Did you know that trauma and PTSD causes so much more than just neural and emotional damage? It’s true, trauma also creates physical and cellular damage on a nuclear level within your physical body.
Being a trauma survivor, you know exactly what I’m talking about when when I say trauma is stamped into you heart, soul, mind and body like a tattoo that you can never seem to get rid of.
Trauma messes with the mind and the body so that’s where we're going to start.
Every American remembers September 11, 2001. It is a moment that is scarred into each of our minds forever. But for a client of mine, who is also a New York firefighter, it is so much more than just a memory of that tragic event. It had become the trauma that held her from moving forward with her life. She was battling with triggers everywhere that would send her back to the day of 9/11 mentally and emotionally. Every smell, sound and feeling flooded her body with powerful emotions and feelings and she was constantly stuck in the fight or flight mode.
Fight, as in uncontrollable rage. Rage that she directed at her family, friends, the checker at the grocery store, the person on the sidewalk. She terrified everyone, especially herself.
Or flight as in panic and run from everything altogether. It means to hide out in her house for weeks, avoiding everyone while doing her best to bury and ignore the issues.
The horrific trauma she experienced due to the terror attacks on 9/11 had been ruling her life for years.
Before 9/11 this woman loved to go camping every weekend. She lived to wake up early and watch the sun rise as she sat by her campfire drinking her camping coffee. She would catch fish and cook them over the campfire at night. She’d watch the sun go do down and the night sky light up with a billion stars while keeping warm by the campfire. After surviving 9/11, she couldn't even stomach the smell of her neighbors fireplace without a full blown anxiety attack. Camping was completely out of the question. She spent 8 years avoiding the one thing that brought her the most joy and peace because the smell of a campfire would trigger her thoughts, sending her right back to 9/11 and there she was stuck like a hamster on a trauma wheel, reliving it all over again.
A similar thing happened to me after my son was hit by a car. While holding my son's lifeless body the smell of lilacs permeated my senses. And I could not get rid of that smell for weeks. I smelled it in my morning coffee, I smelled it in the shower, I smelled it in my sleep. I used essential oils, air fresheners, burned incense. I did everything I could to make that smell go away. It was excruciating and I could not escape it, regardless of my efforts. The smell of flowers became a huge trigger. I would relive the trauma of watching my son die every time I walked through the floral department of a grocery store or near the lilac bush blooming in my neighbors yard. I was in a continual cycle of mental hell every spring.
This is often the case with trauma survivors like you and me, we experience many different traumas and almost seem to live from one traumatic event to the next, until one day you experience a trauma so great that it completely changes reality as you know it. Simple everyday things that used to bring joy now bring terror. Taking care of normal responsibilities become unsurmountable tasks. Living your every day life becomes a nightmare of triggers and avoidance.
You are left with so much damage to your heart, mind, body and soul that you are forever changed as a human being as a result. And the truth is that you are changed, because you are now running a new program in your mind! Your mind is now trying to process all the damage and trauma that has taken place and in many ways your system is overloaded.
It’s like when your computer freezes up and you have to shut everything down and reboot the system, but sometimes that doesn’t fix the operating issue with the computer and you have to go a step further and do a software update and give the computer faster or better operating software to keep with faster internet speeds and also has to be able to process and store ever increasing amounts of information.
Whey in the hell am I talking computers and software in a trauma healing book?
For the simple reason that your brain is a super computer and you can think of your subconscious as the operating system. With trauma or PTSD your brain and subconscious have been overloaded with all the new information and powerful emotions. Something you thought could never happen just did and your mind and body is working overtime to make sense of the trauma that has occurred.
The brain and your subconscious mind are now running on overload and it’s trying to make sense of this new program, which includes the trauma that you have experienced whether you like it or not. Often times we forget about our physical bodies ability to reset after a massive power surge like trauma so it has a chance to pause and work through the trauma.
Earlier, I mentioned that I’m going to give you tools that you can use to heal your trauma so, let’s begin with giving your BODY some immediate coping tools you can use to start upgrading your body to the new and improved, POWERFUL and healed 2.0 version of you.
TRAUMA HEALING TIP #1
The first place to start is with a cold shower!
Yep that’s right, I just said go take a cold shower, and I’m talking colder than you think you can handle!
I told you that some of this may sound weird, but bare with me here and I’ll explain just what a cold shower does.
You don’t have to go jump straight into a cold shower, start by taking a nice hot relaxing shower and for the last minute turn the water to as cold as you can stand.
Let the cold water hit your chest. This simple act will start to trigger your fight or flight response.
Only now you are not going to run and you're not going to get mad.
I want you to force yourself to breathe deep.
When cold water hits you in the chest the natural human response is to gasp for breath and run, but you, being the powerful person that has experienced all of this trauma, will not run!
Stand there and breathe!
What you are doing is beginning to trick your body and mind to start working together to process and begin to heal from all of this trauma.
Internally, your body is sending signals to the brain saying that this cold water hurts, it's dangerous and you need to protect the body by getting out of the cold water.
Similar to the signals being sent when we are triggered and begin to have a flashback.
Our brain is processing the trauma again and the emotions and feelings from the trauma fill your heart and mind, then your body gets the signal that you are in danger of trauma again so your body responds to the brain by telling it to run “the trauma protection program” of fight or flight again.
When you can stand in a cold shower and breath deep you trick the body into thinking its in danger but when you consciously override the response program by forcing in deep breaths and staying in the pain caused by the cold water, you are doing multiple things to begin to heal your trauma.
You are breathing deep and oxygenating your body and brain.
You are intentionally placing your body in a place where it thinks it is being hurt or feels pain from the cold water.
