How Does Trauma Show Up In Your Life?

Hey, beautiful souls.

Welcome to Reclaim Your Inner Rockstar, the space for high-capacity leaders who lead boldly yet often feel overstimulated beneath the surface. I'm Amy Robinson, aromapsychologist and cognitive coach with more than 25 years of helping others find emotional clarity through scent and science. My work began when I realized scent could instantly shift my thoughts and regulate my entire inner world. And I knew women like me needed access to that same power. Each week you will receive grounded tools and conversations that help you steady your nervous system and think more clearly. Are you ready to feel like yourself again? Then you're in the right place. Hey beautiful souls, welcome to Reclaim Your Inner Rockstar, the podcast where your healing transformation meets deep empowerment. I am here to show you how to break free from trauma, rediscover your strength, and step boldly into a life you deserve. This is where old stories lose their grip and the real you begins to rise. I am Amy Robinson, a certified transformational coach and aroma psychologist with over 20 years of experience helping hundreds of women reclaim their lives. My expertise is not just on paper. It's lived, it's embodied, and it's soul-tested. I combined powerful certifications with a deeply spiritual, non-traditional approach that gets results most women didn't even know they needed. This is healing that sticks. This is freedom that expands. Each week, we'll dive into the real, The honest truths of healing. The raw, the unfiltered emotions and tender messiness of breaking free. And the radiant, the light that returns when you finally remember who you are. So grab your favorite drink, take a deep breath, and settle in. Your comeback starts now. Are you ready? Let's rock.

Welcome. My name is Amy Robinson Robinson. I have experienced chronic and complex trauma most of my life. I was very much loved, but life still got in there and darkness still came my way. I had to learn how to manage it as an adult. And so that's what I help other adults to do. How does that help you? It supports you. You get an accountability partner as well as someone who understands trauma from the deepest of levels and can help you to have exercises and implementation tools so that you can learn how to not just cope, but to thrive in your life so you you can let the past be in the past, leave it where it is, and learn how to live beautifully in the present and in the future. Many new clients who come my way, many people who just start watching me, actually question whether they even have trauma, if that's something that comes up in their life. And the reason why is because trauma is such a heavy word, and automatically we think Oh, I don't have trauma because maybe I wasn't raped, or maybe I wasn't mugged, or maybe I wasn't near a war zone. So a lot of people disregard the idea of having trauma only because they don't understand how it affects them in their life and what it looks like for them. But I am here to let you know that all sorts of trauma, from even the lightest form to more complex or chronic trauma, those who my clients, I work with them intimately. Trauma is trauma and trauma affects each of us differently. And even if somebody was treated unfairly, even in the smallest situation, it could affect them very deeply. That trauma can really stick with them and cripple them in various forms. If you are here, it's because you're curious. About the idea of maybe I do have some type of trauma or I've dealt with some type of trauma in my life. So understand our subconscious is very aware of these things. We may not consciously be aware of them, but our subconscious is. If you're curious, it's because your subconscious is being triggered. I'm here to reassure you that if you have suffered the slightest bit of trauma in your life, whatever that may look like for you, it's valid. You are valid. And if it's affecting you, which trauma does affect us in many different ways, understand that you are not alone and that it was never your fault. Even if you were conditioned to think that it might have been your fault, it wasn't, because we never ask for trauma in our life. You'd never say, "Hey, I'm gonna wake up this morning and want a daily dose of trauma." Understand that you are valid and thank you for coming this way. How does trauma show up in your life? I think what I formulated is pretty good and not so heavy for you all to take in. Sometimes we think because we are in beautiful worldwide brotherhood and community that all our trauma is gone. That's not true. We are not immune to these things. Most of my clients who come in have some sort of even religious trauma of having to deal with the imperfections of others. And many of them have really suffered from it because even though we're in this incredibly gorgeous community worldwide and we serve an amazing amazingly wonderful God who's perfect and his organization is absolutely incredible and superior, people are imperfect and people come in with a lot of baggage. And some have a really hard time recognizing how to let it go because maybe they aren't aware of the fact that they came in with all this baggage. And so what happens with somebody who comes in with a a lot of baggage and they're not aware of it. Other people have to kind of deal with the baggage and move it aside. And so that makes it more challenging for us. But here's the thing, trauma can go from the slightest bit because here's the definition of trauma. Let me just go ahead and say it. Trauma is an event in our life that has made it so that we've lost control or we haven't felt unsafe in a situation. It could be somebody lashing out at us. It could be cyberbullying. It could be bullying at school when we were children. It could have been in the household, maybe dysfunction in the household that we grew up. Every single person on this earth has suffered some type of