00:05 So what is trauma?

If we're trying to treat trauma, it's really important for us to

know what it is that we're trying to treat. Now there's all these different DSM
categorizations of it from a symptom perspective, but from an actual kind of
root cause perspective we need to have a different kind of understanding like
what causes it, how does it come into being? The way we like to think about
trauma in the smatic literature is this notion of too much, too fast, too soon.
When our body is overwhelmed by much stimulation, by too much external
distress, if it feels like it's coming at us too fast or if it comes at us before we're
prepared for it and our system is not ready for it, that creates a traumatic
situation. You know, our bodies are equipped, we handle certain kinds of
environments, certain kinds of stimulation, and if we're put into environments
that exceed our inherent organismic capacity, then our body just can't handle it.

01:11 It can't process it emotionally, mentally, physically. Something has to give. And
that sense of internal burying or breaking or giving is a traumatic response. In
addition to this, it's important to note that events in themselves are not
traumatic. It's our reactions and responses to them, our capacity to bear
through them or our inability to do so. That determines whether or not our
system is overloaded to separate people and put them in the same
environment, the same space, the same exact circumstance. One might be
traumatized and one might not. So it's not the event itself that's traumatizing.
It's the way that event interfaces with our experience that generates the trauma
within our nervous system. Okay. So one of the fundamental notions from early
on, Alexander Lowen Wilhelm Reich, was that trauma impacts somatic unity
that we, we, we come in with this possibility of having an, an organized, unified
body mind connection.

02:24 That we have this psychosomatic unity where our body and minds are
integrated with each other. That we feel things in our body, that we feel things
in our hearts and our thoughts and that there's this kind of congruent between
thoughts and feelings and somatic experience, right? However, in trauma that
psychosomatic unity, that psychological body-mind connection sometimes gets
torn asunder. That what trauma sometimes does is our body goes one way and
our mind and our thoughts and our feelings go another. And in that instance,
there's this a breach in psychosomatic unity in the body mind connection. You
hear about people who experience trauma and sometimes it feels like, yeah, I
wasn't in my body, I didn't feel my body, I didn't, I wasn't connected to my body
or my sense of my internal being. Okay. So that's an example of something that
trauma does. It fragments the individual, it causes these breaks in internal
coherence and that is the essence of the split in the body mind connection that
happens sometimes during trauma.

03:48 So there's neurological reasons for this. There is actual kind of a devolution of
the organizing aspects or of ourselves, those, those parts that are supposed to
organize, experience and form them into a coherent unity. Those break down
during a traumatic experience. And so all we left is fragmented experiences,
fragmented experiences, bodily sensations without a connected sense of
meaning or understanding images without a connection to affect or feeling. You
know, you hear people talk about trauma. Sometimes it's just like fragments
and fragments of fragments. A little image here, a little sound there, kind of,
there's no connection with meaning. There's no connection sometimes with
affect or it's just pure affect without any meaning associated with it. So
fragmentation is something that happens during trauma. The coherence of
experience breaks apart this this notion of dissociation and fragmentation.
Okay, so how do we, heal from trauma then, if this is what trauma is, how do we
heal from it? If trauma is about fragmentation, how do we defragment how do
we bring those parts of the self that have kind of fragmented out, back
together? And from a somatic perspective -- we do it one felt sense at a time,
kind of piece by piece. Body sensation by body sensation, just being friendly to
what, what emerges and just welcoming it back, welcoming back, letting it know
that it's safe.