Why You Can’t Just “Release” Trauma

In this episode, we dive into the common phrase “releasing trauma” and what it really means. While many people think trauma can be pushed out of the body, healing is much more about creating safety within the body so it can transform naturally. We explore the layers of trauma healing—physical, emotional, psychological, and relational—and why true healing requires a holistic approach.

Here's the 3 takeaways:

1. Trauma isn't something you can force out – Healing is not about "releasing" or "getting rid" of trauma, but creating safety in the body so it can naturally transform.
2. Trauma healing happens in layers – It affects the physical, emotional, psychological, and relational aspects of your life, so healing requires a multi-faceted approach.
3. Healing is about building capacity – The goal is to increase your ability to be with difficult emotions and sensations, rather than trying to push them away.

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Transcript

0:00  
Amanda, welcome to regulate and rewire an anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong, and I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here. Now, let's dive in. 

I'm going to take a wild guess that many, if not most of you who have found your way to a podcast like mine, you have probably heard the term or the phrase quote, releasing trauma or releasing stored trauma from your body. This is a term you might have even heard me use. And today I want to unpack this term, the accuracy or the potential inaccuracy in it, because this phrase, quote, releasing trauma is something that I've seen a number of other practitioners in the nervous system, healing space, taking on and I think it's worth exploring in more detail. 

answering questions like, what does it really mean to release trauma? What are the different layers of trauma healing? And why have I never seen anyone totally heal their trauma with any singular modality or approach? So we are going to talk about the layers of trauma, healing and why, despite what you may have heard, healing trauma is far more nuanced than simply getting it out of your body, releasing it from your body. 

And before we get into talking about the different layers of trauma, let's take a step back and talk about what trauma really is, and create, at least for today's discussion, a universal definition or understanding. Often, when we think of trauma, we think about a particular event, this big thing that happened to me, and now I have these triggers, or I'm overwhelmed, or it's what started my anxiety, this event being something that happened to us, but trauma is not the event, or it's at least not just the event that happened to us, but it is what happened within us during that experience. It is our internal responses to that event. It is the aftermath of that event, it is the way that event or that experience imprints on us, both mentally and physically. Trauma is anything that overwhelms the nervous system beyond its ability to cope, to re regulate, to get itself out of a perceived stress cycle. It can be too much of something, something that happened too soon or too often, to the point where it became overwhelming. It can also be experiences where we got too little of the things that we needed to feel safe, secure, seen, accepted, to have our needs met. And these could be physical needs, emotional needs, psychological needs, societal sense of support. So trauma is just too much or too little to the point of overwhelm. Trauma is everything that happened within you as a result of that event, it's also the beliefs that you developed, the ways that you learned how to survive, the coping mechanisms that got you through, the behaviors that became ingrained, the physical responses in your nervous system. Trauma is the story your body continues to tell you long after the event has passed. 

Did you know that the part of your brain that time stamps events, the part of your brain that lets you know that yesterday's breakfast was yesterday's breakfast, that part of your brain goes offline in some ways when we experience these overwhelming events. So these events actually don't get an accurate time stamp. We never become fully sure in mind and body that that event passed. We don't get to close out or settle that stress cycle and experiences where that happens, that is what we recognize as trauma, this thing that was left unresolved, that was overwhelming, that our system still carries this imprint from and I often reiterate that trauma isn't just something that happened to you. It is something that happens within you, and your mind and your body are still reenacting it in your present day life in some way, shape or form, when it is unhealed, when it is not yet integrated, and that is a crucial distinction to make when we talk about healing trauma. 

So we want to shift the conversation now to what does quote releasing trauma mean? And I am sure that many of you have seen video. Shows on social media of people shaking or screaming or sobbing, whether it's at a retreat or a big seminar, and this is often what gets labeled as releasing trauma, and these intense releases are often what we refer to as cathartic healing. And I'm going to sidebar about this really quick, because this is something that I get asked about often. What is cathartic healing? It feels kind of scary for me. It looks overwhelming. Is that what you do? 

