Trauma is not an event(s) that happened, it is the energy from that event that stays immobilized in our bodies—what we often think of as unresolved emotional upset. This left-over energy continues to be active in our lives long after the event and is lived out in our daily lives and felt in our bodies as stress, illness, panic, anxiety, pain, etc. One of my somatic teachers, Kathy Kain, calls this “living under the influence of survival physiology.”  Some people have an experience of full-blown PTSD, others feel that something is just not right—there is a range of experience.

This energy we call trauma pushes at us, causing difficulty in our relationships, preventing a deep connection to ourselves and our inner life, creating out-of-balance reactions to life events, and making our perceptions unreliable. Ultimately, it prevents us from enjoying life. 

This happens because our nervous system is built to keep us safe, to flee when there is danger, to fight when appropriate, and to freeze when that is the way we can survive. The problem is those energies don’t get released in humans (like they do in animals) when the threat is over. Over time, this causes anxiety, mood changes, behaviour changes, depression,  fear, loss of sense of self, etc.  But the good news is that the body wants to release this survival energy and I can help you do that.