The Distortions of Trauma & How Stress Gets Stuck in Your Soma (aka Your ‘Body’ and Your ‘Mind’)
A big part of what I do revolves around the ways in which stuck stress and stored trauma distort a person’s reality – in their posture and movements, as well as in their thoughts and feelings. These stuck patterns and responses distort your reality, and cause you all sorts of emotional and physical problems and pain.
Coming to see and acknowledge these ‘distortions’ allows true, lasting healing to take place.
But what exactly are these distortions, and why do they persist so long after danger has passed?
When Protection Becomes a Problem
Automatic responses to threats whether real or imagined are NOT flaws in your character or nervous system. Rather, they are protective mechanisms trying to keep you safe, and they will be shaped by your past experiences of stress and trauma.
Sometimes, those experiences of stress or trauma become ‘stuck’ in your neuromuscular and nervous systems, and so cause automatic, unconscious responses to situations that are not always the most helpful for you, and can cause you problems and pain.
And that’s the key: It’s getting STUCK in automatic or habitual responses that’s the problem – not their existence in the first place. These responses serve a valuable purpose when they show up at the right times.
It’s only when they become a habit – when a stuck pattern is your only ‘go-to’ response to even the slightest perceived threat – that needs changing.
Distorted Thinking: Keeping You on High Alert
Distorted thinking refers to thoughts that come up automatically in response to a threat, including stressful situations and emotions. But it also refers to automatic responses that arise even when the threat is imagined, or when the stress you’re dealing with just is not that big of a deal, and you know (at a conscious, cognitive level) that this is the case.
What might distorted thinking look like in everyday life?
You have a date coming up. And instead of looking forward to it, your main thought is: “I’ll mess this up, they won’t like me, and we’ll never see each other again. I’ll never meet anyone else. I should cancel.”
You’re at a restaurant with a friend, and a group of people at another table are laughing. You think: “They are laughing at me, at how awful I look and wondering what this person is doing with someone like me. I need to leave as soon as possible.”
You’ve been trying to get in touch with a friend, but they’re not responding. It’s been a few days and you think: “What did I do to upset them? I must have done something wrong, or maybe they just realized how boring I am and don’t want to be my friend.”
The fundamental problem with stuck, habituated responses like these?
They prevent you from responding to your environment, your life, as it actually is.
Instead, you respond to a preconceived, ‘hardwired’ version of your environment and your life – a version often stuck in the past, when you were in real danger threat, or sensing a genuine threat.
Staying in the past, responding ‘as if’ we are still in danger, is what causes most discomfort and pain. It limits your capacity to experience safety and connection in the present reality around and within you, even when you are safe and with others who are safe to connect with.
Beyond Thoughts: Your Muscles Hold the Pattern
This problem with habits always also shows up in your neuromuscular system. It’s not just your autonomic nervous system that’s distorted by getting stuck in habituated response. Your muscles also get stuck in patterns of tension that reflect and enable distorted thinking and feeling.
This happens the other way around, too – leading to a vicious cycle of physical and emotional pain, where habituated thoughts and muscle tension patterns feed on each other and make it even harder to create change.
For example, if you identify that the response “They are laughing at me, at how awful I look” is not about the real situation you’re in now but about a learned pattern from before, that’s helpful awareness. And if you also allow yourself to sense this as an embodied state, this too is helpful – and can start you on the path to healing. But most often, this awareness and sensing alone is not enough to create real, lasting change.
If the pattern has become truly embodied in your neuromuscular system, then simply ‘sensing’ it is not enough to keep it away. It’s a learned pattern, and it will return if you don’t educate your neuromuscular system not to revert to it time and time again.
Why Does This Happen?
A frustrating truth: Your nervous system, your brain, is interested in survival more than accuracy and efficiency!
If you’ve experienced trauma, as well as ongoing stresses (physical and/or emotional), this may have left your central nervous system on high alert – so instead of neutrally scanning the environment, it’s scanning from a state of hypervigilance, looking for threats even when none exist, absolutely sure they’re out there if only you look hard enough.
This, again, is protective – and that’s okay. But when this becomes stuck and habituated, when hypervigilance hijacks your relationship with the real environment around you? This is what creates inaccurate, ‘old’ stories about our environment and ourselves.
This leaves you constantly ready for impact... so, you might be:
Stuck in orienting (in a negative way, i.e. stuck in hypervigilant mode)
Braced and in the type of ‘freeze’ that means you’re ready to run or to fight at all times (even when you don’t need to(
Stuck in muscular patterns of fleeing or fighting (creating tension and pain)
Or you may have gone past all that and be stuck in another type of freeze – the collapse, the ‘playing dead,’ where immobility feels like the only option because nothing else has worked
In any of these stuck states, it’s as if you’re constantly ready for the other shoe to drop – you’re bracing for an impact that your nervous system (including your neuromuscular system) has already decided must be coming.
This keeps you stuck in survival mode – incapable of ‘rest and digest’, let alone social engagement.
The Origins of Distortion
There are lots of places in which these sorts of distortion get started in your soma.
You might have been in a car accident and not been able to do anything about it. Your nervous system may still be ‘stuck’ there, trying to escape.
Perhaps you have been under enormous pressure at work for months or even years, worried about losing your job if you don’t work 60 hours a week and every weekend.
As a child, or in an abusive relationship, you may have gotten way too used to reading subtle cues of real threats to your safety – and, so, your system stays that way. Reading ‘too much’ into your interactions with all people, even those with whom you ‘know’ (cognitively) that you’re safe.
It can also show up as rigidity – in your physical body, and also in your self-talk or self-expectations. You may tell yourself you ‘should’ be a certain way, or ‘must’ do (or avoid doing) certain things. This can lead to unnecessary shame, guilt, and unwillingness to try new things or to please yourself.
Again, these are all protective habits resurfacing time and time again, even when they’re not needed. So recognizing them for what they are – attempts at self-protection, to avoid harm, conflict, or even ‘just’ rejection – can really help when trying to address them. They’re not ‘bad,’ they’re just too much – over-protective (as a response to trauma that was, also, too much).
The Binary Nature of Trauma Responses
All of this most often shows up as binary (or ‘black or white’) experiences: if something is not 100% ‘good’ and safe, it will be experienced by your hypervigilant system as ‘bad’ and unsafe, and vice versa. (This makes you question your own judgement at times, because your judgement is in fact not reliable…)
Part of healing looks like finding nuance – the spaces in between, the ‘grey areas.’ Instead of “I can’t move,” you might discover “I can’t move that part of me easily, although part of it feels okay right now...”
Another part of healing is taking in the whole picture – actually experiencing and sensing the reality around you: noticing and accepting signals of safety and kindness, not always focusing exclusively on signals of threat and danger.
Moving Forward
In my next post, I share more about how I integrate neuromuscular release strategies with other approaches to create lasting change in both body and mind. This integrated approach addresses the whole story of embodied stuckness, not just parts of it.
So the good news is that these patterns, though persistent, can change. With the right approach that honours both the physical and emotional aspects of trauma, it’s possible to create new patterns that better serve your present reality.