What is Trauma Really?

A holistic approach to trauma defines trauma not as an event, but rather as a disruption and overwhelm to our body-mind’s capacity to adapt, thrive, and flourish. In that case, trauma is defined as any emotional experience that leaves you feeling helpless or powerless or both.

Trauma is NOT:

: a mental health condition although having trauma can affect your mental wellness

: a form of attention-seeking; it's deep-rooted pain from unmet needs and desires

: a chronic illness; it is possible to heal your trauma and live a fulfilling life

Trauma happens when:

• There is too much too soon
• There is too much for too long
• There is not enough for too long
• Power and agency have been taken away from the person or collective
• The stressors outweigh the resources available to navigate them
• When our primal protective instincts, intuitions, and responses are thwarted
• There is not enough time, space, or permission to heal

There’s THREE types of trauma that you can encounter:

Acute Trauma (aka shock trauma) refers to experiences that are life-threatening or can cause serious injury to an individual such as sexual violence (rape), physical violence, car crashes and other vehicular accidents and natural disasters. 

Chronic Trauma (aka strain trauma) refers to chronic experiences that are non-life threatening but still impact the individual intensely such as emotional abuse (bullying and invalidation), abandonment and betrayal, death of a loved one or the ending of an important relationship.

Complex Trauma happens when there is exposure to multiple traumatic events—often of an invasive, interpersonal nature—and the wide-ranging, long-term effects of this exposure. These events are severe and pervasive such as abuse or profound neglect.

Complex trauma can arise in any situation where you feel an ongoing sense of fear, horror, helplessness, or powerlessness over an extended period of time, with the perceived or actual inability to escape. It usually stems from trauma experienced in childhood, but it can also develop from traumatic events in adulthood.

Whereas shock trauma comes from experiencing too much too soon, strain trauma comes from experiencing too much or too little for too long. It creates chronic trauma symptoms that easily get passed up as personality traits and is often not addressed. For those who live with complex trauma, the memories don’t just live in the past. They live in the present moment, too. This is often what we see manifest in most people living with trauma.

The symptoms of trauma may occur immediately or emerge over time from the compounding stress and challenges of processing and adapting to the experiences of life. Symptoms of trauma emerge as the body and mind attempt to cope with and resolve the stressors.

When you experience a traumatic event, it activates the limbic system in the brain. This “fire alarm” shuts down all nonessential systems (rest, digestion, sleep) and floods your body with stress hormones, like cortisol, so you can prepare for fight, flight, or freeze.

Once the danger passes, your parasympathetic nervous system provides inner calm, otherwise known as your “rest and digest” mode.

At this point, normal cognitive function returns, and you can go back to your day with relatively few side effects, perhaps only feeling a little jittery for a while, or a bit on edge, but it eventually passes.

However, for people who live with complex trauma, this balance doesn’t quite return all the way because the limbic system stays engaged most of the time.

This is a coping mechanism the body uses to try and stay safe in the face of ongoing adversity. The problem is that it creates an experience of constantly being in survival mode, or on edge.

The trauma becomes trapped in the body and over time, the brain rewires itself to this "new normal". These lasting effects then lead to symptoms of complex trauma.

If you’re living with trauma, there is nothing inherently wrong with you. Your survival strategy is an intelligent response that your body elicited to help you survive the adversity, and now, that strategy is no longer serving you. So, you get to teach your body a new way of being by giving it a new way of responding. That is the essence of healing

Trauma can lead to feelings of powerlessness, helplessness, and groundlessness. It interferes with our ability to feel real in body and mind, it disrupts our very sense of existence, and takes us away from the present moment.

And this bodily state of your nervous system being on “high alert” can affect your thoughts, actions, and relationships.

However, as Dr. Peter Levine, creator of Somatic Experiencing says “Trauma is a fact of life. It does not have to be a life sentence.”

Trauma in the Caribbean

Trauma is not the event itself, it’s the way your body adapted to survive adversity. 

When you understand trauma from this perspective, it is clear that the Global South, specifically the Caribbean region is uniquely juxtaposed as both a traumatized and traumatizing society.

The Caribbean lived experience is one characterized by adversity and most people experience at least three Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) which are known to lead to long-term mental and physical health complications.

Research shows that more than 60% of Caribbean families are single-parent households headed by women. These households are plagued by poverty. 

