When Do You Experience Trauma?
Trauma isn’t just about the events we face; it’s about how our nervous system processes them. Think of your human nervous system like a river. Just as a river has a natural capacity to handle water, our bodies have a natural capacity to handle stress.
However, problems arise at two extremes:
- The Flood: If it rains too hard or too fast, the river overflows. Similarly, if we are exposed to too much stress too quickly, we breach our internal “riverbanks”.
- The Drought: A river can also suffer from neglect. Our systems struggle when there is a lack of stimulation, nourishment, or connection.
The Window of Tolerance and Chronic Stress
We all operate within a window of tolerance—a specific range where we can effectively manage our emotions and activity. Stress itself is a normal, healthy part of life, much like relaxation. Both are natural fluctuations of a healthy nervous system.
The issue isn’t the presence of stress, but the duration. When we stay in heightened states for too long, the system becomes overwhelmed and kicks into ancient biological survival modes:
- Fight or Flight
- Freeze or “Flop”
- Functional Freeze
These responses are an “intelligent design” meant to keep us safe during high-pressure moments, like a job interview. But for those with chronic illness or unresolved trauma, the system often gets “stuck”.
From Adaptive to Maladaptive: How the Body Remembers
If you were unable to defend yourself during a past threat—especially during childhood—your natural biological responses may have been “thwarted” or blocked.
To protect you, your body builds coping mechanisms. While these were adaptive and helpful at the time of the threat, they can become maladaptive over the years, leading to:
- Chronic pain
- Physical dysfunction
- Complex chronic disease
For example, I recently treated a patient whose migraines and neck pain were actually rooted in a childhood coping pattern where they didn’t feel safe to fight back. Their body was still repeating that “unfinished” protective response decades later.
A Mind-Body Approach to Healing Complex Illness
For 30 years, I have helped people on the verge of losing hope due to complex chronic conditions. By using a deep, intrinsic understanding of physiology, we can look at how these patterns affect the entire body—including the organs and deeper physiological systems.
True recovery happens when we treat the whole system:
- Nervous System Regulation: Moving from a survival state back to a regulated state.
- Emotional Processing: Addressing the underlying feelings of being unsafe.
- Physical Integration: Releasing the “stuck” responses held in the tissues and organs.
When we address the adaptive strategies that have become maladaptive, we gain a much richer, more effective way to overcome even the most challenging illnesses.
Watch the video on this on the Hope for your Healing YouTube channel – click here.
Find our more about how therapies at the Grange can help you recover from your chronic pain condition: https://thegrangehealth.com/trauma-physio/
