Healing Trauma

The Body Keeps the Score

Trauma is an experience that most people go through on some level. Often, it is less about the event and more about what happened, or didn’t happen around the event. A traumatic experience gets locked in the body and stuck in time until a solution can be found. This is why you might feel unsafe in certain situations that perhaps unconsciously remind you of your past. In order to heal trauma, we work with the nervous system charge in the body. This means contacting those difficult places and helping the body release its charge.

Relationships and Trauma

Most of the time, trauma tends to be around relational wounds. Even with combat veterans that I’ve worked with, much of the processing has been around childhood wounds that have affected the way they’re relating to present day combat trauma. Attachment or relational healing is often a big piece of the solution that helps people update their trauma programming.

Sexual Trauma

Sexual trauma can include date rape, invasive medical procedures, inappropriate touch on the playground when you were young, and many other experiences. Whether you remember your sexual trauma does not matter. The body stores the memory, and certain sexual and intimate situations may trigger a trauma response to come back. This could look like checking out during lovemaking, needing intense stimulation that you get “lost” in, inability to orgasm with a partner, loss of desire, intense fear in getting close to others, and painful intercourse.

How to Move Forward

We want to re-pattern the nervous system to be able to feel safe, so the body can relax and open to pleasure.

II can support you to get back into your body, slow down, break the shame loop, come out of the “freeze” zone, and understand your unique arousal pattern. The trauma made a lasting imprint on your nervous system and can be released through the body and loving, supportive relationships.

Mindfulness and Sex 

Part of what happens in trauma is getting stuck in the past. You may notice a lack of desire for your current safe and loving partner because some part of you gets “triggered” to make them out to be someone from the past. Part of our work may include developing skills to come back to the present moment by beginning to bring in your senses and body awareness, leading to more connected and enjoyable sex and intimacy.

Your abuse happened to you; it does not define you.