Trauma + Trust: The Disconnect
Much of the Self-Trust Model centers on learning to reconnect to your body and the wisdom held there. Because connecting to your intuition begins in the body.
Trauma can disconnect you from this wisdom. From your intuition. From your body.
Trauma has a huge impact on your ability to trust yourself.
Anything that overwhelms your nervous system's ability to cope can be registered as a trauma. Anything that is too much, too soon, or too fast. Being traumatized after an event is related to the residue left behind in the nervous system; not necessarily the event itself.
There are often very good reasons you disconnected from your body (and therefore your intuition and trust in yourself). It often starts as protection.
The body is wise and knows what it needs to do to protect itself when it’s under real threat. It may flee and get away. It may be able to fight back against the threat.
OR.
It might need to FREEZE to survive.
(Side note: the younger you are, the more likely FREEZE is the only option for survival.)
The body places no judgment on these responses. The only goal is to survive the situation and then deal with the consequences later. But many people don’t have the tools to “deal” with the consequences. So they disconnect instead and the trauma remains unprocessed.
Unprocessed Trauma = Dysregulated Nervous System
It can show up as anxiety (fight or flight) or depression (freeze). And, it’s really difficult to trust your intuition when your nervous system is dysregulated. It’s hard to discern a real, current threat from your system stuck in survival mode.
And when everything is a threat; nothing actually is.
What starts as protection in the moment can become an unhelpful pattern in everyday life. You may have needed to separate and dissociate from your body in a scary moment to survive. (YAY body + psyche for protecting me!!) But then, maybe it started to feel safer to STAY disconnected. It felt safer to stay in your head and use external voices to guide you, instead of going inside for wisdom.
This is a journey I’m VERY familiar with.
I know very well what it’s like to be disconnected from my body for so much of my life.
Numbing and dissociation were some of my biggest protectors.
Problem was, I didn’t get to selectively numb from pain. I also was disconnected from the joy, pleasure, connectedness, and aliveness in my life. Acknowledging how and why the disconnection from my body happened required Radical Honesty.
And while Radical Honesty can be really hard, what came on the other side was choice.
One option was to just keep doing what I was doing. Distracting and avoiding my life. But I realized I had another option too. Understanding why and how the disconnection happened, helped show me the path back to trusting myself. I had the choice to reconnect with my body and my intuition. The choice to be present in my life. To no longer be a floating head.
It was a pretty turbulent re-entry into my body. And to be honest, it wasn’t a one time decision. I had to choose to stay in my body and in my present life many times. And each time I chose to stay, I built more and more capacity in my body. More resiliency. More trust in myself.
This process takes time. The quickest way is, slowly.
Go slow… get curious… And know, it’s worth it.
There are lots of ways to get started reconnecting to your body. We dive deep into many options inside the Epic Self-Trust program.
With Curiosity,