So cathartic healing involves releasing repressed emotions, often through intense emotional expressions like crying or screaming. And this can be helpful for some people, by providing a sense of relief and emotional release, but oftentimes our nervous system backlashes. It can also make trauma worse, because what this often does is it brings up an overwhelming feeling. What I'm seeing happen more and more often is that these are being done in conference rooms surrounded by, you know, 30 to 100 people, which means that this overwhelming expression is happening without proper support. It's often bringing your system to a really high level of intensity way too quickly. And this can lead to re traumatization. It can lead to our system feeling out of control, especially if your nervous system isn't ready to process those emotions. Healing Trauma is more effective when it is paced and when it is done in a safe and supported environment. And I want to share that, because I often get asked this, mostly in context when people are asking about my release class. 

So I have a virtual, live class that I teach each month, and the title of that class is my release class. I can understand why some people might associate that with what they're seeing in these videos. And this is something that's taught by myself or one of our practitioners, and it is not cathartic healing. It is a 60 minute class with three primary goals, and this will tie into this overarching conversation I want to have around effective trauma healing. 

So the three goals of this monthly class that I lead or one of my practitioner leads is number one to invite and hold space for you to be in and with your body in a compassionate, curious, neutral, accepting way, something that every single one of our clients struggles with is feeling safe in their body, and this class is a place to explore and expand this ability to just be tuned in to your somatic experiences modern day life has us living really disembodied. Has us living in our head so much of the time, and yet, 80% of this Mind Body conversation is happening in the body, and so this just holds a container for you to be prompted to pay attention to what's going on in your Soma, in your body, because if you cannot learn how to feel safe in your body, you won't ever feel safe anywhere. So it starts with just opening up this line of communication. The second goal of this class is to offer a safe space to be with uncomfortable sensations. A lot of times, people think, Oh, I'm going to come to this class and she's going to teach me the nervous system regulation tools that I don't have to feel anxious, that I don't have to feel guilt, so I don't have to feel shame, so I don't have to feel shut down. And we do some of that learning how to use different tools to shift our physiology, I'll talk about that in number three. 

But the second primary goal of this class is to offer you this safe space to practice spending time with uncomfortable sensations or emotions instead of trying to immediately distract or numb or cope. We so often grab our phone or some other form of distraction, but in our last month's call, we went into the body and found a place that was uncomfortable. Maybe it was an ache, maybe it was a sensation that you typically identify with anxiety. And I said, Hey, you're safe. I'm in this with you. We're all in this together. Can you be with that sensation instead of running from it? Can you bring attention to it and maybe neutrally narrate it? Because what this does over time is this helps to increase your capacity for discomfort. This helps you to feel more in control when the big emotions do show up, and we do this through various types of titration or pendulation practices. And then we do have our primary goal number three, which is to gain real time experience of how various regulation tools impact your nervous system state. And this gives you those tools that you might need to use in your daily life. Five I am a practitioner who will tell you it's not always the appropriate time to feel all your feelings you might be in a work environment that doesn't actually feel safe or conducive for you to step aside and be with the discomfort that is anxiety or disappointment or shame or sometimes we can feel this activation in our system, and we need to manage that activation until we can get to a place where we can come back to process, reflect on and experience that emotion. And one thing that I know to be true 100% of the time with our clients is when they learn tools to help them alive in their system when they're feeling really burnt out or frozen or stuck or dampen the intensity of anxiety, they have more confidence in moving towards the discomfort that comes with healing anxiety, depression and trauma, these release glasses are slow and steady healing work, and that's the slow and steady healing work that you find across all of our programs at rise as we healing the nervous system, it takes time, it takes patience, it takes repetition, reinforcement of this felt sense of safety. 

One of my favorite analogies is, and you've heard it here on the podcast probably more than once, is when you break your arm and you go to the doctor. The doctor doesn't actually fix your arm. The doctor just creates an environment. It creates conditions in which your arm can heal itself. Our body is similar. We can't force this discharge or release of trauma, but what we can do is set up internal and external environments in our life that feel safe, and the more often we are in the felt experience of safety, the less of this stored survival energy our body needs to hold on to, and it will naturally soften the system. It will naturally release some of that tension that's stored in your fascia, in your tissues. We do know that trauma is actually energetically stored in our body, but we can't force it out. It comes when we experience more safety, and far too often, we skip to the fixing, the fixing tools, to feel less, to release trauma, when really the work is actually not to diminish the discomfort, but to increase our capacity to be with and in it. 

