Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 6: Four Fs

*Author Note* If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

The title is a trick subject because as you’ll see there are more than four Fs when it comes to trauma and the nervous system.  It is still called “the four Fs” in psychology though, and I bet you’ll know at least two of them.  The 4Fs are the main stress response types of mammals.  I think it’s important to understand each of them and to be able to recognize which ones you generally have used in traumatic situations and use currently during a trauma trigger reaction.  With this knowledge, you can begin to realize when you are going into a “4F response” and learn how to calm yourself during the event, as well as perhaps start to pinpoint what prompted it.  This is great inner wisdom to know about yourself, I find. 

In basic terms - inside your brain, you have an amygdala whose job it is to watch out for danger.  When a danger is perceived (whether real or not), the amygdala sends a message to the brain’s hypothalamus to start turning on the engine for the autonomic nervous system (the ANS).  The ANS then kicks your heart rate up, speeds up your breathing to get more oxygen to your muscles (or holds your breath in certain responses), dilates your pupils to let in light to see better, makes your blood thicker to help with clotting in case of injury, causes sweating due to the increased heart rate to try to cool the inflamed system, and a few more things. 

All this happens to save your life.  Full stop.  Your brain is trying to save you from what it thinks is danger.  Even if you recognize there isn’t danger, your logical mind will begin to slow the system once you tell it it’s safe, but you probably notice that you are still activated in your body.  It takes a bit to calm down all the areas that heightened in preparation for the danger.  If there is a real threat to your life, this ANS activation is what gets you to react quickly to jump back on the sidewalk if a car is coming at you, to slam on your brakes to avoid an accident, or to run away from a dog attacking you.

The main four Fs are called: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.  The fight or flight response is as old as human existence is.  Run away or duke it out is what our ancestors did forever.  In humans now, these responses have sometimes become normal ways of life in everyday circumstances to anything that may seem hard at all – not just fear of a true danger.  For trauma survivors, your brain has suffered enough pain and anguish that it tends to imagine that anything COULD be bad, dangerous, fearful, strange, unfamiliar, unsafe, or uncomfortable.  Your brain has adapted to learn to respond to things in these ways on a regular basis, sometimes no matter the reason.  Like we learned in Monday’s mindfulness practice – a trauma survivor may have something as small as a familiar dangerous smell (like the cologne of an abuser) that sets them into a 4F trigger response, and they can’t even comprehend why. 

For some examples, the fight response now could be asserting power over someone else or fighting inwardly with yourself rather than just wrestling a lion like our ancestors.  The flight response could be any type of escape used to avoid conflict or potential danger, not just to run away when you are in it.  This even translates to escaping into your own world of thoughts, or workaholic syndrome.  Freeze is a big one because, in the mammal world, this shutdown response - based on the circumstance - is to either try to trick the opponent into thinking you are dead or to literally start shutting down your body in preparation for death.  The freeze response may be dissociating regularly throughout the day or avoiding human contact altogether because you believe humans are innately dangerous to you.  In trauma, the freeze response looks like the body shutting down for death – the heart rate slows and breathing slows because it is bracing to die.  The fawn response is said to be the people pleasing response.  In a traumatic event, this is the child who is trying to calm the people around them as to avoid the danger that they sense is imminent.  In regular post traumatic events, this becomes a people pleasing perfection – which is a developed coping skill to try to keep everyone else happy, so they don’t become a safety risk.  It’s born out of fear. 

If you are a trauma survivor, you may have a hybrid of some of these tendencies.  You may try to placate an aggressive situation that reminds you of an abusive father that you used to be able to calm with fawning, but you may completely run away from the first signs of deep connection with a friend because your brain remembers the way your siblings would use your vulnerabilities to manipulate and psychologically abuse you. 

There is so much to say on this topic really. I tend to find anything related to human personality and characteristics fascinating.  If you are interested to know your 4F type but are struggling with the self-introspection to do so, I’d love to help you support you in learning more about these and getting to know your responses and reasons behind them. 

