Is Trauma Causing Your Chronic Pain?

Things that we go through in life, whether they are “big T” traumas or micro traumas, are stored in the body. Over time, these stressors build up and start to manifest as pain.

Pay attention to your body...

Where do you hold the most tension? Do you often clench your jaw or raise your shoulders? Maybe you often brace your core or abdominal muscles. Do you struggle with poor posture and hunch your shoulders? All these tensions throughout our bodies are where we hold our stress.  Over time, your muscles fatigue, and things start to hurt.

Learning how to control and release these tensions can help release some of the stress in these areas, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. It takes constant body awareness and consistent practice to learn to relax. Relaxation is a skill!

Body awareness and relaxation techniques are just one way to release stress and trauma; it is more effective to heal or resolve the traumas by reprocessing the memory itself.  Therapies like CBT, EMDR, and IFS are a few popular treatments that help people process trauma. Research shows that healing traumatic memories contributes to a decrease in chronic pain in older individuals.

Traumatic experiences get stored in the part of the brain responsible for memories, the amygdala. Because trauma is associated with intense emotions, these are the most memorable experiences. These experiences, although they are in the past, continue to follow us throughout our lives. They influence how we interact with and perceive the environment around us. They influence what situations we avoid or gravitate towards, and they influence what people we have around us or invite into our lives.  This means these memories are constantly reactivated; sometimes we are aware of this, and sometimes we are not.  People with PTSD often re-live these experiences as they respond emotionally and physically the same way, even if the “trigger” seems unrelated to the trauma.

Photo credit: Welford.com

There are also energetic doorways or specific places in the body where traumatic life experiences mostly reside for everyone. For example, sexual traumas or issues with intimacy are often held in the gut and pelvic areas. Pain and discomfort in these areas are common for people who have had negative sexual experiences.  Sometimes these pains can be relieved by energy practices such as yoga and meditation.

How Does One Release Trauma from Their Body?

Many therapies and practices are used to help someone find peace with what has happened in the past and aid in relaxation. I will go over a few:

Somatic Experiencing: This therapy is focused on enhancing body awareness and increasing safety around feeling and experiencing certain body sensations. Somatic experiencing allows the client to release trauma by helping the client feel more comfortable in their bodies, understand their triggers, and gives them the tools to have more control over their physical responses.

EMDR: Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing is an 8-phase treatment model that helps the client recall memories related to a presenting problem. The goal is to desensitize physical and emotional responses to the memories, thus freeing the client from the mental and physical burdens of their traumas.

IFS: Internal Family Systems is a treatment approach that focuses on “parts” or different aspects of one’s personality that may be causing problems for the client (i.e., excessive eating, smoking, drinking, anger). The goal is for the client to understand and “unburden” these parts from their trauma so they can work better in their “system”.

Trauma-Informed Yoga: Yoga practice that is focused on creating a safe and supportive environment that allows the client to connect with their bodies and emotions.

Mindfulness/Meditation: Meditation serves as a way for clients to create calmness and safety in their minds and bodies. It increases a person’s ability to feel in control of their mental and physical responses. There are many ways to meditate including guided meditation and visualization.

Spiritual practices: Reiki focuses relieving negative energy from the chakras and can decrease pain. Belief in god and a higher power can give hope and help a person making meaning of what has happened in the past which can help them find peace.