Notes

• Trauma ages our cells beyond their chronological age, changes hormones  and neurotransmitters, and alters gene expression in ways that can transmit through generations
• Neuroscientists and psychologists have begun to understand why the impact of a traumatic experience is so deeply rooted, despite a multitude of subsequent positive experiences. Trauma elicits such an intense multifactorial physiological response, flooding the body with stress hormones, that the associated memories reside in the limbic system.
• As renowned neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux explains in his book "Anxious", from the moment the traumatic memory is created, every subsequent situation that contains elements which our “limbic system” associates with the trauma will provoke a danger signal with associated physiologic responses. This set of sensations cannot be overruled by our intellect because it isn't generated by the forebrain. That's why it is impossible to "logic our way out" of trauma and why talk therapy often fails.
• How does Emotional Resolution integrate a Trauma? In their books "The body keeps the score " and “In an unspoken voice”, Van Der Kolk and Peter Levine outlined how the physical sensations felt during our emotional difficulties create a clear and direct path to the origin of our traumas. When we consciously experience the sensations present in our body during an emotion without trying to control or understand them, we allow the forebrain to reconnect to the data stored in the limbic system; data that was until then isolated. Once this reconnection happens, the result is spontaneous and permanent, meaning that the emotional pattern felt until then will end. We will have to work, step by step, regulating one emotional pattern at the time.

Most developmental and shock trauma can't be treated linguistically, it can't be processed 'as a story' before it is processed somatically.

Talk therapy is considered a “top down” approach, as it relies heavily on verbal expression and cognitive functioning. Talk therapy often heavily relies on intellectual insights for change and for talking as growth. Also, it can encourage people to get stuck in patterns of thought or narratives that do not serve them for their evolution.

A big reason we get stuck with talk therapy is also because a lot of trauma happened to us before we were able to speak or before we were able to form distinct memories of the experience. Some big experiences are buffered in our bodies purely somatically and as an emotion, eg. pre-verbal trauma, birth trauma, pre-natal trauma or even ancestral trauma that was passed on to us (it is said that trauma is passed on through seven generations).

On top of all that, the things we struggle to change usually sit in the unconscious. But talk therapy and coaching usually only help us access conscious material, which only makes up about 5-10% of our total mind.

Plus, never once did I explore nutrition in therapy, though it can deeply affect mental health.

Medication is often prescribed as a first stop instead of a last resort (which in some very serious cases might be necessary).

A lot of therapy also doesn’t teach easily available and incredibly powerful tools of how to regulate the body's nervous system, which is often a driving factor in anxiety.

Lastly, many life coaches and even therapists are not trauma-informed or trained in trauma awareness.

I have divided them into two categories:

• Somatic modalities to heal and reprogram our nervous system and stress responses in our bodies.
• Practices that help us access our subconscious mind.

Somatic Therapy Approaches

Somatic psychotherapy instead works from the “bottom up”– reducing stress and anxiety physiologically, through changing the autonomic nervous system and discharging trauma.

Through somatic modalities, I learned to