Think about it like weightlifting. If you're going to the gym and you're lifting weights, the goal isn't to always make the barbell lighter to meet your current strength today, it is about slowly over time, increasing your ability and your capacity to carry more weight without it overwhelming you, without it injuring you. And where that cathartic healing comes in is sometimes we take on too much too soon. It's like stepping under a barbell with 300 pounds you haven't trained for. It's going to injure you, there's going to be backlash from your system. Slower is faster when healing trauma. 

So back to this phrase, quote, releasing trauma. This phrase can sometimes give the impression that trauma is this thing we need to push out of our bodies, almost like an exorcism of our emotional baggage. But here's the thing, I will reiterate this and reiterate this and reiterate this, trauma isn't something you can force out. In fact, when we try to force it out, the body often responds with more resistance, like we've talked about. But why? Why does it do this? Because trauma at its core is trying to protect us. It is the nervous system's way of saying, hey, I need to hold on to this experience because I'm not convinced we're safe. Yet. It didn't get properly time stamped. We never had the experience of it being complete or over. So if your body senses that you are trying to get rid of something before it feels safe and secure. It is going to double down on its defenses, and that is why it is so so so important to create an environment of safety within your body before anything else. This is why sometimes even talk therapy can have a backlash in our system because we don't know the difference between retelling and re experiencing our trauma if we don't know how to first access safety in the body, our trauma releases. It softens when your body realizes it no longer needs to hold on so tightly to protect you. It's not something you can just decide to let go of. Let go of on a whim. It's not something that's magically going to release after some weekend hoorah retreat. It is something that your body chooses when it feels ready, and you can guide your body down that path to being ready through small, simple, daily resources. 

And I think this is also where I want to talk about the layers of trauma, because when we're talking about the releasing, we're only actually addressing one aspect of trauma. This is the physiological layer of trauma, the trauma that's stored in your body that absolutely can be and needs to be released and processed and metabolized via somatic practices, but that also needs to happen in tandem with increased overall safety and an acknowledgement of the other layers of trauma, and it's because of these layers and the way that they layer differently for every single person, even people who've been in the same situations, have different layers to their trauma, healing, and this is why it's never a one size fits all process, and it certainly doesn't happen in just one go. There are layers and layers. It takes time. There will be layers to your trauma healing, and different modalities will fit better in different times. I don't know a single person who has resolved their trauma through just talk therapy or just EMDR, or just nervous system regulation or lifestyle changes, or healing an inner child, or attachment wounds or somatic experiencing, et cetera. Trauma, again, is what happened within us during the event, how our nervous system went into or got stuck in states of fight, flight, freeze, fawn or shutdown. Trauma is also the beliefs that we developed about ourselves others or the world that formed as a way to survive this experience or to cope afterwards. There's the attachment wounds, and we'll unpack each of these layers in a minute. Just know that there are different healing modalities for a reason. 

and if you feel like you have stalled out in something that you've been doing for a while, or you joined a program that seemed to work for other people, but it didn't work for you, I just want to reiterate that you are not the problem. You are not too broken. You simply need a different practitioner or a different approach. And I know it can be so exhausting when you feel like you've tried everything. That is one of the number one lines that we hear from people who work with us in our practice, is I feel like I've tried everything, but I know I don't want to live like this forever, so I'm going to try one more thing, and I think why our practice and our approach works so well for so many people who feel like they've tried everything is because it's not cookie cutter, because it's personalized to their unique experience. Because we have trauma trained practitioners who do and are trained in multiple modalities in top down and bottom up, and we have now officially a blood work program, and so we're able to say, hey, let's actually look at the physiology. Let's look at ways that that might be contributing to your sense of lack of depletion, that's making your body feel unsafe because there is a very real hormone imbalance or micronutrient deficiency, and can we, in a very data driven way, rectify some of that, that is going to increase your body's felt sense of safety, that is going to give you more capacity to do some of the deeper internal trauma healing work? And so I think why our practice works so well is because we have this multifaceted way that we support clients, and there are hundreds and 1000s of other practitioners and other modalities out there that could be the right fit for you, if what we're doing isn't it is possible to heal trauma. It's not possible to get to a place as if it didn't happen, it did. But there is beautiful life. There is post traumatic growth. And if you've tried and you're feeling stuck or you feel like it's not working, please don't give up hope. 