I also like to add more Fs to this conversation because I believe there are also stress responses like: Fix (akin to doing and helping), Function (just keeping on going in the system of your inner world), Feel (stopping and feeling the stress and healing it), Flow (finding rhythm in your chaos and moving through it), Follow (looking to authority for cues of how to respond), Flop (related to flight escape, turning inward to laziness and couch potato lifestyle to avoid life), Forget (repressed memories can lead to inability to even recall daily stressors), Force (just pushing on pretending that you aren’t stressed), Fun (seeking adventurous ways to release your activation), and Forgive (using the triggered moments to recognize where the activation came from to forgive your trauma for causing it). 

There is a lot to explore here and even more to discover about your inner world.  If you need help navigating that, shoot me a message on the “Connect” tab of my website, or check out the “Work with Me” tab to see if coaching is right for you.  Knowing your body and brain’s response choices is helpful in figuring out where your trauma response came from, unlocking ways to calm your activation, and finding some freedom from these triggers.    

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 5: Easy v. Simple

*Author Note* If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

I have been known to say that “nothing is easy, but everything can be simple”.  This isn’t always the case, of course, but this kind of blanket statement motto has been a constant reminder for myself in my own trauma recovery journey.  For me, because I believe in the almighty optimism of life, I just trust things the simpler they are.  It’s almost like when searching for an answer – I tend to have it fall into my lap.  However, then, when something comes too easy, I tend to be a skeptic!  Yet when something tangible and logical comes to me – like in a dream or something – it seems simple and feasible.  This could be an answer to a question, a confirmation I needed for something, the next right step that I’m searching for, the proper response, or just what I must do to move forward from a situation.  However – this comes after taking time to learn to self-trust and trust the universe.  If you aren’t there or you are bent toward pessimism – I’m not going to try to change your mind.  If you hear me out though, I will challenge you with a concept that may turn into a powerful inner resource on your healing path.  Either way is okay, but I’m going to share it because I believe it to be true - if only for my own life.

The way toward self-realization is realizing who you are; the way toward self-actualization is actually realizing who you are. 

The End…Just kidding.

Trauma survivors – all of us – would LOVE an easy solution, an easy cure.  We want the PTSD to stop, the emotional disconnection to end, the relational and intimacy issues to go away, the physical pain to be gone, etc. We know there really isn’t an easy one-step-cure-all to fix each of us.  What if it could be broken up into simpler steps though?  What if there was a perfect path for trauma recovery with YOUR name on it?  Different for each survivor; tailored to your specific trauma, responses, coping skills, and aftereffects.  Instead of asking how CAN you live your best life – what if we asked ourselves how SHOULD we live it?   What I mean by that is what if we had a felt sense of knowing in our gut that is our authentic self that is guiding us back to our truth.  

I don’t say this to sound woo-woo.  I’m not woo-woo; I’m just woo.  I believe that survivors have their own tools and keys buried inside them like a hidden treasure.  Trauma covered it up with earth, magma, rocks – like a volcano that covers everything it touches.  But – underneath is still preserved the tools that you were born with, the person you still are even before the trauma happened.  The purpose, the passion, the right path for your perfect life.  Now, those tools may be altered from the lava, ash, and soot.  They may work differently; they along with you have been changed forever.  That’s all true.  It’s also true that the coming back to yourself is the healing.  Then you realize, uncover, and rediscover (or maybe just discover) who you are.  This can’t be an easy task – but it can be simple if you trust that you are still in there.  If you are sure that you are, you are willing to do the work, set a plan, and show up for yourself over and over – the rest can be simpler.  Your self-actualization can then be freed to bubble over and do great things. 

