What Happens When Trauma Leaves The Body

Can we talk about how last night I taught yoga online in the granniest of granny panties, and IDGAF?

Like, so granny, the kind hospitals give you after you have a baby and leave the hospital, that go all the way from the place where your ass meets the top of the back of your upper thigh to fully grazing the beginning of your thoracic vertebrae?

Yes, THAT GRANNY.

And when I was changing into yoga clothes to teach how it was a decision I made to not change, not into a thong, not even into something less likely to peek out from the back of my activewear, because I am finally realizing what the feeling the world is experiencing is, and I need comfort wherever I can get it?

It’s grief. We are in mourning.

Whether or not you agree with the way the U.S. culture works, and I can assure you that I do not agree with most of it, it is the water we have been swimming in for a very long time, and the tank has sprung a leak.

Following this revelation (I started this particular post around 8 pm Sunday night), I had a massive anxiety attack, the worst in awhile, way back to the days when I used to black out in the middle of them.

This anxiety attack had an additional feature: uncontrollable shaking. I have been known to shiver as an anxiety attack recedes, but this shaking was like having a seizure, only I was fully aware and able to stop long enough to go throw up.

It was so bad, I had to hold my jaw open to prevent me from smashing my front teeth in as they gnashed together (they have short roots, I am informed, and it will only take the slightest nudge to knock them out).

Triggered, is the term, I think. I am triggered.

This shaking may have been trauma, held in my body for so long, trying to make its way out. The linked article (which I highly, highly suggest you read) explores the idea that our brain responds in a very orderly way to disorderly occurrences (like, oh, say, the death of your husband or the stressful unknowns of a pandemic). The reptilian brain kicks into gear when confronted with a stressor of any kind. This keeps us alive when we need to respond, as in when tigers are chasing us.

But what if the tigers are constant – real or imagined – and the rest of the brain is not able to spring into action to process the emotional response or to allow the brain to understand what occurred (the cognitive processing of an event)?

We are literally unable to “shake off” the trauma and our bodies remain primed for action. Conventionally, this is referred to post-traumatic stress disorder.

I have been collecting trauma in and of my body for an entire lifetime.

Being a learning robot and making an effort over a decade to recover and manage, I have been doing all of the right things – going to nature, eating well, attempting to meditate, (finally) managing my access to news and social media – so it is especially disheartening to have this occur.

I have no answers. I don’t know why.

This is not a blog for that.

We are living through trauma. We are surfing an ocean of grief that may or may not have anything to do with losing the life we have now but may instead be a compendium of a lifetime of damage in the body, damage that comes from just getting by, stuffing things down, insisting we are ok.

I am not ok. I am better than some, but even saying that invalidates the sentence before.

I am not ok.

But I am learning. I am here. I am working towards letting go. I am reaffirming what is important. I am developing tools within myself.

I feel at my weakest. I feel I am the strongest I have ever been.

We are all of us swimming in contradiction, far away from land.

For ourselves and for each other: let us be kind and patient. Let us be compassionate. Let us move slowly and lovingly and remember always to breathe.

I am trying.