A couple of weeks ago I had a super engaging podcast conversation with author, TedX speaker and founder of The Insecurity Project, Jaemin Frazer (you can listen to this podcast here, where Jaemin interviewed me about how I have navigated insecurity to become the business owner, practitioner, and mother I am today).

After the podcast, Jaemin and I went on to discuss the origins of trauma and treating trauma. It's something constantly on my mind. In our clinic we see many clients develop body system breakdown and burnout as a result of trauma. Sometimes unresolved trauma is at the root cause of health issues, and if not addressed, it can be really hard to heal the body and achieve symptomatic resolution.

Jaemin had some super interesting insights into trauma, which I wanted to share in this blog post today.

The excerpt below comes from Jaemin's book Elegantly Simple Solutions to Complex People Problems. 

Over to you Jaemin... 

"Why lying to yourself always leads to trauma.

Trauma is what happens when rapport with self gets broken. If you constantly turn off or ignore all the internal signals about what is not working and just keep sailing on, sooner or later the subconscious will revolt and sabotage the body so you are incapable of moving forward. Most sickness, anxiety, depression, weight gain, burnout and post-traumatic stress is self-generated by the subconscious due to a breakdown in the relationship with yourself. It’s like the subconscious is saying ‘you have stopped listening, you are living unsustainably and I am not OK with that any more so, for the sake of love, I will stop you by all means possible.’ 

When you remain in a situation that requires you to lie to yourself to make things work, it inevitably leads to trauma. Living out of a lie will eventually cause you to be at war with yourself as it violates the relationship between your conscious and subconscious. 

Trauma is not caused by the terrible things we experience, it is caused by suppressing the human response to these terrible things and pretending that you are fine and everything is OK. 

A great example of this concept is the PTSD experienced by many soldiers returning from war. 

Army training is all about turning a human being into a soldier. The natural human response to life must be replaced with robotic obedience to the instruction of the commanding officer. This is not being critical of the defence force protocol; it is just how it has to be. It is dangerous for a soldier to be influenced by the natural human responses of compassion, empathy or fear when they are engaged in a battle situation. Those in charge must be 100% sure that their soldiers will only respond to orders and that the training will take over their normal decision making process. 

A soldier must conform to the instructions from higher up the chain and are rewarded only for pre-programmed behaviour. That means all human response must be suppressed. The problem with this is that people are actually human beings not robots or machines. To suppress, ignore or turn off the best and most honest part of a person therefore, eventually creates some very real problems in the life of the individual. Ultimately this suppression of natural human response is the cause of trauma. 

A soldier doesn’t experience trauma because they see people killed all around them. They experience trauma because they see these things and are not able to have a human response to them. 

Trauma happens when the relationship with yourself gets broken. To constantly turn off or ignore all natural emotions and internal signals is a cruel thing to do. Imagine if you treated another person in this way. When trust and communication become non-existent between the conscious and subconscious, sooner or later this leads to massive internal conflict. The subconscious says “I don’t like it...” the conscious mind says “too bad, this is my job so I don’t have a choice.” 

If the relationship stays broken, the subconscious has no choice but to finally override and remove the person from the situation all together. Out of the subconscious comes severe sickness, anxiety, depression, weight gain, burnout, or chronic fatigue as way of manifesting the internal trauma and giving a clear way out of the unsustainable situation. If you have PTSD, you no longer have to be a soldier."

If this has got you interested, head here to read more on what Jaemin has to say about trauma. 

And this is also a really good podcast by Jaemin that talks about the body-mind-connection from an insecurity perspective.

 Author: Filipa Bellette