Way back on Week One, I discussed some basics of this in episodes called: “Agency” and “Acne of the Soul” which I’ll link to in the show notes for reference.  Finding what works for you and what you actually need is part of a self-inquiry process. If you are struggling with sifting through this – I recommend asking your trauma recovery coach or therapist for help.  This is similar to Life Coaching – which I am passionate about in helping people find their life’s mission – but if you have a trauma history, this may be bringing up so many emotions that you may need extra support.  Feel free to send me a message and ask how I can help.   

Once you do this self-inquiry process, you’ll start having freedom to ask yourself questions about goals, careers, relationships.  You can search out answers to life’s big questions.  You’ll want to figure out how you want to live, where you want to live, who you love and why, how to be a good parent, how to break addictions and cycles, and so much more. 

And all that can be simpler because you’ll ask your inner knowing what SHOULD you do instead of what CAN you do.  For instance – if you asked yourself what you can do for a living … you could think of 10 things off the top of your head. You could pick off the option’s list by narrowing it down based on how long the commute is and how much the salary is.  You then decide on whatever one, and then go and get it.  Probably in a year or two with the right certification or degree or application process – in no time, you could be a (insert career here)! 

However, if you ask yourself deep down what SHOULD you do for a living … then, you have to simply be quiet, patient, still, and listen.  Aligning with your purpose deep in your inner being, you can actually find out what career bests suits your purpose.  Then – you won’t be given a random list to choose from, you’ll be given an answer.  

I do know from experience that this trauma recovery thing is really difficult at times, and it requires consistent, hard work.  Picking an easy road – like remaining where you are, not growing, allowing your family to keep manipulating you, not setting boundaries, losing yourself in everyone else, striving to be perfect, just staying where you’ve always been – this won’t take you to where you want to go.  Choosing the (albeit) harder recovery road– doing the work, being coached, figuring out who you are, getting help for your addiction, emotionally releasing all the junk, discovering your authentic self – will give you the long-term gains in the future to live your best life and walk in your healed, whole self. 

And that’s the end.  That’s the goal of this human life thing we do – finding ourselves and our purpose and then being our best self. On this week’s Full Circle Friday (week 5: Eat, Pray, Love), we’ll talk more about the idea of goals and goal setting (which is a big part of what I do as a trauma recovery coach).  If you are overwhelmed at the challenge of today, send me a message on the “Connect” tab on my website to let me know.  I promise to reach back with any help I can offer.   If you are feeling overwhelmed, there is a reason for that, and we can figure it out together. 

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 4: Developmental Trauma

*Author Note* If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

Our Wellspring Wednesday tries to offer a focus of the inner resources each human innately has as, I believe, they are in charge of their own healing and well-being.  Something special to note is that sometimes our conflict is actually within us, which is especially true for trauma survivors.  I find for myself and clients that we can’t necessarily heal from something that we don’t understand or identify with.  So if this word, developmental trauma, is new for you, consider this your introduction.  In learning more about this, I hope you are able to start finding ways to mend your inner wounds so that you can continue to flourish in your trauma recovery journey.  This is in no way a means to provide a diagnosis.  If you align with this type of trauma, please seek professional help from your trauma recovery coach, therapist, or even your regular doctor to seek the next steps in the process.

The first eight years of life is considered to be the formidable years.  Many believe these years are the shaping of your whole personality, roles, career objectives, likes and dislikes, social understanding, and moral judgments.  This is because our brains develop from the bottom up.  The lower parts of your brain are responsible for survival.  These are your “physiological needs” as Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs lists as: air, water, food, shelter, clothing.  The basic of all basic to survive outside the womb.   As you enter this world as a helpless infant, your brain is responsible to find you nourishment and shelter from the elements. 

As the brain grows, it is now looking for safety, connection, proper health (beyond just survival), friendship, intimacy.  This is right at the start of infancy when your brain is seeking out what and who is safe and forming the ability to trust.  In survivors of early trauma – this is often where problems begin to arise.  And because the brain is still developing toward its next stages to identity, self-esteem, eventually more and more independence, etc – thwarting the foundation of the lower brain’s functioning is devastating. 

