In our avoidance of pain and suffering, denial and fear, we push away the very experiences that seek to stimulate the evolution of our consciousness. And since our lives will never be free of situations that trigger stress and provoke anxiety, it is important to understand that stress and anxiety are not the same, although they often trigger each other. Stress comes from a feeling that something ‘should not be happening.’ We go into a mindset of resistance and the feeling is stress. We are in flight from the way our life is right now. Anxiety, however, stems from the feeling that something should be happening that clearly isn’t. Longing for something that isn’t happening causes us to become dissatisfied with our life as it is right now. With both, our inner experience is that we want to be somewhere other than where we are. We must deal with these circumstances as they arise. The problem with merely “getting past” a stressful or anxious time is that, although life appears to have moved on, nothing has actually changed. We may have left a particularly difficult situation behind, but we remain the same. We couldn’t allow the stressful event to have the transference effect it could have, and so we are just as vulnerable as ever to subsequent difficult times.
Along with stress and anxiety, many people experience trauma. Our reaction to potentially traumatic situations is instinctual and therefore not under our conscious control. A traumatic response is not a sign of weakness but the body’s attempt to protect itself. And trauma can be experienced physically, emotionally, and mentally. Situations that threaten our social self such as rejection, shame, fear of failure, and negative judgement by others cause us to react in the same manner as if we were being threatened physically. A common response to trauma is depression, and thus it can be called “The Invisible Epidemic” and knows no discrimination or boundaries in term of who it may affect. Sharing pain, though, is one way to receive encouragement and reduce alienation.
Traumatic experiences are processed differently from pleasant sensations. Because these experiences are intrusive and result in an overwhelming arousal of our system, they are taken in as fragments rather than as a whole experience. When data is taken in as fragments, it’s stored in the sensory parts of the brain, where it remains compartmentalized. Years later, when life presents us with cues that closely match the unprocessed stimuli from a traumatic event, it tends to trigger these unintegrated memories, bringing them back to mind as if the events were occurring in the present. These stored and unprocessed sensations are what we call flashbacks and nightmares. It’s as if the trauma were happening all over again.
Anxiety is unresolved fear. Prolonged anxiety can manifest disorders such as panic attacks, social phobias, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Trauma, when unhealed, will sooner or later surface into our awareness. Exercise lowers stress levels and reduces anxiety. Exercise is antidepressant effect on the the body because it creates the stimulants norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin.
As with many mammals, tremoring occurs naturally in humans when we are either shaken up or nervous. Tremors in humans are the natural response of a shocked or disrupted nervous system attempting to restore the body and mind to a state of balance. The body evokes the tremors to complete the discharge of our fight, flight, or freeze response. The purpose is to discharge the excess energy. Such tremors are referred to as neurogenic tremors. They are a primordial bodily experience originating in the processes of the brain’s procedural memory. If the nervous system doesn’t deactivate itself, the body continues to remain in a kind of short-circuit loop. Our mussels hold on to the excess charge because our brain is continuing to believe it’s in danger and needs to maintain a state of readiness.
Tremors are generated from within the lambic system of the brain, not under conscious control. Tremors bypass the thinking brain, giving us access to the unconscious reptilian brain. This enables us to bring about changes that we couldn’t otherwise accomplish. By interrupting the hypothalamus-pituitary- adrenal axis, tremors produce physical relaxation, reducing our stress without the need for our conscious control or even awareness of the releasing process.
Trauma induced behavior is designed to protect people from additional trauma. That is why it is so difficult to get traumatized individuals to let go of their behavior.
Trauma release is an act of forgiveness. Every emotion, feeling, or physical sensation is revealing an accurate history of what the body has experienced. When the body begins to tremor, it releases chronic tension. Through this release process, the body tells its story. The places where the tremors move through, along with the places they are unable to move through the body, reveal the physical aspects of the body’s history. Which emotions are released and which are not released reveals the specific emotional aspects of these experiences. The memories or thoughts that are evoked by the tremors reveal the cognitive aspects of these same experiences.
We all have the potential to improve the quality of our life in the wake of trauma. Whether this happens or not depends on whether we go into the trauma and reflect on it, or whether we push it away because it’s too painful. The trauma release process enables us to go into our trauma by means of our body. TRE exercises allow us to revisit the traumatic patterns established in our body, which enables us to release them. In the process of the release, a new consciousness is born.
