Why Does Trauma Get Stuck?

I've been asked this question along with why it presents in your body.

Long story short....

When an offending event enables you to fight or run to get away from real or perceived danger, the likelihood of trauma getting stuck and creating reactive patterns diminishes significantly.   

When you are defenseless against the potential harm, you freeze and store that energy of trauma within you unknowingly. It creates patterns of reactivity and posture that block you from moving forward until you feel the pain of it and choose to liberate it. 

Trauma is truly a broad reaching word for an experience of being threatened...with physical safety, unmet needs or rejection of belonging. And the post traumatic pattern develops when there's no awareness that this energy has set up camp in your body.  

There are absolutely individual variations of the affect on people, but essentially...

Trauma event or series of events > successful fight and flee or knowing that one is ok > energy liberated

Trauma event or series of events > trapped in physical or lack of knowing that one is ok > energy stuck in the body

This is why being threatened as a child can hook us into body and mind patterns that sabotage our life. We don't have the stature or the analytical capacities to empower our circumstances.  

We can release this energy in several ways. When we completely liberate this energy it's a process called "cycling".  

Massage, movement and somatic presence can all start to move this, but staying with the feelings and sensations until it is transmuted, changes the patterns. The physical tools are powerful, but the somatic presence along with it gets at the root of the pattern so it can move on.

Please join me Live on Friday to see how this works. It still astounds me how powerful it is.

Wishing you well :)