What does this look like?  This could be an abused mother who is nursing her newborn while in a terrified state.  Her nervous energy is actually not just transferred into your baby’s milk supply via stress hormones, but also creating confusion in the infant as they sense the mother and watch her.  The brain is recording her fear and trying to decide if it should also be afraid.  Or perhaps this could look a mother nursing while angry at her own circumstances.  The baby again is feeding off of the mother who may be making the baby scared.  The baby may not drink as much so that the feeding can be over.  The baby may even not want to alert the mother to its hunger eventually when it is met with resistance and frustration most of times that it asks.  This the beginning of another topic called ‘Self-Abandonment’ for another day.

Another example would be a preschool age child who is sexually abused.  The brain is learning during this trauma.  The brain is always watching and holding everything it learns from the outside world.  The physical pain of this experience tells the brain to get away.  However, when you are small, you simply cannot get away.  So now your brain has to find another way to get through the torture.  It may learn to dissociate.  Maybe afterwards, the brain seeks something that used to be a comfort to the child like food to try to sooth the physical and emotional pain.  Also, at this early stage of learning, the child has not yet discovered any of its sexual or reproductive abilities.  The brain has now been introduced to something so foreign that it cannot comprehend what actually just happened. Yet somehow now has to learn to cope with this trauma and any further circumstances of it.   

While moving into the upper parts of the brain with something like Friendship, per se, in first grade, if a child is being assaulted at home, that is what the brain has learned that connection with others is – abusive.  The brain learns how to appease their classmates in order for the tribal skill of Connection to be earned.  This child is operating in fear and seems shy or weak – which then makes them a bigger target for bullies.  The child may be trying to make themselves very small and invisible so that they aren’t a target.  Unfortunately, this actually makes you more so.  *On a side note, childhood bullies are simply trauma victims themselves whose brain has learned to lash out for survival instead of lashing in.*    

I digress.  All of these parts are developing as we build on this rocky foundation to now - as executively functioning adults.  We are simply all moving around the globe using our brain’s knowledge from past experiences.  For you, if your infancy through childhood had physical abuse, neglect, anger or raging parents, often fear, alcoholism, drug abuse, sexual trauma, dysfunction, poverty, chronic stress, family lies and secrets, harsh or distressing environments, harm or perceived harm, racial inequality, food insecurity, witnessing violence, or any other atrocity – this is what we call Developmental Trauma.  This is often connected with our Attachment Style.  Attachment trauma is a wounding between the baby and their main caregivers.  This becomes a style of bridge that the survivor walks across to every relationship from there on forward.  Again, another topic, but highly interwoven.

“Ok Sara”, you may be saying, “This is so doom and gloom.  What’s the prognosis?”  I’m glad you asked because as you may guess, I believe healing from all of this is completely possible.  However, once you understand what developmental trauma is and determine whether you are a survivor of early-age abuse or neglect, this is where you start figuring out the steps to heal because now you know. 

This is just a very surface level introduction to Developmental Trauma, but if you are resonating with any other this, here’s some suggestions.  In the show notes, I’ve linked my website.  Click on the “Resource” tab and you’ll find some powerful written work on this topic.  There is a link to take an attachment style quiz, and more.  From there, I highly recommend finding some professional help.  If you are looking for a trauma recovery coach, this is one of my specialty topics, and I’d love to help you find your way healing your childhood wounds.  Remember that some of the wounds you experienced are not part of your conscious memories in the first years of life.  So this takes time to find, process, root out, and heal from.  If you feel like you align with some of the developmental trauma symptoms or discover an attachment trauma but can’t pinpoint what the issue was – I offer that it was in the first few “forgotten” years.  As you see, your brain still amazingly remembered all the things you “learned” from those years.  The healing comes now when you uncover what your brain learned and discover how to become well again from the inside out.  There are many resources available for your type of trauma.  Starting with your inner wellspring of resilience, it just takes you making that first step to find help.  Feel free to send me a message on the “Connect” tab on the website in the show notes below with any further questions about how to begin this journey.

