Ten Ways to Know you are Holding Trauma

1. You were in a car accident, and now you are unable to drive without some anxiety or fear.

2. A person or animal you cherished died several years ago. Thoughts of them bring tears to your eyes, and talking about them is difficult.

3. You have gained twenty pounds in the last year and cannot figure out why you are eating so much.

4. You have panic attacks.

5. You are not capable of creating healthy relationships with lovers, friends, or family.

6. You have been molested. This experience continues to make it challenging to cultivate intimate loving relationships.

7. There is a specific feeling and when you connect to it, you feel out of control. This out of control feeling leads to making poor coping choices such as drinking, smoking, shopping too much, eating disorders etc...

8. At some point in time, you had an operation or medical procedure that you just can’t get over.

9. Your ability to handle everyday annoyances is narrow. Screaming at your children for minor infractions, flipping people off in traffic, anything you consider an injustice makes you angry.

10. You have a feeling in your body and believe that if you allowed yourself to feel that emotion, you would be engulfed by it. .

All of the above are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to trauma. We bump into traumatic events every day, and some we navigate correctly. With others our natural process gets interrupted. We store the event in our nervous systems. Stop telling your story, start feeling it, and start rewiring it in your body and brain.

Set up at time with a phone call or email to see what trauma you are still holding.

The paradox of trauma is that it has both the power to destroy and the power to transform and resurrect.

Peter A. Levine