From trauma to trust: building a safe space within your body.

Learn to trust, listen, and feel safe in your body.

The concept of listening to your body is not as simple as just tuning your ears into your body.

This concept can be challenging if you have a history of trauma, live in chronic pain, have chronic illness or are burnt out. I want to break this down a little more, and provide a reason why it is hard to listen to your body.

I invite you into mindfulness-based practices to support building trust, and develop listening skills that are supported by compassion and curiosity to build the felt sense of safety intellectually and from a deeper embodied sense.

Your body and brain are always communicating, they communicate through the senses. Your senses send messages through neurons back and forth between the brain and the body. You have billions of neurons that work together to create this intelligent communication network.

Sometimes the communication can develop poor signaling or there can be a mismatch of information received. If there is an instance of trauma, ongoing chronic stress, chronic pain, and other chronic illness, your nervous system will adapt to protect you and keep you safe. Please know that trauma is a spectrum and can be experienced in many ways. The other thing with trauma is that it is not only about the event itself and what happened, it is also about the physiological and biological responses that occured in the event and may continue long after the event.

In the event of trauma, your body and brain perceive danger, your intelligent nervous system receives information to move into your fight/flight response. You’ll either fight the threat, or make very quick exit. This is intelligence. In a healthy, supported, and regulated nervous system, you will move back into your safety & connection response after the event has ended and you cognitively/ physiologically, and somatically believe and know that you are safe. 

If however, you can’t get away from threat, your stress response could remain in the fight/flight response, flooding your blood with stress hormones, and eventually you could shift into another state known as the freeze response. Visualise a deer in headlights for the freeze response. Your prefrontal cortex goes offline, your ability to speak clearly is inhibited and your body goes into freeze. Your heartbeat becomes less variable, your breathing becomes shallow, and your digestive system may become inhibited.  Becoming stuck in freeze; is normal if you don’t receive the right support, care, and have the skills to self-regulate efficiently. Your body may feel exhausted and sensitive. You may experience fear, and a loss of tone in your voice to speak your truth. You may also lose a sense of connection to yourself and others.

Overtime, the feelings of stuckness may continue. The feelings of stuckness can present as being unable to make decisions, unsure where to turn to for help, panic, anxiety, pain/tension in your chest; to name a few experiences. If you do receive the appropriate support, you can move slowly back to ventral vagal safety & connection. Ideally learning about how this occured, and developing resources to support nervous system awareness, regulation, and resilience.

If the original traumatic event or events are not resolved on a biological and physiological level, they can lay dormant in your nervous system and become triggered without explanation. The trigger could be implicit; you have no explanation for how you became triggered. It could also be explicit; you know exactly what triggered you, sounds, smells, facial expressions, people, places, memories etc.

These triggers, are reactivating the physiological response that was the same response in the event of trauma. So even though you might be able to discern that there is nothing to be afraid of, and wonder why you are feeling so triggered; your body has no idea you are safe. Your body is responding to perceived threat, and with that comes thoughts, beliefs, emotions, sensations, and bodily movements from past events.

So how do you learn to listen, and feel safe in the body?

Through learning both Top-Down processing (for this practice I encourage mindfulness) & Bottom-Up processing for integration & embodiment.

Concept 1- Neuroception: The brain’s surveillance system that operates below the level of consciousness. This system is always scanning your environment and people within it to detect safety / danger signals. To bring conscious awareness to this, we draw from your Exteroception or external senses; Sight, Sound, Taste, Touch & Smell, to gather data in real-time about your environment. Using a technique called Orienting- Look around your environment like it is the first time (beginners mind in mindfulness). Notice what you see, smell, hear, and what you can touch. Become curious and can you identify how it makes you feel? Is it safe, or unsafe? And are safe and unsafe represented in your body somatically (how does it feel in your body eg. do you become hypervigiant, on high alert, do your pupils dilate, does your mouth become dry, are you feeling anxious, urgency, can you feel and hear your heart beat fatser and louder)?

Concept 2- Interoception: The body’s sensing system. Receiving information from the environment, people, and other senses like movement, temperature, sound, and signaling the information received through the body first before going to the brain. This may feel like butterflies in the tummy, tension in the neck or shoulders, having a hot flush or cold shiver, hearing your stomach gurgle, tense up or feeling urgency for the bathroom.

Both concepts are working below the level of consciousness. By becoming informed on these concepts, you become part of the process of having choice, and instead of your habitual reactions leading the way, you can create change through reshaping otherwise known as neuroplasticity. Which changes reactions into accurate responses, leading to a felt sense of safety within the brain/body systems.

Because of the experience of trauma, living in chronic pain or chronic stress it is a non-linear process. It is really important to drop expectations of being fixed, putting a deadline on when you want to be ‘healed’ and “back to normal”. With these experiences, you may find your window of tolerance for being mindful is small. This means we must go slow, be intentional, and have supportive resources to help you stay grounded. 

Learning the language of the body is a practice and one that deserves full commitment. Healing can’t be about taking pills and doing loads of ‘things’ for self care. It is a practice to yourself that deserves a concise, thought-out, integrative, intentional commitment that you can gift yourself.