"Trauma is not what happens to you, but what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you." - Gabor Mate

What is Trauma?

Dr. Mate emphasizes that trauma is not simply a single event or experience, but rather the persistent psychological and physiological response to distressing or overwhelming situations. Trauma can manifest in various ways, and its effects can be long-lasting and pervasive.

Trauma is that very separation from the body and emotions. So, the real question is, “How did we get separated and how do we reconnect?” Because that’s our true nature—our true nature is to be connected. In fact, if that wasn’t our true nature, there would be no human beings.

The human or any species could not evolve without being grounded in their bodies. You couldn’t have a bunch of intellectuals walking around out there in the wild, wandering in an abstract sense about the meaning of life when there’s a sabre-toothed tiger lurking behind the next bush.

Individual and Collective Trauma:

"Trauma is not just an individual issue. It's a public health issue. It's a social issue." - Gabor Mate

Dr. Mate underscores that trauma can be both an individual and collective issue. Traumatic experiences can be passed down from one generation to another through epigenetic mechanisms and cultural norms. Trauma can also perpetuate systemic oppression and inequality, creating cycles of trauma that impact entire communities.

Effects of Trauma:

"Trauma is an injury, not a choice." - Gabor Mate

Dr. Mate stresses that the effects of trauma are not a choice, but rather a result of the injury that trauma inflicts on the mind and body. Trauma can have a profound impact on a person's emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and physical functioning. It can lead to symptoms such as anxiety, depression, dissociation, hypervigilance, and physical pain.

If you are interested in checking out the stress cycle and how it relates to burnout you can check it out here

Lets look at the different types of trauma responses that you could be experiencing without even knowing.

The Four F’s: Fight, Flight, Freeze, And Fawn

• The fight/flight response is an innate automatic response to danger in all human beings it is a natural process in the fight/flight/freeze/fawn response of a combination of these. The unique wiring of your nervous system will allow you to respond whichever way

• A fight response is triggered when a person suddenly responds aggressively to something threatening. A flight response is triggered when a person responds to a perceived threat by fleeing, or symbolically, by launching into hyperactivity.

• A freeze response is triggered when a person, realizing resistance is futile, gives up, numbs out into dissociation, and/or collapses as if accepting the inevitability of being hurt.

• A fawn response is triggered when a person responds to a threat by trying to be pleasing or helpful in order to appease and forestall an attacker. This fourfold response potential will heretofore be referred to as the 4Fs.

If you identified with one in particular skip ahead and read on. See if it sheds a little more light on you and how you are navigating your reality.

Fight Trauma Type

Fight types avoid any sense of real intimacy by unconsciously isolating themselves and pushing others away by alienation with their anger and controlling demands as a way to meet their unmet need of unconditional love. Someone stuck also avoids vulnerable relating because his past makes him believe that he will be attacked or abandoned as he was in childhood. This is why showing vulnerability often triggers painful emotional flashbacks. With having this unrealistic demand of the unmet childhood need it also cancels out the possibility of any real intimacy. It can seem narcissistic but fight types will convince themselves that there is nothing wrong with them and everyone else is the problem. Eventually showing up as super defensive reactions and responses in relationships and never feeling as if you can switch off and actually let your guard down. It’s this me against the world thing that can eventually lead to perpetuating your own burnout cycle.

Solution to Response

According to research fight types who are not true narcissists, however, benefit from understanding the costly price they pay for controlling others with intimidation, criticism, and sarcasm.

Learning to understand the downward spiral of power and alienation that comes from being over-controlling. It looks like this: excessive use of power triggers a fearful emotional withdrawal in the other, which makes the fight type feel even more abandoned. In turn, becomes more outraged and contemptuous, which then further distances the connection to the people close to you This once again increases the fight type’s rage and disgust, which then creates increasing distance and the withholding of warmth

Flight Trauma Type

The flight response intends to protect us from pain through escape. The flight response can make it challenging to slow down and rest; it might feel like you’re constantly rushing, worrying, or panicking. When the obsessive/compulsive flight type is not doing, she is worrying and planning about doing. Many flight types are so busy trying to stay one step ahead of their pain. You may feel like you have to micromanage everything to maintain control.

Solution to Response

The flight types that I have worked with are so busy trying to stay one step ahead of their pain that introspecting out loud in the therapy hour is the only time they find for self-examination. As a recovering flight type learning and understanding trauma helped me start the healing process and deconstruct my inner critic and her perfectionistic demands.

This is especially important with workaholics who often admit their addiction but secretly hold onto it as a badge of pride and superiority.

Freeze Trauma Type

The freeze response is closely related to tonic immobility, a state in which the body becomes motionless (like a possum). It’s also related to dissociation (disconnecting from one or more aspects of our experience). When it becomes chronic, it is also closely related to depression.

