There’s a reason I offer trauma release body work and facilitation, along with life coaching and the two marry together in beautiful unexpected ways.
There are so many wonderful people out there who are struggling because of anxiety/depression/addiction or childhood trauma, who want to create amazing lives, however their chemistry is often working against them.
The answer here is not ‘false positivity’ which is what the personal development industry is often accused of and it’s not ‘rational behavioral therapies’ which miss the ability to enable the rewiring of the body and neural pathways.
Nor, is it going to tonnes of yoga classes, without doing the inner work of linking the emotions, psychology and soul with what is happening in the body and brain. Optimal approaches use all of these things together.
What I have seen work most effectively (and what I offer my clients) is this:
1. Body work to unlock old trauma – Use of body work to remove the electrical circuitry holding the trauma pathways in place in the brain and body. As well as creating a space from which new neural pathways can be formed, this gives the person a sense of relief and ease being in their own skin (sometimes for the first time).
2. Facilitation for self awareness/understanding – The client begins to understand what has happened to them and makes sense of their experiences instead of feeling paralysed by them.
3. Turning your wounds into wisdom and self value – A compassionate/gentle process where I show my clients how to extract the wisdom from their past. They see what’s right about themselves that was previously obscured by pain/heaviness.
4. Addressing skill/knowledge gaps – Those who grew up in chaotic families always have knowledge gaps and lack certain skills/tools/perspectives to give further context to their experiences and navigate the world differently. This is essential for them to feel safe going forwards and this step is often missed!!
5. We life coach/mentor together to reinforce the learning they have done and support them to reach their goals/start to reach their potential without their old barriers/blocks in place.
Unless you have all of these elements, or a multitude of people who contribute these various elements to someone’s recovery, it often can’t and won’t work.
The popular narrative around depression and anxiety has up until recently been “it’s a chemical imbalance take a pill” or “take a pill and do some behavioral therapy” or even “do both of those things and meditate or do yoga”
There is something being missed here.
People with adult depression or anxiety, suffered childhood trauma and for those who are sensitive, talk therapies will often miss the mark, leaving them stuck, in deep pain and feeling like there is something wrong with them.
Science is now starting to understand is that because of childhood trauma the brain is wired differently.
The good news here is that you can also significantly rewire a traumatized brain if you are willing to do the work and employ the right techniques to do this. Typically, as you do this, your symptoms will resolve along the way.
Anxiety and depression are symptoms that you’ve been through tough experiences that you are still carrying, that have become wired into your body, brain and energy field.
Far from making you ‘mentally ill’ these symptoms are actually a sign that you are healthy and your system is working as it should be.
Rather than labelling people as ‘mentally ill’ and promoting acceptance of their ‘mental illness’, we should be realizing our society is sick and people’s symptoms indicate they’ve been traumatized. Their symptoms don’t indicate they are unwell (although they may be suffering horribly), but that their system is healthy, in a toxic society. What a person’s symptoms are demanding, is healing of the root cause. Treat this suitably and they will resolve on their own.
Our culture sanctions trauma, functions from abuse, worships the superficial and normalizes it all. Furthermore, it then judges and makes wrong those who are suffering, creating marginalization and making it far worse. This is often done by those in the medical or helping professions who have not lived it and do not understand what they do not know.
My clients are often perplexed about why they have had therapy and been bravely honest and open about their lives/situations/emotions and yet are still locked up inside and their symptoms haven’t really improved. In these instances their therapist may not be trauma informed and with the client’s physiology working against the therapy and keeping them living out horrible, distressing symptoms, talking to a so called ‘expert’ can become an exercise in disappointment and frustration.
If you want to know whether you experienced trauma as a child or not, ask yourself when painful/challenging things happened to you, who did you tell? If it wasn’t one of your parents, you probably didn’t have an (emotionally) safe environment growing up and you didn’t have your needs met. That doesn’t mean your parents were at fault or didn’t love you. What it means is that they had their own trauma, were preoccupied, stressed financially or emotionally and that is unsurprising.
Releasing your trauma, rewiring your brain and body and learning new tools and skills for functioning differently in the world is the kindest thing you will ever do for yourself. It will allows you to take on a new lease on life, begin to like yourself, grow your confidence and perhaps accomplish some of what you really came here to do!
I am taking limited bookings for mentorship clients now (before my study commitments begin for 2022) Don’t miss out on your opportunity to work with me. I see people from around New Zealand who often travel here to have ‘healing holidays’ for up to a week. Nelson is the perfect setting for this and often doing our healing away from our usual environment is quite powerful and appropriate.
You are welcome to message me here and I promise I will respond within a day.
