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Believe You Can Heal, or Believe You Can’t and You’re Right

What’s Somatic Trauma After All?

We have more and more awareness of the big traumas in our lives, we’re better at sharing information and the news is,overall, grim.  What’s fascinating to me though is the growing awareness around less big trauma; dozens and dozens of small ones from infancy upwards (and even earlier, some scientists say) that can continue to disrupt our adult lives and hinder our healing.  These would be trauma/ptsd and microaggressions that the body holds onto because it hasn’t been resolved yet, or we were too scared to deal with it at the time of the event and/or we didn’t know how to process the event at the time it happened, or it happened when we were children and powerless.

I’m a huge fan of Irene Lyon’s work on somatic trauma.  Let me just point you to her body of work and invite you to dive in to her youtube world of free information which may just change your life.  She explains the current thinking has published a series of short videos so you can digest and come back to all this information over time. It’s changing my life, for sure, and my clients will benefit because of that, that’s just how being human works best, when we choose to raise each other up.

The Importance of Belief!

I recommend you start with her latest vlog. She explains why we need we even need to work on resolving our trauma and how important believing we can do it is.  The journey is not easy and we have to face our own discomfort purposely to grow, but it is worthwhile.  And in this longer video, Irene talks about what is meant by self-sabotage: briefly, the ways we stop ourselves from looking after ourselves the way we know we should, but somehow don’t do –

I watched this and was struck by these points:

  1.  Humanity as a collective lives in survival mode!
  2.  We can choose not to live always in survival mode, but we have to intend to do it!
  3.  We can sabotage the healing by believing we don’t deserve to heal!
  4.  The problem of healing is a biological one; the body naturally wants to self-regulate to perfect health but the brain is so complex that once the evidence is in that “it can’t do it” it’s hard work to convince ourselves that “it can” !
  5. ‘Coping’ is better than ‘survival’ but choosing healing is what leads to a life well lived.

I would be so interested in your thoughts so do leave them below.

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