Understanding Trauma and Its Impact
Trauma doesn't just affect the mind; it impacts the whole person. It can shape your relationships, your mental health, and your ability to cope with daily life. I provide compassionate and personalized strategies, helping you find the resilience to navigate your journey toward healing.
"Approximately 90% of what we think or perceive about our environment is based on past experiences."
Cozolino, 2016
Trauma is NOT what happens to you (event). It is what happens inside (internalized experience) you because of anything, too much, too soon, too fast, too long, too little or not at all for the ordinary human adaptation of our nervous system to handle.
Often times society and even culture led us to believe that trauma is an event. A car accident, abuse, witnessing death or other life altering events. While these events can impact us, they are not what determines if an event is deemed traumatic. How our bodies respond to these and other events, determines if we store them as traumatic. Our nervous systems capacity to navigate the experience, how our brains store the event, often fragmented.
There are two types of memories.
Explicit Memories-Have the ability to be verbalized and they tell a story, have images, and emotions.
Implicit Memories-Are neither verbal nor stored as images. Often there the maps of our earliest relationships and show up psychophysiological as sensations, emotions, motor patterns and arousal.
Implicit memories are often times the memories that impact our day to day challenges. Unexplained anxiety, anger or even lack of feeling. Clients often describe "feeling off".