My region in Scotland is about 2,000 square miles and has a population across the region, which is mostly rural, of 155,000. We have a local women's group for the city (about 55,000) called, for some unknown reason, EGG. It has an astonishing 15,000 members where women ask for advice and recommendations about everything from health to their relatives to a good local plumber or physio. Increasingly, there are questions about mental health and trauma.
One woman recently said she had gone through various kinds of trauma over the years and now noticed that her body was constantly tense, unable to relax even when she tried. She had come across an idea that trauma was stored in the body. What were people's recommendations?
What are some of the key things I have learned?
Tense means defence
A tense body is "on guard". I have written about this before: external stimuli (eg a loud noise) get compared to patterns developed by the brain over time indicating threat or non threat. If threat then activate defences eg. fight/flight/freeze. If that is happening most of the time then the body will be in a regular state of alert. In trauma those stored patterns change. Stimuli that wouldn't normally cause a threat response, now do, even though, cognitively, you know there is no threat. This can be frustrating!
Those patterns can be changed by teaching *the body* that stimuli that are triggering defence mode are in fact usually safe.
Functional freeze vs freeze
A tense body that functions might be in "functional freeze" mode. This not the same as a body that is in freeze / collapse mode. That body barely functions: it stops thinking very far at all. It often doesn't move. It needs to be moved by others. It loses the ability to speak. In extreme distress it may wail or groan or make unspeakable noises that frighten others but strangely may both alarm and and feel protective to the sufferer. That state can be "unlocked" by strong medication.
In the absence of such medication, eventually, things like temperature or a bathroom urge may make that body move. But the longer freeze lasts, the more likely it is to return and to stay. It is not clear whether it feels life-sapping or life-preserving. Cognition is not necessarily operating at that level yet. Memory becomes vague. Decisions become difficult. Everything is shutting down.
Fatigue, fog, fear are all part of that state. The sufferer is completely vulnerable, has effectively no defences left towards threat. They depend on other people. If my husband had not been there, I doubt I would be here today though I prefer not to think what that pathway might have looked like.
Looping
The mind loops endless frightening circuits. It cannot comprehend the horror of what has happened nor why. A trauma response is essentially a comprehensible one to an incomprehensible situation.
Loss of identity
Astonishingly, one forgets who one is: perhaps not one's personal history, but preferences, past hobbies or enjoyments because "like" is a luxury and has been absent for so long. It is the oddest sensation: I could remember that I used to like tango, but it was like looking back on a foreign land in the deep past. You are a sort of zombie, trapped in a horrific present haunted by the threatening past and in fear of incoming attacks.
All of the above makes for a very bad phase.
Footnote re different trauma types
I think it is worth pointing out that not all trauma can be like this, in the sense of regular and real incoming attacks (as opposed to the memory of bad events). Singe instance traumas may be horrific beyond belief - natural disasters or car crashes where you lose people or homes. I suppose those people relive the trauma in their daily lives in grief, and shock and practical need and in the trauma psychologically haunting their present.
Relational trauma keeps going every day or week or month or however often they can get to you until they kill you, or you commit suicide or the perpetrator gets whatever they want and departs or, in very rare cases they are caught and prosecuted. The suicide rate of relational abuse victims is high - because you can't see a way out and it is such a hidden crime. Unlike a war veteran, a hurricane or car crash survivor relational abuse is insidious, often carefully hidden and designed to undermine the victim and deflect the authorities. End footnote.
It's trauma!
Eventually, you may realise or read, or be told, if you have contact with any informed humans, that this is trauma. Parts of your mind, can eventually or sometimes function, especially the parts that don't have to interact with the world. Those parts want to know what this is and thanks to the wonder of the internet, they can, endlessly. Research replaces the fear loops.
Getting "help"
One thinks about getting professional help - and puts it off, because people are alarming. But there is no improvement. Things may get worse. My husband took me to the GP when I had been suicidal for some months. We then tried to get help for several more months. The experiences made everything infinitely worse. The key takeaway is: the medical profession at least in Scotland, on the National Health won't help people in trauma because it's not worth it. It doesn't work. In a nutshell: you can't heal people while the bombs are incoming or they're stuck in a burning house.
