How Trauma Lives in the Body and Why You Should Heal it in Your Nervous System
Episode 55
“How can we hear our intuition? How can we know what is good for our body if we can’t hear the signals that it is sending us? How can I be someone who honors and respects and listens to my body to know what’s in alignment for my life if I can’t read the signals that my body is sending me?” -Elisabeth Kristof, founder of Brain-Based Wellness and NeuroSomatic Intelligence Certification
This week we have an awesome mash-up episode for you that highlights the science that this podcast is rooted in. Season 2 Episodes 1 and 2- Why Heal your Nervous System and How Trauma Lives in the Body.
As always, we share our personal stories of how healing our nervous systems vastly improved our lives and made us experts of our nervous systems. We love being able to show you what’s possible for your life by sharing our experiences. As Jennifer says, “healing our nervous system is the underbelly of everything”.
If you’re someone who has a mindfulness practice or/and has been doing “inner work” for a long time, but never seems to make real progress then you have to hear Elisabeth’s story of childhood trauma, addiction and binge eating. She struggled for decades until she started using nervous system tools to create safety in her body.
Jennifer shares that creating safety in the body through the nervous system is vital, because we can’t heal when we don’t feel safe. Safety is at the heart of everything for the brain because its only job is to keep you alive.
Highlights:
- How little deficits in our nervous system over time fill up the stress bucket and create negative outputs.
- We define trauma and describe protective outputs like dissociation and the four reflexive F trauma responses (fight, flight, fawn, and freeze)
- Elisabeth shares how the pandemic led her to start the Brain-Based Wellness site.
- Detailed explanation of the nervous system- somatic, autonomic, sympathetic and parasympathetic
- Why you want to intentionally train your nervous system to be more resilient
- The importance of a daily nervous system regulation practice
- How unprocessed trauma affects us somatically and psychologically
- What happens in your brain and body when you’re triggered
- The effect that trauma has on your brain, physiology and vagus nerve
- How stimulating our brain with nervous system tools helps it become more active and function better
- Elisabeth describes dissociation in a way that you probably can relate well to
- Fascinating role the Vagus Nerve plays in your parasympathetic nervous system
- The damage that chronic stress causes in the Vagus Nerve and how it affects our ability to get out of sympathetic flight and freeze responses
The most important work we do with clients, privately and on the Brain-Based Wellness site, is teach them how to understand their own nervous system, how to assess and reassess it and develop their own unique toolkit of the stimulus needed to heal their unique deficits and to create the a positive response for them. It’s a truly empowering method of healing.
Listen to more episodes of Trauma Rewired HERE
