EP 295: Healing from Trauma with Anne

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode is about healing trauma. Today’s caller, Anne, is a musician who wants to expand her creative expression but feels blocked due to the sexual abuse she experienced. She has done a lot of personal development work but still has difficulty fully expressing herself. She wants guidance on how to navigate through her trauma to heal it.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">[For show notes go here:</span> <a href="http://christinehassler.com/episode295"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">Christinehassler.com/episode295</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">]</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Trauma impacts and/or injures the nervous system. When a person experiences extreme trauma the brain goes into survival, which means fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. The brain is always on the lookout for danger and it is exhausting. That is why we experience fear and anxiety.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I can’t label what “extreme” is because two people can have the same situation happen to them and one person may register in their nervous system as not that big of a deal, but another person with the same circumstances can register it as a really big deal.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When we are healing trauma it is not about reliving it. It is about providing space for somatic emotional release and working with a person to regulate their nervous system. It is about coming out of the survival brain and moving back into the “rest and digest” part of the nervous system, moving from the sympathetic nervous system which is on alert, and into the parasympathetic nervous system.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The personal development/self-help world can be misleading, perhaps even damaging, for people that have experienced extensive trauma like rape, sexual abuse, physical abuse, racial trauma, etc. Often, there’s an expectation or ethos in the personal development industry t