How To Feel Embodied After Trauma and Loss

Post-traumatic embodiment is a way to feel aligned and embodied even after our nervous system has been frazzled by the most powerful forces of life, loss and stress.

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

Please let us know if you would be willing to make these edits, and we can continue forward working on rounds of feedback. Cheers!My own journey with post-traumatic embodiment became very apparent when I recently took a road trip along the dazzlingly famous ‘Garden Route’ in South Africa. Here, I found myself in a polarised state of getting lost in the beauty of Mother Earth while holding the grief from my past at the same time.

My journey down the sandy roads, riding by the adorable, grey baby elephants and their gentle giant mothers, past the migrating zebras and their travel partners, the wildebeest, and past the African tribesmen who spoke in clicks took me on an emotional discovery all its own.

I danced to African music in the middle of highway traffic (much to the amusement of the truckers) and I cuddled a beautiful surfer dude while the rain torrented down on the roof of our tiny cottage nestled in the trees on a farm somewhere along the route.

I had the most beautiful times.

But my past still lives within me.

My dark past shaped me and made me who I am for all my silly zaniness, my complexity and my darkness.

So is it possible to get lost in the beauty of the earth, blanketed in bright green pastures that are dotted with purple flowers along a Garden Route while also carrying one’s past?

Can silliness, lightheartedness and fun exist in a body that survived so much grief?

Overcoming trauma has been my lifelong case study and research project.

I work with therapists and their clients to help relieve the debilitating symptoms of PTSD and a frazzled nervous system using over eight forms of somatics, art and movement centred therapies.

So when the term ‘embodied’ came up as part of the global conversation, I had to ask myself the honest question,

“Are survivors of loss, abuse and chronic stress able to feel embodied even when they’re suffering from numbness, dissociation, intrusive memories or a startle response that makes them jump up high into the stratosphere every time they hear a car door close?”

True embodiment is when you feel like your body is a safe and comfortable home for you to live in.

Where you are the turtle and your body is your home.

Like you are in power, grounded, present and attuned to your own instincts.

Like your body is both a nurturing refuge and a powerful medium for your soul to express itself.

Like you have the power to make decisions that are aligned with who you are.

Now, let’s be honest with ourselves.

Embodiment is often a very privileged emotional state to be in. It is much easier to access feeling embodied if you’ve never been through a traumatic loss of control, chronic stress and are predominantly a white male who is financially stable and has a strong support system.

So the answer to how to feel embodied after you’ve been through the vortex of the depths of your soul and survived the poles of life is as complex as trauma itself.

Let’s begin answering this question of how to feel embodied after trauma by first understanding how the body systems physiologically and psychologically change in response to trauma.

While in the throes of emotional anguish, or after prolonged chronic stress, the body can get overwhelmed by being pushed past it’s limits. In this case, various body parts associated with the trauma begin to either go numb as they shut down or begin to ‘scream’ in the form of twitching, anxiety, nightmares or chronic pain.

For this reason the correlation between PTSD and migraines are undeniable. Similarly the link between sexual assault and Fibromyalgia as well as forceps assisted childbirth is high. This is due to the birth canal’s autonomic psychosomatic response to physically shut out anything from entering the vagina as a way to protect itself.

The body really does keep the score.

So now that we understand how trauma and chronic stress cause the body to react not only mentally but physiologically, our original question gets even stronger.

How can we feel blissfully embodied when our body is physically reacting, screaming for comfort, attunement and most of all, relief and healing?

To put it simply, by developing new neural connections.

New somatic experiences allow us to develop neutral or positive sensations and emotions that allow us to reconnect with our body and re-enter our brand new ‘post-trauma’ life in a different and more emotionally resourced way. A new somatic experience can be any positive experience that you get ‘lost’ in.

Like running, painting, skydiving, learning guitar, travelling or dancing.

Just as trauma creates new neural connections, thought patterns and bodily sensations, our brains were made to evolve and heal by further developing these processes for the better.