I don’t just know you can do this; deep down, you know you can do this too.  That’s your survivorhood taking right there!  Be proud of yourself for coming this far!  

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 3: Compassion

*Author Note* If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

One of my most favorite self-practices now but that was the hardest to learn and utilize was compassion for myself and then for others.  The dictionary defines compassion as “sympathetic pity and concern for suffering and misfortune”.   As a trauma survivor, once you are able to fully recognize what sufferings and misfortune you have endured, you can start to realize how much compassion you deserve.  Once you can see your inner suffering, really truly see it, you will begin to understand how important this self-compassion thing is.  If you heard your own story of trauma and abuse but from a friend, you would immediately grasp how much compassion they are due.  You may even be able to look from the outside in at some of their life choices and coping mechanisms without judgment but more of “sympathetic pity”.  You may want to hug your friend, cry with them, feel angry at their abusers, and try to help your friend heal. 

You see, compassion is a motivating factor in how much care, grace, and love we give to others.  Self-compassion, when truly felt in our being, is a motivation to give ourselves allowance for failures and give ourselves kindness.  That is what is so powerful about this practice.  It also makes it the most difficult.  By sheer humanness, your abuse and trauma actually made you feel worse about yourself, especially from early childhood neglect.  Once a survivor has learned to turn on themselves as the “bad ones”, “deserving of abuse”, “worthless”, or “unlovable”, they are now locked in a cycle of self-hatred, feelings of unimportance, depression, self-harm, and suicidal ideation.  Even after the trauma and abuse has stopped, us survivors can be stuck wallowing in distaste for ourselves – which actually re-traumatizes our own self over and over.  One of the mental tolls of trauma is the ongoing self-degradation that we learn from our abusers.   

Having a felt sense of compassion (truly understanding what happened to you and allowing yourself to feel pity for yourself) can begin to repair all these fears, maladaptive coping skills, and mistrust of yourself.  Embodying self-compassion literally unclouds your judgment of yourself.  Imagine being in the grocery store, and you see a young woman rushing around paying more attention to her phone than the direction of her shopping cart.  She stops in the middle of the aisle to text, looks lost and disheveled, seemingly not seeing all the other people trying to go around her.  You’d be annoyed, most likely.  You’d want to tell her off as you pass her - “I’ve been watching you since produce – you are knocking things over and getting in everyone’s way!!”  However, if you REALLY watch her and actually take time to SEE her, maybe you’d realize the tears in her eyes.  Turns out that she is running around quickly to find some dinner for her children after leaving the hospital where her mother just passed away.  She’s stressed; she’s got family texting and calling her, yet she still has to get dinner for her small kids at home waiting.  Once you can know her pain and suffering, your whole perspective on her “annoying” behavior changes.  Now you find yourself feeling badly for even being frustrated with her, and now you want to help her or give her some encouragement or maybe a hug.  Maybe you want to pay for her groceries or tell her you know what’s she’s going through because you lost your mom too.   THAT’s why Compassion is transformative.  That shift in how you perceive someone who’s been through something – that’s where you remember your humanness and how you would feel if you were them.  Judgment ceases, and powerful concern, care, and love come rushing in. 

Now – apply that situation to YOURSELF - your traumatized, abused, neglected, hurting self.  Sit with that and feel it in your bones.  How can we learn to love ourselves?  Self-Compassion.  How can we be motivated to seek therapeutic help?  Self-Compassion.  How can we be gentler with ourselves as we heal?  Self-Compassion.  When will the cycle of self-hatred, self-blame, and unworthiness be broken?  When we learn self-compassion. 

