An Invitation to Connect with Your Trauma Response to Heal

Your guardedness, your isolation, your anger outbursts - these are not to be judged by you to spiral into shame and start this cycle again. 

This is an opportunity for you to connect with yourself on a deeper level of care, nurture and compassionate curiosity to understand, release and heal.

Flight, fight, fawn, freeze and flop - the 5 Fs these days. 

Each of these trauma responses offer an opportunity to find and free yourself of judgmental patterns.

1.  Find:

• Curious compassion is in order, first and foremost, to find your inner child hurting inside.  

                        Let's look at an example together:  Perhaps you work in a high pressure work environment and currently manage five large projects with two coming due today.  Perhaps your sister was diagnosed with cancer two weeks ago and you have been on the phone with her after work so unable to work your usual 24/7.  Perhaps you have been getting up at 4am after going to sleep at midnight to be sure you have time to complete hoursehold chores, prepare breakfast for your son and be ready for the day before you wake your child up, take him to school and get yourself to work with a piece of toast still wrapped in a napkin in your purse. Perhaps, just as you walk in to work, your boss yells at you for being late with a deadline.  Your immediate response is, "Yes, yes, I am so sorry.  It is all my fault," as you lower your head and walk slowly out of the room with your boss continuing to yell at you as you leave.  You walk to your office, feel a tear on your cheek, wipe it away, and then say to yourself, "This is my fault.  What is wrong with me?  Just get it done," and put a smile on your face while you start focusing on completing your task.  Your boss arrives at your office one hour later and shouts, "It better be done" and you look up, still smiling and beam, "I just finished it.  I finished it for you."

                     Fawning includes not sharing your own sadness or anger, putting others needs in front of your own, and pleasing others.

Let's reflect together with curious compassion.

Perhaps, if you reflect back on this situation, you will discover a memory, a memory of when you were a child and your mother was running around the house, and quickly yelled at you, "Why did you not pick up the mess in your room?" not noticing that you had just entered your house with a scraped knee and a tear on your face.  In that moment, at the age of 5, you learned, on an embodied level, that the best reponse was to stuff your own feelings.  You remember back to this five year old child, to you as a little one, that after your mother said this to you, you wiped your tear away, smiled, and went to go clean your room.  You fawned for the first time.

In this reflection, you find, that you need healing first.  

2.  Free:

•      What does this mean now, as an adult?  You can begin to pause, to find, and then, seek to release to free yourself of trauma response patterns.

                       Begin to prepare for the next event.  There will be another situation when you will experience hurt.  This is life, and we all carry unresolved trauma response that can project onto others along the way.  We can't imagine or will this reality away, and the truth is that you have all you need already within to prepare for healing yourself in any situation.

With your reflection, you have found a memory.  With this deeper level of understanding and compassion for your inner child's unresolved pain, you can begin to release the internalized self-doubt and shame that snags you into a spiral.  What does this look like?

•                   Step 1:  Needs Checks:  When you wake in the morning, and before you go to sleep at night, check-in for your needs.  Your physical, emotional and soulful needs.  Begin to connect more with that inner child, the one whose needs have likely been put on the back burner for moments and years since you were five.  It is now time to get reacquainted with yourself on a deep knowing level.  You no longer need to fawn in the face of other people's needs if you have a more secure understanding of your own.

•                         Step 2:  Pause, seek, release:  The next time you begin to enter into a situation where you know that you will likely "fawn," for example, before you head into your workplace, begin to calm your fawn response.  Your fawn response is already simmering, already preparing to move into action.  Prior to heading into work, create a calming playlist to calm your autonomic nervous system (ANS), or listen to your funniest podcast, pet your dog, meditate, practice yoga or a mindfulness activity.  This gives your ANS a chance to enter your workplace calmer than usual, thus increasing your capacity to pause in the moment you will need to pause.  Next, if your boss walks toward you with her mouth open and ready to raise her voice, take a calming deep belly breath to pause and seek with one question, "What do I need for my healing right now?"

Release expectations of yourself to fawn and hide your emotions.  If your answer to your question, "what do I need for my healing right now?" is to turn around and walk out of your workplace, then do so.  If your answer is to speak, "I need to take care of myself and when you yell at me it is very hurtful" followed by you walking to your office and closing then door, then do so.  You can practice and play out these potential scenarios in advance if that will be helpful to you as well.  

Release that fawn response, put your emotional needs first to begin to heal your inner child, with compassion and care.  Once you begin to do so, you will feel lighter, you will seek to release your fawn response in even more situations.  Your emotional health and your embodied connection to your healing will grow.

Science Moment:

The Autonomic Nervous System, or ANS, works by processing our body’s response to incoming signals to prepare for action. If our cortisol (stress neurochemical) levels are high, our limbic system receives this information as threatening, thus launching our ANS into a response of fight, flee, freeze, fawn or flop.

By engaging in an activity that brings you present-moment joy and peace, you are actively calming your cortisol levels and Central Nervous System so your body can respond with calm and centeredness. Each time you practice this mindful activity, your grow your internal sense of safety.