Furthermore, these trauma induced changes were designed to protect us from similar, future experiences and also help us recover more quickly if they do happen again (so long as we develop the tools to recover in an adaptive manner).

This means survivors of chronic emotional stress and trauma are recommended to develop new thought patterns and exercise their capacity to feel body sensations like attachment, trust, safety and pleasure just like we exercise to increase our body’s muscle mass.

This takes time and practice because just as muscle mass isn’t built within the body after going to the gym for a few days every now and again, new neural synapses require consistency.

It takes time and mindfulness to slowly generate and grow palpable body sensations that help the body relearn feelings of serenity, power and embodiment.

This process is actually a three step journey to teaching our bodies how to integrate new, healthier neural connections.

The first step to embodiment after trauma or chronic emotional stress actually has nothing to do with talking about the stressor or trying to make sense out of it.

Rather, the first step is to notice and validate how the adverse life event still affects your body today, in this moment or in this week.

You can make a list to track this.

Maybe you’re now living with a constant struggle to connect with others, to feel safe or are living with chronic anxiety or pain.

Step two is to focus on these sensations.

Do these strong feelings or emotions you’ve identified above express themselves in certain parts of your body more than others?

When you focus on these body parts, do certain memories, feelings or movements show up? If so, these are the parts of your body that need to grieve, they need a moment of silence, they need to be attuned to, and nurtured.

For example, if trauma is stored in the feet, one may notice that their feet can feel numb or separate from their body. Wiggling our toes or thinking about our feet may bring up a memory or an urge to run away from something but feeling trapped or unable to.

Working with the trauma stored in the feet would be a multi-step process in this case.

Using art therapy, one can draw what’s on the inside and the outside of the feet.

Using drama therapy, one can take on the personality and role of the feet and act out the feet’s journey. Tell your feet’s story.

Using somatic experiencing therapy, one can feel into the feet as much as possible, and honour the movements that the feet once wanted to do but couldn’t. Maybe the feet want to run, kick and hide.

Do all of those as you wish, slowly, mindfully and meditatively.

Give your feet the healing journey they deserved after going through so much.

Perhaps while working with the feet or other part of the body, one feels the need to cry or tremble. Let your body move through these reactions. Welcome them.

Step three is the integration of the new neural synapsis and bodily sensations that arise throughout these reparative therapeutic events that you’ve just created and experienced.

Perhaps working with our feet gave us a moment of feeling powerful again. Perhaps we feel a deeper sense of knowing that our feet are a part of our body again. Any new or ’weird’ feeling that comes up is our body’s way of creating new neural synapses that will be able to grow stronger as we practice it.

In this way we develop the emotional capacity to counter our old trauma sensations and feelings with newly developed positive bodily sensations and emotions.

Only once we’ve developed the neural capacity to counter sensations of dissociation with sensations of neutrality and groundedness, or feelings of anxiety and overwhelm with moments of inner trust and alignment, then the body has developed the capacity to feel moments of embodiment.

And let’s not kid ourselves. Feeling blissfully embodied and orgasmically aligned usually only happens for moments at a time, it doesn’t happen for many hours or days at a time (unless Psilocybin or Ecstasy is involved as part of a supervised medical clinical trial to treat PTSD symptoms which I discuss in my other work).

As a mental health educator and trauma survivor, learning to re-introduce the emotional capacity to feel embodied in my own life has been and continues to be a journey.

Thankfully, a more and more rewarding one as time passes and my own post-traumatic growth journey evolves.

It was interesting timing that I happened to find myself on South Africa’s famous Garden Route when I was integrating my own concept of post-traumatic embodiment.

I’d met a beautiful Dutchman quite randomly and two days later we were cruising down the highway together as nomadic souls are wont to do (yes, I’m a hopeless gypsy).

At first, it bothered me that I could not truly focus on and appreciate the lush green mountains floating by my window or the brilliant, fluorescent pink sunset. After all, my body’s internal post-traumatic stimuli and hypersensitive fear response were too ‘loud’ so to speak to integrate the feelings within me of peacefulness, safety, calm and appreciation.

