When we experience trauma, our thoughts, emotions, and body can feel fragmented—like they’re speaking different languages. We might notice flashbacks, racing thoughts, numbness, dissociation, or a pounding heart. These reactions come from different parts of the brain: Neocortex = thoughtMammalian …
Tag: Body
Trauma Symptoms
When we have experienced neglect or abuse in childhood, the child must adapt to survive. The child might survive by leaving their body when the abuse is taking place. Then as an adult, when there is physical discomfort, or someone …
Identifying Emotional Exhaustion
Emotional exhaustion can appear in various ways through your body, mind and spirit. In your BODY, it might show up as: In your MIND, it might show up as: In your SPIRIT, it might show up as: When I’m emotionally …
What a ‘No’ Feels Like In Your Body
A few years ago, I watched my kids as toddlers start to distinguish between the bodily felt sense of ‘I’m hungry, and I’m sleepy’. It made me smile to see my daughter fast asleep with a sandwich literally hanging out …
The Bottom-Up Approach To Trauma
Bottom-up approaches are more somatically, body-based interventions to working with trauma. They work to resolve the imprint of trauma on the body through the limbic system, the feeling centre of the brain. As we connect with the body, the body …
Dissociation And Trauma
“Dissociation is the essence of trauma. The overwhelming experience is split off and fragmented, so that the emotions, sounds, images, thoughts, and physical sensations related to the trauma take on a life of their own.” (Van der Kolk, 2014, p66). …
The Separation of the Body and the Mind
BOOM! And herein lies a fundamental problem. Enter Descartes in the 17th Century and the idea of the mind and the body being separate, providing the foundation for the biomedical model for the next three centuries. I feel we are …
Acting Out
When you feel yourself about to ‘act out’ can you pause? Can you hold the tension and discomfort in your body and be curious about what is happening for you. Can you think, “wow! I am feeling so much anger …