Okay, I sidebarred Again there.

I want to come back to unpacking these trauma layers, because, as I do, it, might give you an idea of another way that you can approach or address your trauma if you're currently feeling stuck. So we've talked about the physical layer. So review, this is where trauma is stored in the body. The body holds on to tension and pain and stress long after the traumatic event has passed, as a way of protecting you, of keeping you safe, of truly, actually limiting you, trying to get you to live a smaller life so that you are safer, and sometimes even our muscles, our joints, our nervous system stay in A state of high alert, waiting for danger to return. Because this happened because there wasn't a resolve. Our nervous system never got to reset. So healing this layer, this physical layer, requires somatic work practices that help release the stress and tension and cultivate a greater felt sense of safety. D in your body. This physical layer also consists of your general health. Health is the pinnacle of mental health. You need to be nourished enough, rested enough. You need to have functional enough gut health, thyroid hormone balances, that all needs to be in a state of enough balance to get your system out of survival mode. 

then we have an emotional layer. So trauma is often accompanied by intense emotions of fear or anger or shame, and these emotions get, quote, stuck in our system. So emotional healing requires us to gently explore these feelings, allowing them to be felt and processed, rather than suppressed and ignored, then we have the psychological layer. So this is what I call like the mind layer. Trauma changes the way that we think. It changes the way we think about ourselves, the world. It creates patterns of negative thoughts, beliefs, coping mechanisms that can feel debilitating and impossible to break, and it feels real. These ways of viewing the world, of viewing ourselves, become our truth, become our reality, and healing, this layer often involves cognitive approaches, so things like talk therapy, can we take a look at and build some awareness of, what type of protective thinking patterns are we in? What type of beliefs do we have? Are they helpful? Are they not? What evidence do we have that they're true? Are they untrue? And I think where I talk a lot is that our state determines our story. If you go first, in my opinion, to this psychological layer. While your nervous system is still stuck in a survival state, it's like carry on a boulder uphill, because you are going to send stress signals from your body to your mind that's going to create more panicked, more spiraling thoughts. So if we can learn to settle our physiology. We have so much more capacity to working from the top down, working on our mindset. So this is why we say we're a physiology first a body first healing program. 

There's another layer to trauma, which is the relational layer. So trauma impacts how we relate to others, so it can create mistrust, anxiety, social anxiety, difficulty forming healthy relationships. So healing this layer often means rebuilding trust, learning how to feel safe with others. Again, I would say a big part of relational this relational layer is also learning to play, to be collaborative with others in both a maybe work based productive way, but also in a play based way. 

All right, three more layers I want to talk about. 

The next one is the developmental layer. So when trauma occurs during our childhood or a key developmental stage, this can affect your overall psychological and emotional growth, and this can be our identity formation, our emotional regulation, attachment styles. There's a lot of times, some inner child work, and this can be done in a variety of different ways. My favorite is through ifs or parts work, and it's something that all of our practitioners are trained in. But this developmental layer getting in tune with these wounded or these burdened younger parts of ourselves. 

The next layer is a cultural or societal layer, so trauma can also be experienced at the societal level, such as systematic oppression, discrimination, racism, historical events. And this layer involves collective trauma that affects communities or groups of people. This leads to inherited patterns of behavior, beliefs, responses to stress, and there's not something that we can always do to change the circumstance of this. Are there things we can do to change our relation to that? 

And the last layer I'll mention is a spiritual or energetic layer, trauma can often disconnect us from our sense of purpose, meaning, connection to a higher power and healing this layer often involves reconnecting to that sense of meaning, spirituality, personal values. 