I so desperately wished I could make my trigger responses disappear so I could take in the mossy forest around me until I had a profound realisation.

Just as what I’ve eaten in the past is the sum of my current nutritional status, and the current expression of my genes and phenotype are a summary of my past, my current human experience too is a historical record of everything I’ve lived through before this moment.

Understanding post traumatic embodiment became more clear to me.

“I need to learn to sit in my own proverbial garden” I told myself on the Garden Route.

“Your garden may have grown weeds, it may have snakes, pesky ants and scorpions that will always be a part of your garden experience to some capacity or another…but you’ve also grown lush grasses, vibrant coloured plants and there are dreamy butterflies flitting by beneath the fluffy white clouds above you that you can try to focus on.”

Sometimes you won’t be able to help but sit in fear in your garden because of the possibility of ants or scorpions, even when they’re not around.

Other times you will get lost in the dreamy swaying of the trees’ branches nodding above you. But most of the time in our lives we need to sit with both the past and the present.

“No garden is perfect because nature isn’t perfect. THIS is your proverbial garden of life. Sometimes you’ll be able to focus on the sunset while other times you’ll be busy focusing on the ants running across your toes.

Accept your garden for what it is. Accept that sometimes you’ll get lost in the mossy, emerald green patches, but sometimes you’ll be busy worrying about the scorpions.

Such are the polarities of the emotional experiencing of life.”

Just as nature uses osmosis to create balance, the body also uses negative hormonal feedback loops to create internal balance within our body systems in addition to osmosis. So in order to bring our own emotional status back into balance after chronic stress and trauma, we need to help create new neural connections to foster new sensations of internal balance. Then our body’s can learn how to shift back to this safe place, if it finds itself in a triggered or chaotic state.

Most of the time our body systems will eventually learn how to hold both emotional extremes. We will adapt to be on alert for the scorpions while also being able to appreciate the peaceful sound of the wind in your ears or the birds singing their sweet melodies to each other.

Both the life experiences that happened to us beyond our control and the ones we’ve gone out of our way to create, essentially trained our brain to feel a certain emotional baseline.

Although we can’t control everything that happens to us, we can control the sensations we practice every day and the new experiences we choose to create.

For example, if we are feeling vulnerable and unsafe, we can practice self-defence mindful movements to restore feelings of power and choice. Similarly helpful techniques can be pulled from drama therapy, Yoga, art, dance and music therapies as well as ancient practices like Tai Chi, Qigong or smudging ceremonies. All have their place in our healing processes which is why I’ve created techniques to encompass all these healing options.

Not every day in our lives will we be able to feel blissfully embodied, so on the grey days, we can learn to sit within our body’s proverbial ‘Garden of Being’ nonetheless. By practicing to sit with the anxiety as well as the reliable sound of our breath or our faithful heart beat. Try to sit with both the negative and positive sum of your past with each being held equally, one in each hand.

This rebalancing practice will lead the body to grow capacity to eventually find itself experiencing a few blissful moments of forgetting all about the scorpions and getting completely and utterly lost in the colourful mist of the rainbow or the reassuring sound of the leaves swaying on their branches in the wind.

So if you are struggling to sit within your skin, to feel embodied and at home in the garden that is your body, then I invite you to create new internal experiences, new feelings, new emotions. Practice creating and feeling into those new neural connections as much as you can.

Moving away from your body’s habitual feelings, emotional conditioning and overall sense of being is definitely work, but with time and practice your body will take on those new feeling capacities so you can feel safe, empowered at peace and at home in your body.

You only get one life and one body to sit in, so grow, evolve, so build it into the nurturing home you’ve always wanted and yearned for.

Sit in your garden with your past, your present and the future you will create and hold them all at once. Make peace with them.

After all, your brain and body were designed to transform your experience of being human.

Tanya is a mental health nurse specializing in trauma therapy and women’s health. She writes for Rewire Trauma Therapy’s online therapy services: https://www.rewiretraumatherapy.com/