One of the best audio CDs I have heard on trauma and how it is stored in the body is by Peter Levine. He is a leading expert in understanding and treating trauma.
mammals
As mammals, our natural response to anything traumatic is to fight, flight, or freeze. As humans we judge ourselves for freezing, but in the wild it’s actually a survival mechanism as it means the predator may think an animal is dead and while it goes off to find pups the animal may run away. After the freeze response, the animals shake off the frozen energy and then continue as if nothing had happened.
Releasing
As humans, we judge ourselves weak if we tremble and tremble, we have the ability to numb or stop it. But it is a natural biological response to a dire situation.
When doing any kind of trauma healing that creates trapped energy in the brain and body, I tend to go through a period afterward where I get angry, make sure to move my arms to release the energy like I’m fighting, or hop on to my trampoline and jogs like I’m running away. It tells the brain that the situation is over and I ran away. It’s the response that should have occurred if I hadn’t frozen in the situation where I couldn’t escape.
David Berceli’s trauma release exercises work on the same premise.
school days
One example I posted recently was in my early days of school, we had a particularly nasty principal who really shouldn’t have been in charge of a school, but that’s how they did it in the 1960s, and I’m sure it was worse for some than that. as you progressed into the 20th century.
5 minutes before the bell rang for playtime and lunch, there was a *freeze* bell. So when we were kids we literally had to freeze like statues and the director would walk around to make sure we were all frozen. If we weren’t, we were punished.
We were literally locking into our muscles the trauma of helplessness of being *prey* to this man.
School was a great place to make kids sit still, and you were naughty if you fidgeted or moved around a lot, which is what our bodies want to do to release tension.
frozen in time
Healing trauma is about releasing the energy trapped in the brain and body that keeps it frozen in time and creates symptoms of stress that manifest as emotional and physical disturbances.
Frozen Trauma means that we may have trouble regulating our energies, because we have found ways to avoid feeling that trapped energy, whether it be dissociation, addiction, anxiety, depression, and illness.
The energy is always pressing to be released.
But once safely out of the dangerous situation, the energy that has been encapsulated can be released and the learnings can be assimilated into your being, integrating the wisdom and power you had to give up to survive.
