3 Ways Trauma Changes your Nervous System
By Orit Krug | October 10th, 2018
If you’ve experienced trauma in any relationship, there’s a good chance your nervous system is still yelling at you, “YOU’RE NOT SAFE!” even long after you got out.
Think of your nervous system as an alarm. It detects danger and safety through “neuroception” and instantly responds through the body. Our nervous systems help us survive in dangerous and life-threatening situations.
When it perceives that you’re in danger, it responds with your fight/flight, freeze and shutdown responses to save your life. This is our biological will to survive.
After being a traumatic relationship, your alarm system is now extremely sensitive and it perceives danger in many more places and situations than before your trauma.
You can feel the alarm ringing much more often which shows up in anger, anxiety, panic, withdrawal, numbing, impaired memory, dissociation, etc.
Here are the 3 ways your nervous system alarms you of your past trauma, even when you’re actually “safe” in the present moment:
1. Fight/flight
Your react with explosive anger, aggression, physically fighting or running away. Your physical movements are reacting with fear and they’re difficult or unable to control. This can look like yelling, slamming doors, and storming out of the house.
2. Freeze
You’re not moving, stuck or frozen in fear, full-body tension. You appear to be like a “deer in the headlights.” You may relate to this as putting a wall up in your current relationship or with friends and family.
3. Shutdown
The most ancient and severe nervous system response, like animals who play dead so they aren’t appealing to predators. Your heart rate and breath slow down, while your blood pressure and body temperature go down. You’re awake but physically numb. You’re there but emotionally dissociated, like “nobody’s home.”
If you’re experiencing any of these signals, then your entire survival system is still storing trauma from your previous relationships.
The most effective and fastest way to re-calibrate your nervous system is through your physical body and movement.
Get on the right path to healing trauma from your body and nervous system.
Many people spend decades and thousands of dollars in traditional therapies trying to heal their trauma. Unfortunately, even the most popular therapies are scientifically shown to be limited in accessing trauma stored in the non-verbal brain and body.
Even alternative approaches, such as EMDR and Brain Mapping, are often not enough to fully heal from the physical body or the nervous system.
This makes trauma healing a very frustrating journey for so many people. They often blame themselves for being “un-healable” and decide that they’re broken.
This is NOT true!
Every human being is 100% neurophysiologically capable of healing from the past, because we all have wiring and neural pathways that can be rewired from fear and overprotection, to love and openness.
My unique, scientific-backed process via Dance Therapy has helped hundreds of clients finally heal from past trauma and transform their relationship (even after decades of trying in other therapies).
You can heal too, but you need the right methodology.
Sign up for my online course (ranges from free to $20 USD) to begin a unique, body-based learning experience that will teach you:
- Science-backed education about how trauma is stored in your body and nervous system. You’ll gain an understanding why it has NOT been your fault you haven’t healed yet from past trauma.
- Gentle, guided body-based movement that is necessary for integrated healing. This is crucial if you want your mind’s intentions to match your body’s behaviors in relationships.
- An embodied approach to healing that has helped hundreds of clients break unhealthy relationship patterns and let in healthy, lasting love.
