“While trauma is contraction, tantra is expansion”
What is trauma?
Trauma results from any event that overwhelms a person’s capacity to cope. The common ingredient is helplessness. When our capacity to defend ourselves through fight, flight or freeze is not successful, the unreleased survival energies stay stuck in our nervous system. If we do not release this energy from our nervous system where it is stuck, we develop anxiety and panic and other psychosomatic and behavioural problems. Trauma can affect us physically, change our behaviours, intensify our emotions and transform our psyches.
Trauma field luminaries such as Peter Levine and Bessel van der Kolk among others, concur that trauma is in the body and not in the event. Trauma is locked in the body as incomplete survival responses resulting in a dysregulation in the autonomic nervous system long after the event has ended.
Trauma is more common than we think. In fact, anything that is “too much, too fast and too soon” has the capacity to overwhelm us is traumatic.
Causes and sources of trauma are:
Abandonment, birth trauma, bonding break with parent, consistent criticism and judgement, experiencing violence, rape, abuse, incest, sexual molestation, accident, bullying, surgery medical and dental, divorce, death of a loved one, war, suicide of a loved one, forced emigration, prolonged illness, torture, accidents and falls, natural disasters or any experience that causes a threat to someone’s life.
In fact, any incident where we feel that we can’t cope, that we are going to die or are in danger is traumatic. Our body will go into fight/flight/freeze in order to survive. From developmental trauma to PTSD, trauma severely affects our nervous system, our beliefs and our emotions. When trauma gets stuck in the body for a period of time, symptoms start to show up.
“Traumatic symptom arise when residual energy from the experience is not discharged from the body. This energy remains trapped in the nervous system where it can wreak havoc on our bodies and minds.”
Peter Levine
Symptoms
Anxiety, panic attacks, phobias, feeling disconnected and detached, feeling isolated and alone, depression, helplessness, hyper-vigilance, hyperactivity, mood swings, weight gain, insomnia, nightmares, physical pain, chronic fatigue, dissociation, reduced ability to deal with stress, compulsive behaviour.
While many healing modalities treat only the symptoms, it is important to go to the root cause of the issue and complete the trauma for true healing to happen.
Sexual trauma
Even if a traumatic event that is not of a sexual nature, it can also sometimes inhibit our sexual expression. When the body is in fear and contraction, it is likely to affect our sexual function. Therefore, someone may not have experienced rape or sexual abuse, yet still feel the need to heal trauma from the body in order to have a happy sex life.
Trauma also affects our sexuality which leads to sexual dysfunctions such as:
- Men: Erectile dysfunction, impotence, premature ejaculation, performance anxiety, low sex drive, fear of intimacy
– Hyper: addicted to sex, porn, sexual fantasies - compulsive and obsessive
– Hypo: no sex drive at all, avoid sexual connections, fear of intimacy - Women: Period pain, fertility issues, loss of interest in sex, vaginismus, no orgasm, painful sex and others
Clients with sexual trauma can also have the following symptoms:
In freeze, dissociated, numb, cold, shutdown, feel fear, guilt, shame, mistrust, overwhelmed, feel violated, no boundaries, feel dirty, feel not worthy, helpless, hopeless, suicidal.
Sexual trauma can erode a person’s self-confidence, self-esteem, the ability to trust self and others, the inability to set clear boundaries, the potential to experience real intimacy and an understanding of appropriate sexual behaviour and healthy sexuality.
To be continued.