You have to get out of the trauma, but public health won't help you with that. And for all the talk of "duty of care" and "safeguarding issues" they won't protect you even if they know what the cause is. You need to get the fire brigade or the police or whoever is supposed to help traumatised people and it really isn't clear who that is. Certainly, the police are well known for making things worse and are not really trauma experts. The public health service certainly won't protect you if the people responsible for safeguarding are causing the trauma.
Diagnosis
Here's a strange thing: medical professionals, mental health nurses, and senior mental health nurses will all tell you that yes, you are suffering from trauma, but also tell you that they can't tell you you're suffering from trauma because they don't have the right to diagnose you.
To get a diagnosis, you need to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist. If you see a psychiatrist, you could quite likely be medicated. Whether you see a psychologist or a psychiatrist can be the luck of the draw. It will also take, in nearly every case, months, unless you are admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
To avoid that, but in order to get some kind of help, you may be able to get an at-home support team visiting for a bit. This is not really helpful. They will just watch you and see how much of a risk you are to yourself or others and chat to you as though they are helping.A diagnosis may help you get seen by a psychologist and start treatment more quickly, but equally, especially in the public health system, it may be used against you as proof that you are all kinds of problematic things. At each stage you will be told that whatever is being done or decided is for your own good and to help you. You will probably not agree and that will not help you.
I did get as far as the being told it was all for my own good etc and it would help me but I did not get as far as being getting the official diagnosis because I could see the dangers.
If you go down the private route, some mental health professional, probably a mental health nurse, will do an assessment and decide you can have treatment for trauma, or they will call it some kind of stress damage. So you can start treatment for trauma without having been diagnosed. The wonders of the private system.
When the attacks stop.
Eventually, the attacks stop, or you think they might have stopped, at least temporarily. You are surprised to find you are still alive. But you are not the same. They used to call it shell-shock when applied to those who had experienced the unimaginable horrors of WW1. It accurately conveys a very different "after" state.
The body unfreezes, or stops going into freeze or doesn't freeze as often. It moves a bit, talks a bit more, stops making horrid noises. Mental health surveillance goes away as the agents look for more acute cases.
The body looks about. It remembers a former self but it is not that person. It tries to do things it did before and finds it can't because of trauma, triggers, fear, panic. It can't open doors, or mail or answer the phone, or go outside or whatever the individuals new limitations are. The attacks have stopped but now there is a legacy. The patterns stored in the brain that compare incoming data against themselves have changed. The world is now full of threats, in my case, mostly in the form of people, but loud noises and traditional threat stimulators also feature in exaggeration as they probably do for most trauma survivors.
Thing that stressed you before now might stress you immeasurably more. I now can't go to the GP alone because I can't speak to them anymore and have to wear all kinds of protective paraphernalia: goggles and head protectors and have an interpreter.
Trauma research continues, safely, away from humans.
Longer term help
This means therapy. It takes months, even years to get professional assistance from psychologists in the public system. You can end up with the wrong person, even if you get through. You also have a record that can be used against you. I tried private therapy. I was assessed and recommended EMDR ttherapy supposedly because, per the NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) guidelines used in the UK, it was for more complex trauma. I suspect that's a bit simplistic. Anyway, there were so many red flags over the therapist I was allocated to that I became practically mute by the second session. I've been reallocated to someone else.
Coming to understand how trauma works
Phases overlap.
It took me a while to learn that what "you" think and want is not necessarily what your nervous system requires. You want to bound about as you did before now that things appear safer, but you find you do not feel safe. You find you you cannot *think*, in that moment of fear, your nervous system out of defence. The body will instead respond to physical safety cues, a longer out breath than in-breath being among the most effective & well-known.
Layers
There are different types of trauma: developmental and single incident (car crash, natural disaster, operation), war. Relational abuse, systemic betrayal are probably very common kinds of trauma, they're just not as well studied. Trauma as a studied topic at is still in the cradle.
People can acquire layers or trauma all the way through life. Some are more damaging than others. There can be a cumulative effect, especially in the expression of anxiety, trust etc.
How much trauma affects you depends on your upbringing, your environment, your inherited qualities and your life experiences. If you've had a lot of instability, especially early instability and a lot of different environments with threat and without support that will have an adverse effect.
Support and protection, especially from expected directions matters a lot when it comes to trauma. If the support and protection from the expected quarter suddenly disappears or (as with child abuse ) turns into a danger or harm, this is apparently particularly damaging.