trauma because of imperfection. Some are able to manage it and be able to go out and live an amazing life and not have it weigh them down. But others, the ones that I work with, have had chronic complex trauma, trauma that has created this massive heavy weight in their life that has kept them where the weight of this manifests in many different ways. Chronic illness is one of them. Having ADHD, that is actually a sign of massive trauma in the brain. Those are the ones I work with, those who have chronic and complex trauma. I've really worked on every spectrum, maybe just wanting to let go a little bit, whatever that may be for them. Every one of my clients has seen transformation because the methods I use work. It helps them and supports them. Highly sensitive beings, and I'm talking primarily to my spiritual community, We serve a wonderful God. He is our refuge. He gives us everything that we need. He gives us tools to work through, to take the edge off. We appreciate that. And then there are those who grew up within the confines of this beautiful spiritual community who have seen less than perfect parents, or maybe has seen outright hypocrisy. And things like that, that forms its own level of trauma. And so dealing with those things can be really challenging. So what are some of the ways that this type of trauma, unprocessed, unresolved trauma manifests itself in our life and how does it affect us? How do you really know if you have unresolved trauma in your life? There's so many ways, but I did list a few here so that you can identify what some of those things are. Once we identify that we have this and acknowledge it to ourselves, we start to become aware. Our subconscious brain holds on to a lot of baggage, holds on to a lot of things. It picks things up. Our brain is constantly working and the goal of it is to keep us safe. And so if we're working in unresolved or unprocessed trauma, a lot of things are going to affect us. And so we live in this very limited world where we can only take so much and everything else is too heavy for us. Can you see that happening in your life? Do you see that starting to bubble forth in your life? Are you becoming aware that you have a lot of baggage that you want to let go of and release? It manifests itself physically in ways like chronic illness. ADHD is a manifestation of it, a physical manifestation of it. OCD, PTSD. These are things that are more recognized, but insomnia can be one of them. Do you have a hard time sleeping at night? Do you have dreams that wake you up in the middle of the night that are like nightmares? Do you suffer from that? It's easy to say, yeah, every one of us has something like that. If it's something that's become a pattern in our life, could that be a trigger that we need to start identifying. Here are some of the psychological effects to help you identify if you could be carrying unresolved or unprocessed trauma. Overwhelming fear. Every single one of my clients has such a crippling fear to step into new situations that they really just don't. They live a very limited life in many ways because that overwhelming fear manifests itself. Emotional numbing. Somebody who's always has to joke, always has to have a joke for everything. They're numb emotionally. Those who are overly sarcastic, everything has a sarcastic edge. They don't want to feel the pain. They don't want to feel the emotion. Excessive guilt can really weigh us down. If we have excessive guilt going on in our life, that's a sign of unresolved or unprocessed trauma. Some of the more recognized are depression, anxiety, chronic anxiety, social anxiety, unprocessed trauma, unresolved trauma. And here's the thing, this may be controversial to some. But I'm gonna say it because I've personally experienced it and I've seen it so many times. When we start to say, I have depression, I have chronic anxiety, recognizing and identifying these things is very important. But when we lean on that label of depression, anxiety, we are subconsciously telling our mind, I can't ever get out of this. And that's just not true. If you feel that you need help or support, that's what therapists are for, psychologists, psychiatrists, medical doctors are there for that. I am not one of them. I am a coach. I help you to move forward and step into your goals and implementation plans. Think of a football coach, somebody who tells you how to play the game so that you can win in life. Sometimes we cripple ourselves in thinking, I have depression, but really what depression is, it's an indication in our brain that we have a lower serotonin level and that we need to activate our brain to work so that we can increase our serotonin levels. And there's so many natural ways to be able to do that. As a certified aromatherapist, There are oils, the chemical components in oils that help you to increase serotonin levels in your brain, but our brain needs to be activated and used. Do we need sometimes chemical enhancers? Absolutely. Medication is there for that. Sometimes we rely too heavily on that. Have I personally had to be on an incredibly high dosage of antidepressants at one point in my life? Yes. However, I told myself at the very beginning, I'm not going to stay on these. They're going to help me get out of that pit. Then I'm going to work toward increasing my serotonin levels naturally and holistically and cognitively so that I can move myself into a more healed state. Because emotions are signals in our bodies that tell us how to work through certain things. We need to process them. Just like digesting food in our stomach, our brain, our thoughts, and our emotions need to be processed and digested so that we can get what we need from them and move on. If we're still in that stuck state of depression and anxiety, it's because it's unprocessed trauma that we're not identifying. I'm a big believer in that. It's controversial to some. I've done enough research to know that there is