Getting Unstuck - The Spiritual Side of Healing from Trauma
Discussing trauma from an energetic/spiritual perspective
Disclaimer: Once again, I am not a mental health professional and everything I write about is based on my experiences and opinions. Please seek professional counsel if you are in crisis.
Before I get into my views on what happens to your soul and energy after experiencing trauma, I want to address the fact that most people have differing views on what counts as trauma, and that’s actually one of the main reasons I decided to write this piece.
I think so many of us were never taught to recognize our own trauma, and that’s why we have gone most of our lives never seeking help or healing. And although the use of therapy has skyrocketed since the beginning of COVID in 2020, and my Instagram feed is filled with people talking about healing and addressing trauma, I still believe the majority of humanity is in need of so much more healing than they are willing to admit. And of course societal norms change from generation to generation, and I believe younger generations are being given better tools for navigating their emotions and experiences, but there is still so much work to be done in terms of understanding how we process difficult situations and emotions.
That being said, I identify trauma as getting “stuck” in a moment/experience/emotion.
That is the most straight-forward, simple version of what I’m about to get into, so if that was enough for you, I’m glad. But if that didn’t quite hit home, keep reading.
Explaining Trauma as ‘Soul Loss’
There is a very old concept in many native/indigenous cultures and spiritual communities called ‘soul loss’. This is when a part of your soul gets stuck in a moment or experience, and stays there until you retrieve it. The way I like to describe soul loss from a more 3-dimensional or human perspective is that it’s the feeling you get after experiencing something very shocking or unpleasant where you never seem to quite get back to who you were before the event. And this can happen, like everything in life, on a spectrum.
There are catastrophic events and tragedies like near-death experiences, war, being attacked, loss of a loved one, the ending of a marriage, etc. that will take “larger” chunks of your soul - and that’s the kind of thing people go to therapy for. But then there are much “smaller” more subtle ways you can experience soul loss. These can include the trauma of consistently being abandoned or let down by a parent as a child, being laughed at by peers, being ignored, feeling left out or rejected, and just generally feeling not accepted for who you are. These moments that didn’t have any significant physical danger, loss, or pain can be just as traumatic, and sometimes more so.
Think about how often you got physically injured as a little kid from being clumsy and reckless but never thought about it again because there was no strong emotional affect on you, but how you might carry a memory of embarrassment from when you were seven into your 40s. Or how you choose to never dress a certain way any more because you got a negative comment about your style one day. It is these small, fleeting moments that can forever change who we are as people and can bring us so far away from our original soul expression - and those are the traumas people do not tend to acknowledge as adults.
So if you think you have lived your life without trauma just because you’ve never been through anything tragic like a major loss or physical injury, then I want you to consider this - does your brain go back to the same memories over and over again? Do you have any triggers in your daily life that might make you breathe a little faster or get your palms sweaty even if they don’t trigger a full blown panic attack? Maybe you’re always slightly on edge and worried about how you’re being perceived or the decisions you’re making. Or maybe you seem to have lost your passion for life and you stopped caring about most things, and everything feels just a little pointless or meaningless. These are all signs that you have been through trauma and have lost parts of your soul.
Explaining Trauma as Stuck Energy
If you didn’t resonate with the last perspective because you can’t get behind the idea of having a soul or that you can lose parts of it, then I implore you to read this section.
As I mentioned above, I define trauma as “getting stuck in an experience”. Well, besides your soul getting stuck in experiences, your energy can also get stuck. You see, emotions are just energy, and each emotion has a different frequency. So when you have an experience that is highly emotionally-charged, and you are unable to consciously process that emotion during or after the event (which is true of most children and young adults), then that emotion stays in your body as a little clump of unprocessed energy.
Still not convinced that what I just said makes any sense? Well we learned as children in science class that energy cannot be destroyed or created…it just changes form. Therefore everything is just energy in different forms/vibrating at different frequencies. Whether something is a solid or gas, it is made up of the same thing. Sound is energy. Color is energy (and every color has its own frequency). Thoughts are energy. Therefore it can be concluded that emotions are also energy. So when you experience something like shame as a child, which is one of the lowest-vibrational emotions, and no one helps you process that feeling, you carry that vibration in your body until it gets resolved.