Trauma architecture
Another key thing I learned was that perpetrators setup, through strategies, fear loops in the target. They scare you into doing anything, almost breathing. So every time you try to do something you are second guessing whether it will be OK, what will be the consequences. This is an example of just one kind of fear loop. The genius of this, from the perpetrators point of view is that they don't need to be there to initiate every individual loop, they just need to scare you enough for the trigger to start.
Then they setup multiple triggers. Some examples for clarity.
- My perpetrator made sure that he spread lies to enough allies so that I was constantly wondering who he had got to, what he was saying, which enquiries to me about mum were genuine and which were sent by him as I discovered later, some were, or even were from someone playing a role in an attack by him (ditto); in short, it undermined who I could trust.
- He spread lies about me to mum's care home and controlled everything about it such that I cannot go to the care home because I have panic attacks.
- He took control of all mum's money, pocketed thousands and took away all information connected to managing her finances such that I feel - and am - disempowered in every financial aspect despite having joint power of attorney.
- He controlled mum's house with cameras, abused me via tha cameras and the phone, took away mum's possessions, took down a painting of me, to erase me and dominate the house such that trauma lives in that house now. I can no longer go there. Although officially I could try to have a say over what happens to mum's affairs, the whole edifice of intimidation, attacks lies, and erasure of me means that he knows I can't challenge him and that all of mum's asssets are effectively now his - and without oversight.
- Email, mail, phone calls, the front door. These were all mechanisms by which the attacks came in, so they all became charged and dangerous.
- He confiscated gifts and cards I sent to mum, part of the erasure plan so we only give her gifts in person now.
- I am afraid to take mum our anywhere except for a coffee while he regales his family with meals and treats at her expense. I am afraid of what he will say, might say, might accuse me of. A lot comes back to that. He was constantly dreaming up accusations out of thin air. The council does it so commonly it's practically a policy. It's got a name: deny and deflect. Even though, because of greed and an insatiable appetite for greed, control and domination he is the thief: of mum, her health, her dignity, her home, her relationships, our relationship, our time with her, her money, her money, possessions, assets; even though he has tried to undermine me and discredit me I am afraid of his judgement, of how he will portray me to others and what they will do to me. I know it makes no sense. But that is exactly what that kind of abuse does.
And actually, it does make sense because it's not abstract. Social services did listen to him. They didn't just fail to legally support me as a carer. They ignored over ten times, my concerns about the thousands disappearing from mum's account, her sudden disappearance to England, the large sums being spent in supermarkets when she was in full time care, depriving her of her hearing aids, being prevented from acting as Power of Attorney and on and on. Instead, they wrote a case full of his lies about me and found me, who had done everything to care for mum full time, at no cost, and to the absolute utmost of my ability, as all true friends saw, guilty of harming mum: because I didn't want our abuser to kidnap and abduct her again to another country.
These are just a few examples and in the random order in which they came to me. What I want to show is that whenever I think: gifts, cards, visit, money, house, mums family / friends, my agency / initiative, all of these things trigger avoidant patterns of behaviour because of how he weaponised them. He doesn't even need to know when they run. He doesn't need to think: oh, I need to sort a plan for when she next goes to the house. He just needs to set up a trigger: terrify her about the house so that every time I even think about going to the house, or anything connected to it, that trauma architecture starts running.
I have given concrete examples to make how trauma architecture is setup by a perpetrator but a lot of it is more abstract. A lot of it is to do with your own thought processes - the undermining of your agency, the destruction of confidence, of self-belief: the thought is always: but he will... or what if he... This is why we went to the police about coercive control. But some people can manage intimidation and domination and manipulation with levels of subtlety that organisations are light years away from seeing even if on a human level, some inside those organisations understand what may be happening. They just don't have the policies, procedures, resources, or frankly motivation to dig into anything so Machiavellian.
All that architecture runs on fear.
The perpetrator doesn't even need to think about how trauma works or how these strategies hang together or know the concept of trauma architecture. They just need a nose for it.
Dictators bring about their will in a similar way. While their tactics may differ, their strategies are broadly four fold and the same as happened here:
- seize power in all practical senses;
- removal of opposition through violence / intimidation / discrediting / erasure / or use proxies
- maintain the status quo as above
- self-aggrandizement through lies, alliances and propaganda.
Most recently, compare Trump's attack on Venezuela. Or Putin in Ukraine. Both used all these tactics.