You are intentionally overriding the fact that your brain is telling you to panic and run and you are taking command over your brain by giving it a new program to stay in the imagined pain of cold and to keep breathing deep.
You are now conditioning your body and mind to breath through stress so it can start to respond differently the next time you are triggered by something.
You have filled your mind and body with new information to process and because of this new info your mind begins to engage both sides of your brain to think and process.
When you take a hot shower you are opening your cells, when you turn the water to cold you are closing your cells creating a pumping action and this pumping pushes out toxins from the body.
You are doing something different so you will feel different and as a result you will start to get something different out of life.
I do this exercise twice a day without fail for many positive reasons.
There are all sorts of studies that have been done on the positive affects cold showers can have on the human body but the biggest reason I do it is because it puts me in control of my trauma rather than my traumas controlling me like it used to in the past.
Another way to further challenge your brain in the cold shower is by slowly counting each deep breath until you get to 60.
Sometimes, I spin my body in circles as I count, for example I’ll spin right until I count to 15 and then I spin left until I count to 30.
This may seem strange but, this is one of the most powerful tools you can use to heal your trauma.
When I put my body into cold water and force my body to breathe deep, spin back and forth and count, I am intentionally trying to overload my brain and neural circuits in a very safe way.
When I do this I force my body to not believe everything my brain has been telling it, I force my body to start to respond differently to stress.
This will also help your body know that it is safe even though it felt uncomfortable.
By doing this simple exercise your body starts to naturally upgrade and update itself to catchup with your mind and heart so they can safely process and work through past traumas.
Another area this exercise will help is with sleep and dreams.
Oftentimes with people that are PTSD and trauma survivors you either have nightmares or you don’t have any dreams at all or don’t remember your dreams so taking a nice cold shower just before bed will help you sleep better and change your dream state. Remember I said that you change your brainwaves in the cold so this will transfer over to your dreams in a positive way and it may also help you with remembering your dreams as well.
And to wrap up my preaching about how good cold is for the body think about this.
In the locker rooms of all sports teams there is an ice therapy tank.
After every game or workout one of the first things the players will do to recover from the trauma is soak in the ice tank to speed up their recovery and reduce the pain and swelling.
But you can also use cold water to recover from mental and emotional traumas so give it a try and I’d love to hear some feedback on the results you get.
TRAUMA HEALING TIP #2
Enough about cold water, but I still want to focus on intentionally getting your body to send a pain signal to your mind some more.
Some of you might not even be up for a cold shower and that’s ok so I’m going to give you another tool that is simple but extremely effective.
Now I’m a builder by trade and every building with an electrical system has something called a ground rod connected to the steel frame in the foundation.
The point of a ground rod is in case the building is struck by lightning or somehow has a massive power surge it can send all that extra energy into the foundation and into the ground that the building is anchored too.
But think about this.
Your body has electrical pulses running through it, in fact there is an electrical pulse powering your heart right now which is ultimately powering your life.
So you are a walking self contained electrical system and now think of trauma as this massive power surge or bolt of electricity blasted into your body!
Now let me ask you this?
Do you ever give that energy a chance to ground to the Earth?
Now days a lot of us human beings don’t really give our bodies a chance to ground out energy and I’ll explain.
Most of us are always waring these awesome things called shoes on our feet with this thick rubber sole protecting our feet so we can function in life which is great, but it’s also making it so our bodies never get a chance to ground our electrical system to the Earth.
Rubber is what you use to protect yourself from electricity but in the the case with our shoes its actually preventing your body get rid of energy.
So here’s exercise number 2
Go outside and take off your shoes and touch the ground with your feet, as you touch the Earth try to think about sending built up energy into the ground through your feet.
But if you want to take this a step further you can find some gravel to walk around on.
When you walk on gravel you do similar to the cold shower trick by tricking your body the send pain signals to your brain, your brain the fires up the fight or flight program by telling the body to run from this pain but you don’t run.
Nope you just breathe deep like in the shower and slowly step around on the gravel.
Here again your body is experiencing for the most part imagined pain, but just like the shower exercise there are many benefits to walking on gravel and grounding out your body if your up to it.
You are grounding out excess energy.
You are intentionally overriding the pain response by staying with it and not running, you are breathing through which causes your brain to start working on building a new program.
You're conditioning your mind and body to begin to start working together to process pain.
You have pressure points in your feet that are connected to your body’s entire nervous system so in my opinion it’s just feels good and I always feel better after doing it.
Your oxygenating your mind and body from breathing deep
Again this is a simple but effective tool to get your body to start woking through trauma and really it’s just common sense if you think about it.
Yep it’s one of the reasons why so many of us love the Ocean, or the lake, or the river and really who doesn’t love walking on a sandy beach in your bare feet?
And most of the time you seem to feel better about life after some time spent on a beach and the truth is it did more good for your body than you thought so try to get to the beach more :)
So, back to how I have worked through being triggered by flower smells. As I mentioned before, I knew that I had to face this issue so I started with an ice cold shower and breathing and as soon as I finished with my shower I went outside and stood on gravel to ground myself and did some more deep breathing.
And once I felt up to it, I would start intentionally walking by flowering plants as I inhaled nice deep breaths of air, picking up their flowery smells as I walked by and within a few days time I was able to walk right unto a blooming Lilac bush and bathe myself in their perfume smell.
Don't get me wrong, of course my mind thought about the trauma and why I was struggling with this smell but my body was reacting to the trigger differently, it’s like my mind and body were running a program to sync with each other to safely process the trauma their own natural way.
Today I’m happy to say that I have come to love the smell of Lilacs and similar smells because I instantly think of my son, and in my own way I feel like the smell is also some form of communication from my son letting me know that he is close and that he loves and cares about me.