TRAUMA  

Trauma is the emotional, psychological and physical residue left over from a heightened stress event that accompanies experiences of threat, violence, or life-challenging scenario. Trauma is what is left over in our psyche from an event that upsets us so completely, it overwhelms our ability to cope in the moment, and we are often unaware of how we got through the experience. 

It is most easily thought of as a painful experience that can happen to us at any point in our life that we did not have the conscious ability to cope with, or egoic strength to process fully. 

However whilst it is widely known what Traumatic experiences is, it is far less well known that Trauma is not just what happens to us; but what happens inside us as a result of an overwhelming event. If the event is not fully Processed and integrated fully at the time then there is a lasting indelible imprint left in the mind, body, and nervous system that changes how we feel about ourselves, how we see the world, and how we relate to others. 

The Hidden Truth mainstream Psychiatry chooses to ignore – The real and continued effects of traumatic experience. 

Emotion 

Negative experiences in our life that are overwhelming create painful emotions and thoughts that have to be dealt with in some manner, otherwise the organism is in danger of overloading its nervous system and that would be nothing less than fatal. So the Bodys oldest survival mechanism steps in, the Reptilian brain at the base of the spine and overrides all conscious thought. It stores the excess emotional energy in the cellular memory of the body often in one or more of our body organs and allows the person to survive the attack long enough to get help at a latter date –This stagnant energy becomes the basis for all physical disease in the body.    

Thoughts 

However there are also negative thoughts  generated at the moment of the trauma which become locked away in our unconcious mind and are held in  place with the force of the emotional pain, thoughts such as “ im not good enough ( for this person ) ,  I must be worthless,  Im not loveable , Im bad , I cant trust men ( or women ).   

Behaviour 

And if that all wasnt bad enough we then act out uncounscious negative behaviour patterns based on these thoughts about ourselves in order to protect ourself from the same threat appearing in our life again. These unwanted behaviour patterns can be thought of as our particular brand of charater defences that are employed unconsciously by our lower ego to defend agaist the percieved and mispercieved threats in our outer world. These defenses may help us survive at the time, but over the long term they can limit our aliveness, joy, and capacity for connection.  

EARLY PIONEERS OF TRAUMA INFORMED THERAPY 

Wilhelm Reich was one of the first to recognize that emotional trauma leaves a tangible imprint on the body. He introduced the concept of “muscular armoring”—chronic tensions that form in the body as a defense against feeling overwhelming emotions. When a child is repeatedly shamed, rejected, or not allowed to express anger, sadness, or fear, the body begins to contract, creating muscular holding patterns that serve to suppress feeling. These contractions become unconscious and persistent, forming the basis of a defended personality. Reich believed that this blocked energy—what he called “orgone”—contributes to anxiety, depression, and a diminished sense of aliveness. 

Building on Reich’s ideas, Alexander Lowen, founder of Bioenergetic Analysis, observed that our psychological defenses are mirrored in our posture, movement, and energy levels. A collapsed chest might signal unexpressed grief, while a rigid spine might reflect fear or control. For Lowen, the body is the unconscious, and healing must involve reconnecting with the body’s sensations and expressions. He saw trauma as a disruption in the body’s energetic flow, leading to emotional numbness, chronic fatigue, and the inability to feel joy or connection. Healing requires not just insight, but movement, grounding, and the release of stored emotion through breath and expression. 

Arthur Janov’s Primal Scream a pioneering and excellent work on deep wounding, focused on how unmet childhood needs—love, safety, acceptance—create what he called Primal Pain. These early wounds are stored deep in the nervous system, often beyond conscious memory. They silently drive adult behaviors, from emotional shutdown to self-sabotage, as the psyche takes evasive but oft disasterous methods to avoid re-experiencing that original pain – he terms this the False Self. 

Most importantly Janov argued that you cannot simply “think away” a core belief because it is anchored in unresolved feeling states. If the feeling is still stored in the body, the belief has a reason to exist. It is only when the original pain is felt in deep catharsis can the organism let go of the trauma that created it and come back to the true personality. 

Example: You can affirm “I am worthy” all day long, but if your nervous system still carries the grief of being unwanted, the old belief (“I am unworthy”) will continue to feel true at a deeper level and trump any positive affirmation.  

( In my opinion this negative emotional anchoring is the reason many people seeking to heal get very little results with either postive thinking or affirmation to change the dynamics of their lives. ) 

The upshot of all this is that we are destined to play out old emotional patterns and defensive behaviours until the original pain is dealt with on a cathartic level. The human orgnism is an incredible sensitive being and early damage can create tremendous distortions in both personality and subsequent behaviour. I would go further and say that all our limitaions are a direct result of the damaging events or more often the lack of loving behaviour that we had to traverse. If it were not so we would all be our true loving and creative selves —  One should definately ask why it is that our world is so violent and what we will do to mitigate it. 

Final thoughts  

Gross Trauma : Is clearly understandable by anyone because a physical event has occured ie sexual abuse, violent abuse, domestic abuse or being involved in a war zone or some form of physical accident.

Subtle Trauma : Much less understood but suffered by each and everyone of us. Non -physical pain has occurred but does not leave an outside mark on the persons body. Such as a parent or care-giver screaming at a child or being highly critical of them or threatening the child with physical pain. Other examples would be being hummiliated in some situation or taking on guilt or shame because of what others have said to you or made you believe.

The Body keeps the score  Bessel Van der Kolk 

NB. The capacity to deal with trauma is influenced the many personal variables that were present at the time, in particular the level of support they had both within the event and after – this helps us to understand some of the differences in the way individuals respond to similar levels of trauma or similar traumatising events in different ways.