There are big dictators and there are small ones but the difference in their evil is not in essence but in scale. At a macro and a micro level, the world really is run, as all good stories illustrate, on the basis of good vs evil.
Learning grounding techniques
This is trauma 101. It is the thing that stops panic attacks, shutdowns or makes them less likely, the stabilising stuff. I came across a reel by the Pocket Psychologist.a few weeks ago that contains a lot of these techniques, to stop spiralling anxiety and I've tried many of them. Yes, splashing water on your face helps. Most of these are about grounding your body in sensation or a physical stimulus which are the quickest ways to calm a panic spiral. The trouble is you don't often have spare socks or a lemon or water to hand when you need it, which is why I carry my stones in my pocket - they do that for me. They feel smooth and reassuring and warm, they have a pleasant sound, they clink and I have developed an autonomic habit of reaching for them when I think I might need to. That's how immediate and available that grounding has to be during a a stress or panic spike.
Meditation can help. Good sleep hygiene. Good diet, exercise, early natural light, safe social interactions, all the basics. Self care they call it and without those it's hard to get started.
Changing patterns, finding safety
Changing the effects of trauma is essentially about changing the patterns in your brain that trigger a defence response but, counter-intuitively, this happens through the body. I have found it is a process that first involves remembering what feeling safe means which then tends to gradually include a rediscovery of enjoyment, identity, creativity &, slowly, agency.
The ways I have sought safety have been, of necessity by intuition because counsellors, MH nurses & therapy have so far failed me. I find therapy driven primarily by money, status or process tend not to work for me whereas practitioners committed to what they do by other motivators are more likely to work.
Things that have helped me
Walking (the original bilateral stimulation) - so much, this summer that I now have neuromas: don't do that! Nature, reading, sewing, craft, something as simple as lighting a candle. Being more aware of your body. Being aware where and when you hold tension. Learning to scan your body and let go of that tension at will. Being aware that there may be places you don't yet know you hold tension.
Spending time with people & in situations that don't scare you is key. Or at least don't scare into panic/freeze/dissociation. It is important to have medication or grounding techniques immediately to hand for such times. These are the helpful things that I have come to latterly and actually they are quieter than the things I tried first, which, although hardly Iron Man events, were more stimulating.
Beyond that later list everything I have been drawn to has been somatic: Yoga, feldenkrais, Alexander technique, reflexology, singing, especially ritualistic or call-response singing like bullerengue; music, drumming, sound baths, "Innerdance", fire circles, dance, breathwork, clay for wellbeing. I think what works for the individual depends on the kind, extent & complexity of trauma and on the person.
Most of the things on that second list are no longer mainstream in western society.
The activities I attended that were valuable depended, in most cases as a pre-requisite, on spirit of the leader and my personal connection with them. Or at least the better that personal connection, the more valuable I felt the activity.
I also joined an app called NewCircle thinking it might be a safer way to start reconnecting with people than in the flesh. It wasn't what I expected. It's a paid companion service. Your subscription gets you tokens and these tokens diminish with every message you send. It's an odd idea. But since I'd got my tokens I thought I'd try it out. I chatted about inconsequentials at first but discovered my companion had been through his own trauma. I found male trauma can be unimaginably different to female trauma and requires completely different psychological healing albeith the tools can be similar. I have an idea now why trauma circles, especially alternative styles ones (implied by "circle") are very often split by sex. He was an intelligent and experienced guy from the US and had found that indigenous practices or ones rooted in those were what worked for him, particularly sweat lodges, which had elements of ritual and strong and trusted real community, and shadow work which he said was not a patch on traditional western therapy.
Labels and agency
I think it's useful, to understand how trauma is different from anxiety, how trauma works, the broad process of getting out of trauma. I heard it like this: something awful happened, but it isn't happening now.
Although your mind and body may have the scars of "something awful happened" your mind can understand the truth of that. The actual attacks are not happening now.
But it's your body that needs convincing. That is they key thing to understand in the recovery from trauma process. And that is the process of finding safety, and resdiscovering identity and agency, a lot of which comes from - happily - enjoyment, play and creativity. That's as much as I've larned on that front.
While understanding something about trauma is something your mind wants, and is interesting to "cognitive you" it doesn't actually need to know that to recover. I think it's sensible not to overdo the trauma label. Do you want to be wearing a trauma t-shirt or doing the nice things that help you get past it? That said, I think there is a part of trauma that needs processing. Writing and being witnessed is known to help with that. I was really not witnessed in any way despite trying and trying. People said over and over how awful, how unbelievable, how shocking, but no-one could help and that kind of witnessing is not enough. It is really important to me that a record is made of what happened and the effects of it, what I learned and eventually, why this kind of abuse isn't taken more seriously and how common is it? That's what these posts are about.