Compassion will never give you a pass to play the victim or hurt someone else or act out of revenge.  Compassion will always lead with more love for yourself so you can love others even greater.  That’s why I say it’s my favorite personal practice and also was the hardest to fully embody.   It is SO easy to berate myself.  It is SO easy for that inner critic to flood to the surface and tell me I’m pointless, worthless, unnecessary, stupid, fat, and ugly (sometimes all that same time).  AND THEN … my learned self-compassion practice bubbles over ALL those voices, all that noise, and comes to my rescue to remind myself that I’m a work in progress, that I’m learning and growing, that I’m not JUST doing the best I can but that I’m doing a damn good job.  A compassionate wellspring inside you will flood out all the neglect, emotional abuse, and other learned mechanisms that are still trying to hold you down. 

It’s tough to learn fully, but it’s easy to start.  Try by filling your tank every morning with some compassion before you are annoyed with yourself or triggered or stressed out – like kind talk, affirmations, looking earnestly at yourself in the mirror, hugging yourself, doing one nice thing for yourself, closing your eyes envisioning warmth and love surround you.  You will then spend the day with a friend on your side helping you battle the forces of evil that are trying to be annoyed with you, hating you, making you feel like nothing.  If you can start with a morning routine of loving yourself in whatever way feels good to you, you can be on your way to fully embodied LOTS of chances to fill your self-compassion tank back up even throughout a difficult day.  It’s a practice that is for sure!  In fact, one of the first chances you’ll get to test this out is when you start noticing yourself being mean to yourself for failing at self-compassion! It’s then actually your trauma brain and your new learned compassion brain battling each other.  That’s a great sign because you are recognizing that you failed and yet the compassion is STILL coming to your rescue.   

Compassion will be a warrior to remind you how far you’ve come.  Compassion will forgive you when you fall back into an old coping skill or break your boundaries.  Compassion will ride in like a knight in shining armor with a fresh wind of understanding that (yes) while you have a ways more to go in your post-traumatic healing, (but yes) you have already come a very long way.   Compassion will quiet your inner critic and start replacing it with an inner cheerleader.  Compassion will allow you to re-father and re-mother yourself.  Compassion makes room for mistakes.  Compassion gets you to your trauma coach or therapy appointment so you can keep healing your inner child.   

Compassion takes hard work, but the reward is immeasurable.Self-loathing is also a lot of draining energy work but with no benefit at the end of that tunnel.Choose self-compassion.Learning to love yourself is one of your most powerful weapons on this healing journey.

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 2: Basics

*Author Note* If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

This may seem elementary to some, but it’s actually very common for trauma survivors to struggle with any type of self-care.  An especially important part of discovering, storing, and knowing how and when to use inner resources comes from having a good relationship to self-care.  So if you aren’t really sure what self-care looks like for you or you have no practice of self-care (yet), you aren’t alone.  When you don’t have a regular self-care practice, for trauma survivors, it may be because you don’t have a very strong relationship to your own mind, body, or spirit.  This is also very common, and nothing to berate yourself for. A big key for a lot of survivors when they are first stepping into their healing journey is to initially recognize that they don’t often check in with or feel like they have a communication with their thoughts, body, or inner spiritual world.  If that’s you today, maybe today is just your moment to realize that and acknowledge it.  If you are ready, you may want to explore some of the basics of getting into a healthy space with yourself before you go too big with self-care.  Remember, the self-care regimen and practice that you can eventually develop will look quite different from person to person.  It’s a very special, personal plan of things that feed your own being.  You can get great ideas and suggestions from others – but self-care is actually much more than a spa day or a bubble bath.  Although self-care CAN be those things, it’s not truly just about those things. 

However, a good place to start is always at the beginning. There are actually things that are needed for human survival before one can fully thrive.  If you are at that place today where you are noticing how little you hear from your heart and body, these basics will help you grow some of that inner intuition by being kind to yourself in a very “human needs” sort of way.  Some of these basics that I’m referring to would be cornerstones like sleeping, eating, grooming, hygiene, moving the body, and kindness to yourself while you learn. I’m not in any means saying it’s time to start a major diet or start working out 3 hours every day. I mean taking an inventory of your regular daily habits to see where you may have some deficits.  This is by no means either a way to judge yourself against some standard.  This inventory is to get really honest with yourself in your “activities of daily living”.  This term is used by many health professionals as a measure of fundamental things one needs for independent living. 

