Trauma: How Your Body Keeps Score

When we go through a trauma or Kyle goes through a traumatic experience and some of those emotions are suppressed, then what happens is this has several effects. The first effect is that it makes our nervous system more stimulating, and we've talked about that. Then the second effect is that what happens is this also has an effect on our physical body. And more and more trauma specialists are realizing that the trauma is not only mental, but it gets stuck in our physical body. And when we talk about the physical body, we're talking about that nervous system becomes tighter. It's like we're holding on to tension in our physical bodies. And now there's a third impact. There's an energetic component where some of these emotions get trapped in our energy centers. And when we experience anger, where do we tend to feel it? We tend to feel it in our head. So if you have a lot of anger as a result of the trauma we've been through, we'll find that we are more prone to tightness around the head and headaches. Whereas if we're more fear prone, we're going to experience fear in the chest, in that energy center, and it's going to drop down into our stomach, which then causes the gut issues. So a lot of our gut issues, inflammation, gut dysbiosis, are actually due to these emotions getting stuck in our physical bodies, which then contributes to this. So that's how trauma not only affects our emotional state of being and our thoughts, but also impacts on our physical body in terms of tightness and tension and also these energy centers. And the more that Kyle represses these emotions and doesn't feel them, the more they get stuck in our energy centers, which then means we are more trigger happy that our emotions are more trigger happy. We're more than sensitive to people in situations around us because these emotions are just bubbling under the surface, ready to get triggered.