Things that did not help
Almost everywhere and everything official, organisational or process-driven failed me: the NHS, the police, obviously the council (co-perpetrators), the elected representatives, every charity and organisation (while sympathetic) for elder abuse or trauma survival, the office of the public guardian, lawyers. All the power lay in the hands of a few incompetent social workers though incompetence just doesn't explain it. This was wilful negligence on many fronts.
I didn't bother to complain to the council. For one thing I just didn't have the energy but I also knew that department is staffed by lawyers trying to deflect or contain your complaint, not solve it. If you don't complain to the council first, you can't go to the Ombudsman, who themselves (and like councils) use a strategy of "vexatious complainant" to dismiss people with complex, problematic or litigious complaints. Don't flail against or in the system. The only way to survive is to step away, step out of it. You cannot win.
The toll on the body
This is the phase I am in now. Trauma has expressed itself all through the body. Constant cortisol in the body caused by constant stress - trauma is a stress disorder - is known to by extremely bad for the body. Trauma increases massively damage in and disease to the body. Stress and cortisol are factors present in countless diseases.
At the time of the attacks the toll on the body showed in panic attacks, palpitations, shutdowns, dissociation, physical freeze, all the things I have described above and an at times completely crushing fatigue. As the attacks increased the shutdowns became daily or near daily and could last hours. Certainly, their legacy lasted hours and so time just became a state of damage from incoming attacks or trying to recover from them then the next one would come in causing more damage. It felt like bombs coming in constantly but you can't see them. They are completely real, but they are invisible and that is what makes psychological relational and institutional abuse so horrific.
The first thing that happened was I immediately started hearing a throbbing hum in my house, especially in my room at night that had no known physical source. No -one else could hear it and I have since discovered it happens now with extreme anxiety and a sense of threat. On Saturday we went to mum's house to get some special "dolls" an artist friend of mine had made for me that I had lent to mum and a drawing of me that my parents hung in the dining room for 35 years. All had been taken along with much of mum's. The drawing is surely binned, part of the "erasure". But the point is, I couldn't go in at all at first. I hadn't been in for months and I was overwhelmed by both the hiss of tinnitus and the deep hum which suddenly changed from throbbing to constant.
So, after mum was taken away from us for the second time I left the source and site of the attacks which was my home, my house and the city I live in, primarily to try and escape the hum. It didn't follow me. I was more or less okay for the next couple of months. I developed two neuromas in my foot but they might have happened anyway.
I returned home in September and began to get muscle pain in my right upper arm which got gradually worse. In October, I began to get unpleasant skin sensations especially in my face that sometimes seemed to be anxiety related. In mid October. I developed a near-constant tinnitus that appears to be threat based but which fades when I am absorbed in something, as now. In early December I got a sudden constant pain in my left upper arm muscle. I had physiotherapy tissue massage for the right arm through November and given limited stretching exercises but it did not help much. The arm weakened. I now have strengthening exercises for both arms which seem to be helping a bit more. Apparently the right arm is a tendonitis and it is likely the left arm is also. I have wondered if it has been caused by unconsciously hunching my shoulders protectively now that I am back at the scene of the attacks. Since I started the exercises I have pain in my neck but I don't know if there is a causal link or if whatever is causing the tendonitis is now causing the neck pain.
Since the abuse started I now have cysts on my spleen. I am awaiting a scan on the thyroid for medical flags being raised there.
Old issues, like pain under my ribs flare up.
Other things I had to accept / come to terms with
- That without my health I have nothing.
- That trauma severely damages health.
- That framing things defensively - even, especially in your own mind - as though you are still being attacked, as though you need to justify yourself, shows you are playing the perpetrators game rather than distancing yourself.
- That recovery is slow
- That therapy is not a panacea and can make things worse
- That what you work out works for you is probably going to be the best help you get
- That you may be able to limit the spill-over effects of trauma but you might never and probably shouldn't get back to "before". It's the difference between being able to open mail, walk down the street, go to a social event versus confront your perpetrator.
- That such evil can live, like a snake, inside your own family
- That people can harm even their own mothers and pretend to themselves they are not.
