Trauma Healing Through Connection
The best and worst thing for your nervous system can be the people around you. Who you spend your time with impacts your nervous system.
Who makes you feel anxious?
Who makes you feel shutdown?
Who helps you to feel connected, calm and safe?
You are biologically predisposed to seek and maintain connections with others. Your brain and nervous system is wired for and strengthened by connection, whether that is with yourself, others or even a beloved pet.
Research shows that a feedback loop occurs between your own nervous system and another person’s through the orbitofrontal cortex in the brain.
When your nervous system is activated (too wired) you might feel this tension as anxiety, overwhelm or reactivity. When it’s shutdown (too tired) you might feel this collapse as hopelessness, feeling withdrawn and exhausted.
The Ventral Vagal Social Engagement System
The ventral vagus nerve or social engagement system has neural connections into your eyes, the muscles of your face, your inner ear, and your vocalisation muscles in your throat.
This allows you to communicate how you feel to others through your tone of voice, facial expressions and gestures. It also allows you to receive other people’s expressions and tone through your eyes and ears.
Vagal tone is a measure of the nervous system’s capacity to deal with stress and we learn our patterns of response through role modelling and interactions with our parents, caregivers and other authority figures.
Your experience of connection in relationships starts with your earliest life experiences. This is why babies really need the presence of reliable and trustworthy caregivers to help them to consistently regulate their immature nervous systems.
For example a mother providing a calming and soothing co-regulating presence for her baby through a soft voice, a loving gaze or a gentle touch such as stroking the baby’s cheek. Through touch, vocalisations, facial expressions and body language we create bonds of connection and safety and our vagal tone is strengthened.
Emotional neglect is when you haven’t had regular and repeated early experiences of this kind of connection and this can diminish vagal tone and cause you to feel anxious, helpless and unsure. These survival patterns become encoded into your neural circuitry from early on. They interfere with your sense of belonging and this takes a toll on your relationships.
As an adult you can find yourself stuck in negative and dysfunctional patterns that leave you feeling vulnerable and anxious. You might not trust others because you fear abandonment and you might push well intentioned people away.
It’s also why you can be negatively impacted in the present by a feeling of disconnection – another person looking away while you’re talking, checking their phone, becoming defensive, not validating you or offering you comfort.
These moments can feel very upsetting and change your physiology and how you feel in your body straight away. Your nervous system becomes activated and this results in tension, anger, and reactivity (fight/flight), or maybe you withdraw and shutdown (freeze).
These physical sensations may be so overwhelming that you lose access to your frontal lobes of your brain (where your perspective is greater and you get a sense of the “bigger picture.”)
This can make it so difficult to know how to fully engage with others and it creates repeated cycles of disconnection.
How disconnection may show up in your relationships:
Maybe you avoid vulnerability: your fear of expressing your needs or emotions causes you to put up walls.
Maybe you’re over-functioning: you take on too much responsibility in relationships and try to “fix” or “rescue” situations and people.
Maybe you have difficulty trusting others: you believe that others can’t or won’t be there for you.
Maybe you avoid conflict and withdraw: you shut down and bottle it all up inside instead of talking about how you feel.
Your patterns of disconnection prevent emotional intimacy and this can leave you feeling unseen or unheard. If this sounds like you, I want you to know that you are not alone. These are common experiences when you have lived through relational trauma.
Healing Is Possible
Healthy adult relationships can overwrite those early patterns, help you to learn to cope differently and to heal. It is possible to repair old trauma wounds and develop your ability to find healthy, meaningful connections with caring people in your life now.
Your nervous system can repair when you are in relationships that strengthen your feelings of trust, being comforted and feeling secure. And when you learn how to take care of your own nervous system, so that it is feeling more balanced (your heart rate is even, your body relaxes, your face and voice softens) this can deepen and improve the quality of your relationships.
We all need caring connections with others in order to heal from trauma. Initially, the safest place for you to find this connection may be in psychotherapy with a trained professional who is capable of supporting you as you heal.
When you have a history of trauma, it is common for you to internalise critical or judgemental messages about yourself which can develop into negative beliefs that you are unworthy, unlovable, too weak or broken and that you don’t belong. These negative beliefs can really interfere with your ability to know that you deserve to be loved and supported and treated well.
Having positive, caring and meaningful connections with others allows you to feel seen, heard and cared for by a trustworthy person who accepts all of you, even the messy bits.
If you would like to heal your trauma and develop a genuine connection with yourself and others, but feel that you just aren’t getting there on your own, I can offer you expert help to make the changes that you need.
Please feel free to contact me to arrange a call back: www.caroline-king.co.uk