Trauma happens when the nervous system gets overwhelmed by too much stimulation or deprivation early on, and kids can't process it so it stays locked in the body. It shapes how you avoid threats later, but it can also become a portal to healing, especially when triggers show up in adult relationships.
Trauma is actually very simple. It's not the big bad wolf, but it's when the nervous system is simply overwhelmed. It's when we experience too much too soon, or we experience too little for too long, and that dramatically affects our nervous system. We believe that trauma exclusively happens in childhood, and we carry those wounds into adulthood. Trauma is something that every single one of us experiences, all 8 billion of us. We're walking around with unprocessed wounds.
When we are evolving as young little children, we don't quite have the emotional flexibility or capacity to manage that level of overwhelm, and it gets stuck in the tissues and begins to then inform the nervous system and the brain of different choices and different actions to take so that we don't find ourselves in similar experiences or threats of overwhelm in the future. Trauma's not bad. Trauma's really amazing. I feel like it's the portal to a super free, peaceful, loving life. Often when we show up in our adult relationships, that's when the trauma begins to come forward as triggers.
