What is Trauma?

Trauma is any extraordinarily stressful event that shatters your sense of security, they often leave you feeling helpless. Traumatic experiences can threaten your life or safety but they don’t have to. Anything that leaves you feeling overwhelmed and isolated can be traumatic. Traumatic events can cause physical harm but they don’t have to. They can also affect our emotional and psychological state. Your subjective emotional experience of an event determines whether an event is traumatic, NOT the objective facts.

Trauma leaves scars to the physical, emotional, and psychological being of a person. All trauma is bad and all of us who have experienced trauma, need not excuse our experiences.

How does trauma affect the body and its energetic systems?

Trauma affects the entire body and its energetic systems causing us to become imbalanced. We lose our sense of safety and often forget to do the basic things our body needs for nourishment.

Crisis and shock can cause many emotions. Many times these emotions are left unaddressed and get stored in the body.

Traumas can cause energy drain, which drains our will power. Trauma can cause grief and sadness.

Often, there is stigma around trauma and we learn not to talk about it. There is often a push to “get over it and move on”. This causes us to shut down and not speak out about our experiences. Often trauma results in the victim experiencing emotions that are unjust such as guilt and shame.

All of these affect our body and energy, cause imbalances, and drain and deplete us. It is essential that we learn self care in order to recover and thrive after trauma.

We can also experience secondary trauma in which we take on the experiences of others as our own. This can happen in times of disaster, whether it is natural like a hurricane or something caused by men. We are often bombarded with images from these events that deeply affect the psyche. This affects our energy the same way that primary traumas would.

Look out for next weeks article on how to use self care and mindfulness to cope with trauma and move forward!