This creates 2 problems: first the rupture in family structure created by the absent father which often results in abandonment, neglect and rejection wounds in children. The second is the experience of poverty and deprivation that depletes a nervous system and creates complex developmental trauma due to the lack of access to adequate resources

Add that to the structural trauma of being classified as “third world” and the universal lack of access to basic resources such as clean water, food and safe shelter means that people live in a constant state of fight/flight. This is exacerbated by high crime rates, unemployment and other problems created by poverty and lack of access to financial and material resources.

And you don’t want to forget that the Caribbean is the only part of the world that still carries the painful legacy of slavery as part of its identity due to cultural and historical imprints of trauma. This is a region where the majority of the population are direct descendants of the enslaved Africans, Indians and Chinese.

The science of Epigenetics tells us that trauma changes the way our DNA works and unresolved trauma imprints are passed on from one generation to the next biologically. This is what we call intergenerational trauma. And each human carries the intergenerational trauma imprints of up to seven generations in their DNA.

This essentially means that every Caribbean citizen is living with trauma. However, the mental health care system is not currently equipped to deal with trauma. And it is evident in the way mental health care is practiced within the region.

Most mental health practitioners are not actually trauma-informed and less than 20% of all mental health workers are trauma-trained. 

Research has proven that trauma lives in the body and 80% of our responses are communicated from the body to the mind, not the other way round. This means that we need an approach to healing and mental health work that starts in the body and works directly with the nervous system to remove trauma imprints and reverse the impact of trauma

This has been the direction of mental health work in developing countries in the last few years. Since the pandemic, trauma work has become more mainstream and more and more practitioners are becoming aware of the importance of decolonizing their practice and providing trauma-informed care that is culturally responsive.

How Somatic Therapy Can Help

Trauma lives in the body, not just in the mind. So any approach to healing trauma must start with the body. Somatic therapy is an experiential approach towards mind-body integration. 

‘Soma’ is a Greek word for ‘the living body known from within’, or known to the Self. This ‘knowing’ signifies wholeness. However, the pain, overwhelm, and coping responses manifested by trauma take us away from feeling at home in our body, and as a result there is often a split within ourselves.

The somatic approach to healing and trauma recovery seeks to restore wholeness by going beyond talking about and reframing your thoughts around what happened to you, to connect heart, mind, body and soul.

In Somatic Therapy we look to the body as a wise resource, ally and guide for healing and transformation because your body has been your companion through all of life’s events and it holds the story of YOU in its muscles, nerve fibers and cells.

By connecting with and listening to the messages carried in the body you can be guided to choices that create more ease and freedom and help you become the fullest version of yourself.

Somatic Therapy helps:

• Restore the body as a place of safety while helping to expand the capacity to process body (preverbal and nonverbal) memory
• Metabolize unprocessed emotions
• Complete thwarted (incomplete) stress responses
• Restore our optimal relationship to our self and the world around us

Somatic trauma therapy offers techniques for clients to sense and regulate their own physiology and states of being. This includes building more internal and external resources, building trusting and co-regulating relationships, learning to turn inward with compassion, being invited deeper in the body, and given time and space to process the trauma. These somatic techniques unwind trauma and restore well being.

THE ESPOIR APPROACH TO SOMATIC TRAUMA THERAPY

While trauma is processed and stored through the body, the ramifications of it shows up in many places including our relationships to other people, the environment, the collective, and a multitude of systems (education and political structures).

Through a unified Somatic Trauma Therapy approach we are able to assist individuals to integrate an understanding of their developmental and attachment experiences as well the culture, structural inequities, transgenerational trauma, and systemic forces of oppression they have been subject to.

Somatic Trauma Therapy encompasses a wide range of approaches to restore well-being. Each of these are based on the foundational principle that healing and integration happens through our bodies' primal language of movement, breath, and sensation. Additionally, body awareness helps us access an internal source of wisdom that guides the healing process and builds resilience.

Each of these therapeutic approaches use different techniques to support the unwinding of trauma. The intention of a unified approach is to embody the foundational principles of somatic trauma therapies and utilize the many tools and techniques to support ourselves and others.

At ESPOIR, our Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy Protocol combines many different trauma-focused therapy approaches including:

• Somatic Experiencing
• Hakomi Method
• Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
• Applied Polyvagal Theory
• Inner Relationship Focusing, 
• Dance/ Movement Therapy
• Somatic Stress Release™ 
• Internal Family Systems
• Somatic Attachment Theory
• and Embodied Social Transformation