And so I know that that was a little bit of a laundry list of these layers, but my hope in going through those was that some of you listening went, Oh, I didn't consider that or, Oh, I've done that layer. I feel like I've I may be trying to redo that layer, but what if I addressed it here or in this way, just to get you curious about this work in a different way that trauma healing is a layered process, requiring work at multiple levels, and effective, trauma trained, trauma informed care could involve somatic practices like bodywork, movement psychotherapy, that's cognitive behavior therapy, internal family systems, EMDR, you can do emotional processing somatically or more, brain based through. Journaling and mindfulness when it comes to relational healing, rebuilding trust, boundary, setting, play, spiritual exploration, reconnecting to meaning or a higher power, whatever that looks like for you. Each of these layers overlaps, and no single approach is going to address all of them, and that is why i i say that I've never seen anyone truly heal their trauma with just one modality. It often requires an integrated approach. And so I just want to share again, again, again, that if you've been doing one thing and you feel like you're hitting a wall, it's okay for you to try something different. In fact, it's probably needed for you to try something different. Bodywork, emotional processing, psychological healing, nervous system regulation, relational repair, maybe going at it for more of a data driven physiological way, getting some blood work done, these small baby steps in multiple different ways is ultimately what gets us to a new baseline. 

All right, I want to try to wrap this up by coming back to this thing that I see all the time in the trauma space right now, and it is this idea of needing to forcefully release or get rid of trauma, whether that's through somatic shaking or crying or other cathartic release. And while these practices can be helpful, releasing your trauma is not the goal. The goal is not to simply expel the trauma, but instead to cultivate a sense of safety within the body, we need to remember that trauma is about survival. Your body is holding onto trauma because it still feels like it needs to protect you. So instead of trying to push it out, we need to learn to be with it. This means creating a safe container where we can gently engage with our trauma on a variety of levels and layers. We can feel the discomfort, feel supported in feeling the discomfort, and gradually increase our capacity to hold those sensations without becoming overwhelmed. 

Our somatically trained practitioners do this work with our clients every single day. Our approach guides our clients through this process of reconnecting, cultivating safety, compassion, curiosity. It is not about forcing trauma out, but about expanding our ability to stay present with the sensations and emotions your body is holding on to, and little by little, as your body senses that it's safe, the trauma begins to shift. If I could sum up trauma healing into one sentence, it would be this, trauma healing is not about getting rid of the trauma, but it's about building a larger capacity to hold it. Your body will never forget what happened to you. It is wired to protect you, and that is a good thing. But when we grow our capacity to be with these sensations of fear, anxiety or shame, they loosen their grip on us. Instead of being overwhelmed by triggers, we can learn to stay grounded and notice them, feel the sensations and move through them, let them pass, recognizing them for what they are. Hey, this is my mind and my body saying something about this feels familiar to a time in our past where we didn't feel safe, we didn't get our needs met. Pay attention. Pay attention, and we learn how to actually pay attention and how to turn towards those sensations, turn towards those thoughts with a loving, kind, grounded voice, and say, Hey, thank you. I see what you're trying to do. And we've got this. I'm here and not there. This is now and not then. Thanks for helping me pay attention and we're okay. 

So the next time you hear someone talk about quote, releasing trauma, I want you to remember that the goal isn't to push anything out or get rid of it. The goal is to create more safety in your body, to expand your capacity to be with these experiences and to gently, patiently allow your body to move through this healing process at its own pace. There is no other way. And if this resonates with you, and if you feel like you've been stuck and you want to try a different approach, this is what we do inside rises we in our restore program, we focus exactly on this in a one on one container with each of our clients. So if you're curious, I will drop a link in the show notes to book a discovery call for that. But let's bring it together, as always, with our three simple takeaways from this episode. 

Number one, I've said this, I think, 14 times already. Right? Trauma isn't something you can force out. Healing isn't about releasing or getting rid of but creating safety in the body so that it can naturally transform. 

Number two, trauma, healing happens in layers. It affects the physical, emotional, psychological and relational aspects of our life. So your healing is going to require a multifaceted approach as well. 

And number three, healing is about building capacity. The goal is to increase your ability to be with difficult emotions and sensations, rather than try to fix them or push them away. 

All right, friends, as always, thank you for being here for continuing to step into the courageous work that is healing. Me and my team are here to support you. If what we're saying here on the podcast resonated, I would love for you to join us inside rise as we and until next week, I'm sending hope and healing your way. 

Thanks for listening to another episode of The regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more people who need them. And if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside rise my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space, or apply for our one on one anxiety and depression coaching program, restore. I've shared a link for more information to both in the show notes. Again, thanks so much for being here, and I'll see you next time you

Transcribed by https://otter.ai