In terms of self-regulation, the freeze response arises when the charge in the sympathetic nervous system climbs too high (fight/flight isn’t working!) and thus the parasympathetic activates at the same time, effectively buffering the high SNS charge. People in freeze response look like they’re in a low-energy state, but it’s really a well-camouflaged high-energy state. It’s very costly to the body, especially when it sticks around longer than it needs to. And the nervous system can be slow to come out of this state.

Solution to Response

It can sometimes be seen in prey animals that are about to be killed. I have seen nature films of small animals in the jaws of a predator that show it letting go so thoroughly that its death appears to be painless. However, the opioid production that some freeze types have access to only takes the survivor so far before its numbing properties no longer function. Numbed out contentment then morphs into serious depression. This in turn can lead to addictive self-medicating with substances like alcohol, marijuana, and narcotics. Alternatively, the freeze type can gravitate toward ever-escalating regimens of antidepressants and other numbing agents.

Fawn Trauma Type

The fawn response, like all types of coping mechanisms, can be changed over time with awareness, commitment, and if needed be focused on intentional healing in a safe space like therapy or coaching. In co-dependent types of relationships these tendencies can slip in and people-pleasing, although it relieves the tension at the moment, is not a solution for a healthy and lasting relationship.

A little more on the fawn trauma response. When you don’t have access to (or your body doesn’t feel like it would be wise to move towards) fight, flight, or freeze - the fawn response shows up. In effect, you’re keeping what fees “threatening” close to you and ingratiating yourself towards it because it feels safer than fighting against it, running away from it, or going numb (remember, this is often underneath your level of consciousness so you’re not aware of it). This is most often learned in childhood, when we may be operating under the attachment dilemma of depending on our parents for survival, as well as love and connection, when they may not have had the healthiest ways of expressing these qualities or even know how to express them at all.

Solution to Response

Understanding = learning, and consuming Psycho-education about your parents’/caretakers' role in creating your fawn response has helped so much in my own journey and my clients. Many instantly grasped that their codependence comes from having been continuously attacked and shamed as selfish for even the most basic level of healthy self-interest. One client in her forties judged herself so harshly and called herself selfish so many times, seeing her needs as a burden until one night she had the epiphany that she was by far not selfish enough. T. Fawns need to understand that fear of being attacked for lapses in ingratiation causes them to forfeit their boundaries, rights and needs.

Understanding this dynamic is a necessary but not sufficient step in recovery. There are many codependents who realize their liking for self-abandonment, but who instantly forget everything they know when self-assertion is appropriate in their relationships. In early recovery, I became increasingly aware in new dating situations of how much I was over-eliciting my date. Eventually, I was struck by how little I had to say for myself, but I found it very difficult to break the pattern. To break free of their codependence, survivors must learn to stay present to the fear that triggers the self-abandonment of the fawn response.

Recovering requires us to become increasingly mindful of our automatic matching and mirroring behaviours. This helps us decrease the habit of reflexively agreeing with everything that anyone says. It is a great accomplishment to significantly reduce verbal matching. It is an even more powerful achievement to reduce inauthentic emotional mirroring.

The Fifth Trauma Response that No one is talking about.

Hybrid Trauma Type

I believe there is a little bit of all 4 F’s in all of us, even though we often default to 1 or 2 of them. Knowing how the complex combinations can affect you can be EXTREMELY helpful when you're moving through recovery and healing. There are, of course, few pure types. Moreover, each type is on a continuum that runs from mild to extreme.

Most trauma survivors are also hybrids of the 4F’s. Most of us have a backup response that we go to when our primary one is not effective enough. When neither of these work, we generally then have a third or fourth “go to” position.

CONCLUSION

I work with people everyday some going through the worst of things imaginable and others who just need a tiny permission slip to dance and revel in the pleasure of life. The difference between the two, just the willingness to receive love and believing that they are worthy of the peace they so deeply crave. Not knowing your trauma and understanding it, shoving it into a room and pretending it doesn't exist will only add to the distance between where you are and who you innately are. The healed self is not some -ha hippy woohoo concept out there that is available only for people who can meditate for 3 hours and do 5 embodiment rituals and 2 therapy sessions a week. It's fully available to you, right now. You are whole exactly as you are. I don’t believe in a radical cutthroat guns-blazing approach to this medicine of self. I believe in sitting and holding, witnessing and loving, if not loving learning to love and know every crevice of the aspects that make up the beautiful you that you are. Trauma, as we dive deeper into it will have you believing that you are small and stuck and separate. Like that life of peace and beauty and love is beyond this glass wall that is only available for everyone else and closed off to you until you have 'fixed' the parts the world said are broken. Manifesting your healed self or I like to see it as breathing love into every unmet need and unwanted part of you; requires you to know yourself, to trust yourself and this is why in this edition my focus is to Heal the Hidden.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read and digest this.

If you feel that you have tried the conventional approaches to navigating your experience and want something more intimate, practical and really being seen and heard, please reach out.

Sending you love and light.