Trauma and stress release
By: Lisa Costello
Tags: Stress Relief, PTSD, Trauma Recovery

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I’ve recently finished reading Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski, which talks about how women experience stress and how to recover from the unresolved stress we’ve stored in our bodies over the years. It’s an amazing book and I highly recommend it. The first three chapters alone are worth the price of admission (but read the rest anyway, because it’s equally amazing).

But it got me to thinking: what happens when you’re a Freeze type (as opposed to Fight or Flight) and you’re so frozen in so many moments that you not only can’t feel your feelings, but you may not even be aware of what they are? How then do you complete the cycle of stress?

Truth is, I’ve gotten so good at repressing my feelings rather than acknowledging them (never mind feeling them). I have a few vivid memories of stress-induced rage, but other than that, I’m a big emotional blank.

I know there’s been a lot of stress in my life, but I can recall only vague memories of it — as if it happened in another life, or to someone else.

After my marriage ended in 2010, I experienced intense dreams that often veered into nightmares. I would wake up with my heart pounding, in utter fear, feeling intense nausea. Those nights I would dream heavily, and awaken nearly as tired as I was when I went to sleep. But I also awoke feeling like something had been processed and let go of. I never knew what my subconscious had been working on, just that something had been cleared out.

It was an odd experience.

Then in April and May of 2014, my partner was in the midst of dying. He had colon cancer when I met him, and we took him through a clinical trial at the beginning of 2014. The trial was brutal, and the treatment, which didn’t work, left him almost utterly unable to eat because of chronic nausea.

The trial was traumatic for me as well — watching him go through the rigors of the trial and then being solely responsible for his care while we were far away from his doctors was agonizing and terrifying — and each spring since I’ve felt the echoes of that trauma in various forms.

This year, instead of feeling anxiety and echoes of terror as I have in previous years, I’m feeling great grief and sadness welling up. I feel like crying for no reason from time to time, and while I try to open up to that feeling and try to make room to actually cry, it’s difficult and often doesn’t work.

So I’m working on a toolkit of things that help me process all this trial-related stress, hoping that what I learn will help me process out all the stress I’ve been building up throughout my life, whether I know what it was or not.

Maybe one of these will help you, too.

I’m making a collection of things that always make me cry, or even ugly cry, whether it’s songs or movies or moments in TV shows or movies. Some examples for me are the moment about four minutes into the first episode of Firefly when Mal realizes no one is coming to save him and his troops, the scene in the 7th (or 8th?) Harry Potter movie when Hermione obliviates her parents, and watching the video of Johnny Cash’s performance of Hurt. That last one is a big ugly cry for me.

Those all seem to help me process through some stress.

I’ve created a playlist of hip-swaying ass-shaking arm-waving head-banging songs to dance to, in the privacy of my office where no one can see me and I don’t have to be embarrassed by the way my body looks when it moves. I’m hoping this will lead to a variety of playlists, so my brain doesn’t get acclimated to one particular list, thus making it not work anymore. This gets me sweaty and short of breath in a really good way, and there always comes a point where I can feel the catch of tears in my breath and the back of my throat, and lets me both process stress and feel the edges of my body in a tingly joyful way.

The ironic thing is that for a very brief time a number of years ago, I used to do Nia, which is essentially a mindful movement system that ends up feeling to my body like sexy aerobic dance. I stopped doing it because every time I did, it made me ugly cry, and I couldn’t stand that. I didn’t realize at the time that I was processing stress, and that it was a good thing.

I’m going to add that back to my toolkit and see what happens.

I’ve discovered through some reading that we often store trauma in our psoas muscles and that leg shaking is a sign that our bodies are letting go of some trauma. Recently I’m finding that a yoga practice that’s intense enough — how intense differs from day to day — will leave me with my legs shaking in that trauma-release kind of way when I’m doing corpse pose.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten in building my toolkit, but this is ongoing work, and I’ll report back as and if I find other things that work.