And what happens to this trapped energy? It can result in various mental health issues, triggers, physical and emotional sensitivities, and very often chronic pain or chronic health issues. That is because trapped emotions disrupt the normal, healthy energy flow and function of your physical body, which includes your nervous system and brain. If this sounds crazy to you, go argue with the thousands of years of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurvedic Medicine, and the dozens of contemporary emotional/energetic/somatic healing modalities that are popping up. Or, better yet, go read “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. I haven’t actually read this book, but I’ve read many others like it, and they all come to the same conclusion - emotions effect our physical health (but this particular book happens to be very popular and written by an allopathic doctor).
How to get unstuck
I hope by now you can accept that as humans we have all experienced trauma, and that most of us are still functioning from a wounded mind, body, and soul until we are able to heal that trauma. And if you already knew that and you were hoping I would get to the part where I tell you how to heal…well here it is.
In order to heal from trauma, to retrieve all of your soul aspects that you lost, and to clear out all of your stuck energy, you just need to work on one thing - consciousness. Self awareness is the number one thing to develop in order to heal.
Without self awareness no one else can tell you what needs to be healed or where your pain is. And yes, there are doctors and energetic healers out there that can supply you with loads of resources, guidance, medication, and healing sessions, but you are the one that must seek them out and do the work. You have to be able to admit and know that something needs healing in order to get the healing. And it will take self awareness to know what modality of healing works best for you.
But besides seeking out help, simply being conscious of where your trauma comes from can also get you unstuck (and that’s why talk therapy or journaling is helpful). For example, many people start healing when they are able to identify the cause of their anxiety or depression - as opposed to only working to stop the symptoms. That is because when you are conscious of something, it has less power over you. You can think of consciousness as a light - once you shed light onto a shadow, the shadow no longer exists. So by acknowledging where our pain is coming from, we already start to heal and regain our power. And this brings me to my last point about healing your trauma…
Once you become conscious of your trauma, you must become a Master of it.
It is not enough to just acknowledge that you are in pain, or where it is coming from - you need to make the decision that you no longer want to be in pain and you must be consistent and determined about your healing process. And that might sound like an obvious next step…to make the decision to heal and to not want to hold onto pain or trauma…but if/when you have lived most of your life with that trauma, functioning from it, and even identifying with it (making it a part of who you are), you may subconsciously sabotage your own healing. That’s because being in some kind of physical/emotional/mental pain might be so familiar to you that it is somehow comforting, and you would rather continue life knowing who you are with the pain than having to change and feel lost without the pain defining you. (If you feel offended or called-out by what I just said, and you have tried everything under the sun to heal your issues without any improvement, you might want to try sitting with this idea instead of running away from it.)
Anyway, if you are open to everything I just said and would like some resources about energetic/spiritual healing, I will list just a few below. But for the most part I just want you to walk away with the idea that 1. you should acknowledge your emotions and trauma even if you or someone else wants to belittle/invalidate it, and 2. expanding your consciousness to know all of yourself and your wounds, and taking responsibility for your life, is how you will heal.
Energetic Healing Modalities to Explore:
Soul retrieval (this is traditionally only performed by shamans but there are more contemporary approaches that don’t involve shamans)
Getting an energetic reading - there are many ways to get this done
Reiki (there are many forms of this, so do some research about the kind that resonates the most with you)
Acupuncture/acupressure
Somatic therapy
EFT (emotional freedom technique) tapping
Chakra healing/alignment
Massage therapy - many Eastern-based massage techniques consider the energy system for pin-pointing blockages, and there is such a thing as somatic massage therapy
the Emotion Code/emotional energy healing - the Emotion Code is a specific technique (that I got certified in), but people will create techniques on their own so you can just search for energy healers that concentrate on emotional healing
Yoga
Journaling
Art therapy
Music therapy
Dance therapy
Basically anything that concentrates on the connection between your mind, body, and spirit, acknowledges/involves emotions and your energy system in its principles, and values self-expression or getting in touch with your inner self/soul