so much more to this than just relying on, I have depression, or I have anxiety. So when my clients start to work with me, we start to nip that thinking in the butt. Our minds will believe what we tell it. If that's what permeates our thinking, then guess what? We're going to become the things we think we are. So we have to change that thinking. And that's where I come in as a coach. I've had my clients be very upset with me at times, but when they start to see the results, they thank me. And that's what I'm here for. I had to really emphasize that because it's controversial. However, understand that your life doesn't have to stay stuck in that label. It's a big thing. Another psychological effect of unprocessed trauma is shame. We walk around in shame, always icky from the inside, very hard to trust others. That's why I understand when you say it takes time for you to trust me, to trust what I'm saying, to understand what I'm saying, to really step into supporting yourself, because that is a massive signal and a sign that there's unprocessed and unrecognized trauma there. So having a hard time trusting other people comes from emotional abuse and emotional neglect. Many of us block out our childhood, you know, and then we go on life and everything's good and everything Everything's great. And then something happens and we're like, what just happened? What was that? I thought it was one way, but I'm really not. And what's going on here? Right? Identify that. If that starts to come up in your life, become aware of it and allow it some room to be recognized. Another one, irritability, feeling uncomfortable all the time, always irritable. Panic attacks. This is a big one. Panic attacks, that is a massive sign of unprocessed and unresolved trauma. Here's the thing, this is what makes me different than a therapist. I'm not knocking therapists, I love therapists. There's many therapists that I suggest. The difference between a coach and a therapist is a therapist goes into your past and they're medical professionals that help you diagnose and help you treat these things. As a coach, I don't stay stuck in the past. When you come to me, you are ready to identify some degree where you are in your trauma. With panic attacks, I help you implement tools to alleviate them. I used to have panic attacks all the time. I was always in the hospital, and I thought it was a heart problem, but they were panic attacks. Conventional doctors never told me this. They never helped me. They'd say, "It's something going on with your heart. It's increasing in pumping really high, so you have really high blood pressure. Panic attacks from unprocessed trauma, from emotions that we're not dealing with that come up and go, "Ahh!" How do I deal with this? We have to learn to identify what those emotions are. Once we start to give them space in our life and learn what they are and how they manifest, we're able to cope with that, calm it down, and get rid of the panic attacks. Can panic attacks be alleviated? Yes, absolutely they can with the specific tools, and everybody has their way of coping in that way. So another one, repressed anger. This is a big one. Repressed anger comes in the form of being passive-aggressive or just crying a lot and not showing your anger. Repressed anger comes in autoimmune disorders and manifests itself in gut issues because it's being held in. I've had clients say to me, "Oh, I never get angry." That's a problem. If you have never identified the fact that you've been angry, that's a problem because anger is a very valid emotion that we need to give space for in a controlled setting. So if it's repressed, it's manifesting itself in other ways. We hold on to anger in our liver, comes out in many different physical ways. Anger is a big thing, and if we don't learn how to work through it in a way that's healthy and safe, then it will either make us physically very sick emotionally and mentally very sick. Another one, mood swings. Mood swings can come and go. Many of us who are transitioning into menopause, our mood swings can be really heavy. They can go up and down. And if we're not aware, if we have unprocessed or unresolved trauma and we're going into menopause, that can be a really scary process. You see the wisdom in understanding what our trauma looks like in our life and how it manifests itself, because it will come out one way or the other. And, you know, a lot of times we look at just the physical. Many people just look at the physical because to look at the physical all the time, we run to the doctor for everything and think, oh, we have to eat right. And I agree with that. How we eat is important. How we sleep is important. All of that is very important, but a lot of times people don't talk about the emotions, the thoughts that lead to our emotions, that lead to our behaviors. These things are not noticed as much. As a coach, I teach you how the brain works when it's been affected by trauma, and we work together to identify what your triggers are, what your thoughts are, reframing those, working through those so that you can release those negative thought patterns in your brain, because our thoughts create our behaviors, and then it creates physical, emotional, and mental illness in our bodies. Can you relate? Have you resonated with any of these? The important thing is to ask yourself, how does it show up in my life? Am I ready to step into shifting and changing that? And if I am, what support can I get? That is important for you to ask yourself. If this resonated for you and you would like to learn more, I encourage you to schedule a discovery call with me and we can have that time together. It's one-on-one and it helps you to see if you wanna work with me. I look forward to spending some time with you. Time with you. You can check out the link in my description to find different ways to work together. I can't wait to support you. Love you, beautiful soul. Till next time.