When I think about the question, “What is trauma?” it becomes very personal to me. A textbook definition of trauma just doesn’t cut it for me. In my mid-twenties I began to ponder a lot of personal questions about my life that I could not answer. When I went looking for answers to these questions by reading psychology books and attending personal growth workshops I began to realize that my troubling personal questions had something to do with trauma. Here are some of troubling personal questions that confronted me before doing my trauma healing therapy work:
Why do I feel so much fear?
Why do I feel like an outsider even in my own family?
Why do I spend so much time living in my fantasies?
Why do I have so much anger?
Why did my father prepare me as a boy to take over the family farm while at the same time,taking his anger and rage out on me by whipping me with his belt?
Why did my mother turn to me as if I was her ‘little man’ and surrogate spouse when I was too young to understand what was going on?
Why did my parents fight about me at night when they thought I was sleeping?
Why were my siblings jealous of me for apparently no good reason?
Why do I hold back in my relationship with the woman I love?
Why does fear immobilize me rather than motivate me?
Why did I keep getting my heart broken by my girl friends in high school and college?
Why did I get so upset when my former wife made our daughter into her ‘little confident’ and our two sons into her ‘little heroes’?
Why am I so guarded and fearful about being used and exploited by others?
Why is the musculature in my body so tight, tense, and rigid?
When I began to explore and heal these troubling questions while engaged in personal psychotherapy, I learned that they all stemmed from my parents interference in my early childhood development. It was not that my parents intended to interfere with my natural, child-stage development and do damage that traumatized me. I am sure that they did not intend to damage me because I also felt their love for me. Rather, my childhood trauma was due to their child-rearing ignorance. They simply raised me the way they were raised, and the child rearing mistakes that they made with me had been made with them by their parents, and their grandparents before that, and so on. So, I have psychological and energetic trauma that runs very deep into my ancestral history as does almost everyone else in their family history.
Energetic Trauma Caused by Childhood Caretaker Interference
Beyond the physical and sexual abuse that some childhood caretakers heap upon their children which causes obvious trauma in them, there is another not so obvious type trauma that results when childhood caretakers interfere with their children’s natural growth and development. This is a profoundly hurtful and insidious kind of trauma, especially so as it causes a the lack of energy flow in their children’s bodies. This is the energetic trauma that their children suffer along with the emotional and psychological trauma that their caretakers’ interference causes.
Energy in the healthy human body moves freely in four different ways. It pulsates, vibrates, streams, and resonates. However when people, and especially children, suffer trauma, they automatically adopt energetic holding defenses that shut down their body by limiting the flow of energy in various organs and muscles. For example, when I began my own personal trauma therapy, I quickly learned that I breathed in a paradoxical way which is the opposite of full, unrestricted breathing—that is to say, when I took a breath in, my belly did not expand as it was designed to do but rather, contracted inward which limited my full respiratory pulsation thus reducing my energy level and making me tire more easily. I also learned as I did Energetic Grounding work that my leg muscles were very tight and tense which reduced vibratory energy movement in them and thus kept me in a less grounded stance. Furthermore, I learned that my back muscles were very rigid which prevented streaming from running up and down my spine thus weakening by back and limiting my ability to feel pleasure and joy in my body. And, finally I learned that my chest was very armored which tended to keep me from being fully in touch with my heart and limited my ability to resonate with empathy and compassion for others. My example of reduced physical energy flow due to the trauma I suffered from my parents’ interference in my childhood growth and development is par for the course for nearly all trauma victims who have not engaged in Energetic Trauma Healing Therapy.
However, body-centered, energetic therapists now have the knowledge and skills available to them to help trauma victims suffering from such childhood interference restructure the energetic holding defenses that they adopted as children and thus help them heal their trauma. The remainder of this handbook is devoted to setting forth a client-directed energetic approach to help trauma clients and their therapists do this.