- That mum's birthdays and Christmases will continue to be appropriated.
- That I will not be able to go to mum's funeral because I cannot ever be near such evil again
- That everything can get worse than you think
- That I understand the concept of inherited sin now whereas I never thought that possible in any real way before. I cannnot believe that good can come from children borne of such joint evil and I want nothing to do with the little girls I made dresses and gingerbread houses for and that is sad but true because I cannot go through such horror again.
- That the perpetrator wants my death. His reasons are simple: more inheritance and "winning" because greed and winning have always been his prime motivators and being "last man standing" for him would be both winning and validation of rightness. In contrast, I simply want to feel safe.
- That he will try to bring about my death by my own hand through the trauma architecture described above or some new strategy (see: "things can always get worse than you think") or by causing enough trauma to cause enough physical damage because the ultimate skill is to appear to have nothing to do with anything: like Roper in The Night Manager, an obvious hero for him. I have seen how some people cannot hide their admiration for those who are "succesful" in their aims through strategy and a complete absence of moral brake. The world is run by people like that. The knowledge that someone has that aim and the malice, power, strategic skill and repeated proven success to effect it, is disturbing to say the least.
- That I ascribe a large part of how the perpetrator is to our father and the encouragement in all the wrong ways that he gave. I lament his passing. I acknowledge he had many good qualities. It surprises me that the same daughter that looked after him so assiduously, now nearly two years cannot forgive him for, despite his meticulous financial planning, for not foreseeing the monster encouraged and the mess he left behind him: or rather, everything he handed on a plate to that monster, knowing or unknowing.
- That people should make better plans for their deaths, that they should dispose of their belongings meticulously or get rid of them altogether; that joint power of attorney, acting independently, should not be permitted and that the same oversight that exists for guardianships should apply to POA because of the abuse of elderly and vulnerable relatives and the joint POAs that anecdotally and in the news appears to be both rife and uninvestigated; that legal power to end our own lives in wider circumstances and how those decisions, previously made, can apply in cases of suspected or diagnosed dementia cannot be introduced quickly enough. Mum-before-dementia hated the idea of a care home, would have hated to live with dementia. I strongly believe she would not have chosen to go on with life that way had there been an option and a legal process for that possibility. I certainly wouldn't choose that life. Mum let dad run her life or maybe she felt she didn't have a choice. She isn't aware of the consequences but had she, with all her capacity, been able to look into the future, I think she would have tried to prevent them. We have a responsibility that way.
How past trauma still pulls on the present
A lot of the more abstract ways the trauma architecture ran, without concrete triggers in the physical world, I have shut down, mentally. I don't want to revisit, to flip the on switch of that trauma architecture, to light up the building. I am trying to make what happened another life in another land. Obviously, with mum alive that is hard. We saw her the other day and as soon as she asks me about what I've been doing or what my plans are, I fall apart because what I hear is "What are we doing without you, mum?" and I see in horror anew, the desecration of what was done to mum and to me and to our relationship in the counterfactual "what we could be doing if only what was done to you and to me and to us had not been done"
Other cultures
In other cultures trauma healing is often not a solo activity; the community would take part. Or at least a healing representative of that community. The healing would be connected to nature, to plant medicine, possibly to ancestors, to ritual, to some kind of spirit or something beyond them. I think in some areas of "western" societies but certainly not in modern medicine there is, not before time, a recognition that these practices that developed over millennia may have had more to them than mere "savagery and superstition" and that it is we in the West with our illnesses and unhappiness our rapacious exploitation, greed, overconsumption and decadence who have lost our way
The future
Healing is not clearly linear. As you make gains in this new territory past threats are supposed to gradually loom less large. This I think has less to do with time and more to do with reclaiming agency and changing territory. It's not that you reclaim something from someone. At least I can't do that. Our abuser has so much power now. In contrast I have little strength nor energy, poor health, no confidence and no real support.
But triggers are supposed to become less so as the body (not the mind) experiences repeated safety, though in my experience, even of just trying to go to craft events in other cities, this process of trying to find safety can be far from wholly clear nor comfortable.
The primary drive in human beings, before food, sex or anything else is safety, which helps orientate towards the people/ activities right for each trauma survivor. We often shut down what feels genuinely safe to us in favour of eg social pressure, but without tuning back into what feels safe to us, how can healing happen?
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