Waves of Healing: The Ocean Within
Hello all,
Welcome back to our beautiful, messy, and chaotic shores. Thank you so much for taking your time and energy to surf these violent seas back here, to me. I hope you’re feeling healthy, happy, and peaceful this week. I, personally, have had a pretty self-teaching and realizing week. Since I am returning back to school on Monday to finish my degree in psychology, I have slowly begun submerging myself into the science of the mind… I have always been fascinated by the science of psychology for as long as I can remember… I’ve always seen psychology as the artwork of humans because of how we think, feel, and act all make up the mosaics of our social minds and body. However, one topic in psychology that has always fascinated me is the way trauma clings to our bodies. I remember back in 2017-2018 I was obsessed with this booked called, “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma”, written by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D. I mostly grew to be so enticed by this book because I was trying so desperately to understand my own life and the unresolved trauma I had that begun washing over my lands like a tsunami at the time… it became my literal bible. For this week’s journal, we’re going to be talking about a couple different ways trauma moves into our bodies unexpectedly and resides… almost like a bad tenant you can’t evict.
Trauma and the Brain: This topic fascinates me so much simply because a situation can completely change the way our brains function… they literally rewire themselves to help us survive a haze of darkness. If we look at the amygdala, it is known as the central part of the brain’s emotional response system. However, the amygdala also acts as our traumas “movie screen” to our emotions as it plays the main character of emotional memories and fear responses. Interestingly, people who deal with PTSD have a hyperactive amygdala which means that when presented with a situation, problem, fear, etc… that is trauma-reminded, they tend to act emotionally to the situation rather than logically. I actually have experienced this a few times throughout my life myself… there have been a couple times where I was presented with a situation or person that reminded me of something and in response, I acted out emotionally.
Physical Symptoms: If I’m being honest, I didn’t truly understand this topic until I very first started going to therapy about six years ago. At the time, I was very much living in a state of trauma… There was so much change going on around me, so many things that I was seeing and hearing with my own eyes and ears that truthfully, I probably shouldn’t have been seeing or hearing, and a lot of feelings that I had no clue how to process because they felt stronger than I did. So, because of this, I developed a few different physically symptoms in response to my body being in a constant state of alertness… like: chronic fatigue (I would literally come home from school and nap 4-6 hours a day and still sleep 8 hours a night), dissociative disorder (feeling separated from yourself and your emotions), and these migraines that are called “anxiety headaches”. After I began going to therapy and expressing these physically symptoms that had me feeling truly exhausted in life, I learned that they’re just apart of some trauma’s…
Body Memories: Sometimes, the body can hold onto memories of traumatic events, even if the mind doesn’t consciously remember them…. This topic didn’t really make sense to me because I used to think “how do you just forget trauma?” however, I personally learned last year that you don’t forget trauma… at all. Over a year ago I woke up on this specific day at the end of May, I opened my eyes and my anxiety immediately went from 0-100 so fast that I’ve truly never felt it like that in my life. I sat up in my bed and my entire body was just in pain, it literally felt like there were pins and needles everywhere on me. I thought to myself that maybe I was just sick, but I was even feeling emotions in a way that I still can’t put into words… I felt like an iceberg at the base of a volcano that had just erupted, like my feet were frozen to the ground, I couldn’t move away from the lava even though it was melting me severely. After calming myself as best as I could, it then hit me that I was living in the “one year mark” of a traumatic event that happened to me… I started therapy and attended for 4 months consistently after this.
Healing Through the Body: Trauma is a silent storm, leaving invisible scars that whisper battles fought within our soul… it is a shadow that lingers, a haunting echo of pain that transforms the very essence of our being… but we cannot let our trauma run our lives consistently. I wish I could say this is a lesson I wish I hadn’t learned the hard way, but as I navigate its depths, I find that there is a strange beauty in the resilience and growth it brings. For example, I’ve seen so many beautiful places, experienced so many beautiful events and people, learned (and learning) so many important life guides inside and outside of therapy, and have watched the colors of the sky change right in front of my eyes all while in the midst of healing through some of the deepest darkest fucked up bullshit. Overall, I am learning that when you begin healing through your body, you begin to unveil the true beauty of life, as each breath and heartbeat becomes a testament to the resilience and curiosity within…
Thank you so much for taking your time and energy to read this weeks journal, I appreciate it more than I could ever express and I appreciate you more than you could ever know…truthfully. Make sure to sail these beautiful, chaotic, deep blue seas back here next week for more.
With great love always,
M.H. John