solar system, conquer empires — but we can’t complete the simple cycle of a threat response in the nervous system without shame or suppression. We have adapted faster than we evolved. Technology, war, cities, medicine, capitalism is our doing, and they have all progressed rapidly. But our bodies haven’t reached this speed that we have created in our environments. Our nervous system is still ancient — wired for safety, connection, and attunement. It never signed up for a life of isolation, overstimulation, or chronic stress.

We all consider ourselves to be the most powerful and evolved species on this planet but we are conditioned to suppress simple natural responses like being angry or crying. All animals shake their bodies after a threat passes over and they realize they have survived. Some animals shiver, some stretch, some kick their hind legs, some jump and some make bellowing sounds. Even babies cry when they are overwhelmed don’t they? But humans are told to “stay strong,” “be quiet,” “move on.”

So instead of releasing fear, we freeze it inside us. We carry thousands of incomplete fear cycles — from childhood and they’re not just our own but also inherited ones. Our bodies evolved in forests, in tribes, under stars. Today, we live in concrete boxes, surrounded by noise, addicted to screens. The body feels exiled — from the land and from the rhythm of the planet. We have broken our bond with nature.

Somatic Experiencing® is a way to live life. To complete the story of your life. To become the author.

To reclaim the pen from pain, and write your life with breath, with movement, with presence.

There is a stillness in trauma — the stillness of paralysis. And there is a stillness in healing — the stillness of arrival. Somatic Experiencing® is like coming home. Coming back to the body. Coming back to you.  As Osho said-

“Drop the idea of becoming someone, because you are already a masterpiece. You cannot be improved. You have only to come to it, to know it, to realize it.”