As a trauma survivor, for instance, your sleep might be problematic – from being unable to get to sleep or stay asleep, to full fledge insomnia, or major disruption like nightmares.  If you have used eating as a coping skill during abuse or stress, it may be helpful to just recognize this as an unhealthy mechanism that may be hindering your health in your mind, gut, body, and spirit.  This is just an inventory – and trust me when I say, it is extremely common for trauma survivors to have impediments in these basic fundamentals.  What you have been through has left you with maladaptive survival skills, overactive stressors, fear trapped in your body, and weights of epic proportions on your spirit.  Recognizing that something such as ‘personal hygiene being limited’ may unlock an eye opener to help you realize that your hygiene or basic grooming is representative of how you see yourself.  Then, maybe seeing that limited care for your outer body, this can clue you into how it mimics the way you haven’t cared for your inner being. 

Once you can begin to acknowledge some of these things in the ‘school of basics’, you can itemize out anything that you find to be lacking that you would really like to change.  It’s also okay if you understand your eating habits are a way that you control the stress in your life, for instance.  It may not be something you are fully ready to work through yet because without that coping skill you may not feel equipped to face the stress of your trauma.   With some of these functional skills, you honestly may want to work on your trauma healing much more before you are able to tackle something like your eating choices or body image.  For a lot of survivors, they need to address the mental health aspect of their trauma and find recovery before they can address sleep issues or physical exercise restrictions. This is all okay.  Today is just a challenge for you to examine what is working for you and what isn’t.  This type of investigation is helpful but may be triggering.  If you have a trauma recovery coach or a therapist or close friend, you may want to ask them to help you sort out a list of your daily habits and general self-care.  With my clients, we go through an Activities of Daily Living assignment once a month for three months to get a baseline of what a day in their life looks like. Then we check in with it periodically to see how things have been changing as they move forward down their trauma recovery path.  It may be daunting to write out “sleeps just 2 hours at a time” or “sleeps all day” – but trust me when I say there is NO judgment to this record.  It’s just the truth about your situation – with no story behind it.  It takes practice to recognize a need this great yet to have kindness and patience with yourself as you do it.  If your basic life health has taken drastic downturns due to your mental health or your trauma, please recognize that this activity of exploring these things is best done with a professional or close partner.  It’s helpful to have someone there to remind you that these truths about yourself are totally normal and totally okay.  Then, you’ll also have someone available to help you sort out what areas that you’d like to make changes and help you figure out how to go about starting to do that. 

The basics are an important stepping stone to finding genuine care for yourself.  Beyond the basics, it’s then safer to take a look at those more stereotypical self-care routines and practices that you read about in the magazines – which are truly more about what fills you with joy, what makes you feel alive, and stops the clock while you do it. In fact, in the care of a professional, I would even encourage you to start searching out those things that are “big S” Self-care for you even while you are still working on tackling the basics.  The more you grow in your healing, the quicker some of the basics will start to align to your preferred values. Always remember to give yourself a ton of grace with this type of topic.  You have been through things that others haven’t, and you owe a large appreciation to your body and coping skills for helping you survive here today.  Kindness is really the key here.  You can’t experience self-care without first learning to care for and about yourself.  Be patient.  You got this!

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 1: Acne of the Soul

*Author Note* If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

Fitting with the New Year, I want to talk about something that I think is an overarching topic when it comes to trauma recovery.  As a trauma recovery coach, the first thing (after establishing trust and safety) that I need to let my clients know is that I believe in their ability to direct their healing.  It’s important for Survivors to be given full permission to decide what works for them and what doesn’t.  That’s why in trauma recovery coaching I never give a diagnosis or any prescription of care to my clients.  It’s an exploration to find a regimen that works for them – a toolbox of coping skills, healthy techniques when triggered, and finding ways that makes them feel alive in their true self. 

