Decoding trauma and its complex effects.
0:00:53.7 Charlotte: Over the years, I've worked intimately with the complexity of trauma. Trauma that manifests in many in different ways. Trauma in of itself is something that the mind often protects itself against reliving re-experiencing. There's been many people that have come to see me and thinking that the conflict or the source of unhappiness that they're experiencing is situational. That it's related to any number of what you might call immaterial things. Some of these people have no idea because they have no connection to the true source of their suffering. When a trauma has occurred at a young age, especially when that trauma is developmental trauma, by developmental trauma, that means during your formulative years, and you were traumatized, whether it be mentally, emotionally, physically, or sexually, particularly if it is a family member or someone in your close community to cope to be able to coexist within that same environment, because there is no choice of fleeing or fighting.
0:02:32.1 Charlotte: The brain can compartmentalize that trauma and use dissociation as a means of keeping the brain scaffolding intact. And the Irony for one of a better word is that as much as the brain which is not unlike a computer it's hard drivers wanting to survive, therefore will create a narrative around that trauma to justify it to even erase it, bury it amongst many other narratives so that it can't... It's like a finding a needle in a haystack, even though the hard drive is working overtime to keep that trauma from being revealed. The body conversely is actually doing the opposite because the body remembers everything. The body knows the score in our cells. We hold the trauma and the body is always wanting to purge itself. The body wants to return to a place of a homeostasis. It wants to release so that it can be well. And so what I have found with hundreds of people that I've worked with is that at a certain age they may outwardly live somewhat of a happy life. Everything seems good, and yet something's missing.
0:04:14.7 Charlotte: Something's not quite right. And lo and behold as they start to peel layers back their body is wanting them to be in a place of readiness where the mind can open the gate to remembering things in a different way. When you have experienced trauma that involves family members. Often those family members are then put on a pedestal. They're idealized so that the trauma cannot be accessed. Sometimes there is more placement on, okay, well, my father, for instance, wasn't emotionally engaging, or my father was an alcoholic, or my father was the source of where I find myself today with all of my insecurities. And what can happen is that on deeper delving, the mother actually was a deeper source of trauma and that the brain is so sophisticated in its means of coping, that it shifted the earnest and the emphasis onto the father, and that's not to dismiss the father's role in it. But the... Where we look is where we're going to find things, and if we're not looking, then we're not gonna see it.
0:05:51.4 Charlotte: So healing trauma can be by and large something that is a... It Is timely. It can't be forced it is the circumvention between the body's readiness and the mind's willingness to come together to reshape and remodel the way in which your entire reality has been held. And that's a big undertaking and has to be handled with the utmost sensitivity and I have seen people work through unfathomable degrees of trauma and trauma, some people say, "oh, it's relative. I wasn't traumatized as much as so and so," and that really has no bearing on how your body experiences, the degree of trauma, just because someone else's trauma may have been greater than you doesn't mean that your body isn't holding certain events in a way that is causing your entire relationship with self others and the world to be greatly impaired. And it is an absolute honor to be able to help people move through any degree of trauma and find themselves on the other side of it and experiencing life without constraints, without the compartmentalization that shuts them off from a self love and a deeper love of others and a deeper love for life.