Skin is the largest organ of the human body.  With all its cell and pores, it is truly our window to the outside world.  Yet, no one’s skin is alike. Everyone has a different type of skin, various allergies, special sensitivities, types of birthmarks and sunspots, many kinds of skin tones, varieties of medical conditions, each with our own skin problems and challenges.  What one person may completely swear by as a necessary lotion, potion, or ointment could quite literally kill someone else.  One human with one type of skin may need a face wash for their acne that destroys the pores of another human.  Some people swear by popping their zits; others admonish the practice vehemently.  Some skin seems to never scar while still others seem to scar on a regular basis for minor things.  The skin’s stretch and sag is all built into our DNA when we are born.  People from all over the world are nearly guaranteed to never find someone with the same skin complaints and tips or tricks as themselves.  The beauty product makers and media would like to have us think that their latest product is perfect for every skin type and that every person across the board NEEDS their product.  However, we know that’s simply not true.  For those of us a little older in life, we remember the fussing we’ve done over the span of teenage years through adulthood to find just the right way, right product, right amount, right frequency of lotions and potions to either clear up or cover up our acne.  There of course are those annoying people that never had acne, but everyone has SOMETHING about their skin that bothers them.  I think a lot of us can agree that in different seasons our skin needs different care based on the dryness of the air and the harshness of the weather.  Some shades of skin need tons of SPF all year round, while others never touch the stuff.  People with freckles have their own set of regimens, and yet others have actual medical conditions that prove to have their own specific medical needs. 

How foolish then for any of us, not living in anyone else’s skin, to tell someone else how to best care for their largest organ – the piece of their body that is the most forward facing to the world.  In that same thread, imagine having never walked in someone’s shoes or experienced their traumas or problems or relationships.  There would be no way for anyone else to decide what that person needs.  I know some people, like myself, who LOVE yoga.  And yet I haven’t yet been able to convert everyone because some people I know have tried it and hated it! Can you imagine? (Sarcasm) Some trauma survivors do extremely well to learn breathwork to calm themselves when triggered, while for others deep breathing actually makes things worse for them.  Many survivors have been further traumatized by non-trauma-informed therapists, and yet others (myself included) are blessed with a consistent healthy relationship to regular therapy.  The modalities of therapy anyways are so far and wide and deep; they are expanding with every passing year.  How can we even say that we have the best thing when maybe our personally best thing hasn’t even made it to market yet to be added to our therapeutic menu?

A trauma survivor knows themselves the best – even if the trauma has temporarily (even long term) created a chasm between their trauma identity and their true identity.  My job is to help them find their way back to their body and their authentic self so that they can trust their intuition again.  Then together we can come up with tools and coping mechanisms and trigger techniques and all the lotions and potions they want to put in their box to carry on as a trauma survivor in the real world.  I’m passionate about this because I want people to know that NO MATTER WHAT YOU’VE BEEN THROUGH that you are not broken.  Survivors don’t need MY fixing.  They just need inner healing back to themselves.  There are TONS of inner resources that they have had to use for surviving.  So if you’ve made it here to where you are reading or listening to this right now, you still have your inner wellspring f strength keeping you alive and trying to figure out how best to live in this world following the traumas you’ve been through.  I can help give you some ideas to try, recommendations of what has worked for me, and point you to some great places – but you, my friend, you know thyself.  Trust thyself.  I’d love to come along in the passenger seat and encourage you along your way to finding the perfect regimen for the acne of your soul – the right meds, the right therapeutic interventions, the right exercise and eating routine, the right relationships, and jobs, and all the lotions and potions for your soul to keep you as you walk diligently down your own recovery journey.