How to RELEASE Trauma From the Body | Attachment and Abandonment Trauma

Abandonment trauma is a set of deeply ingrained core wounds you hold in your body as a result of real or perceived experiences of abandonment as a child that now cause you to self-abandon in romantic relationships, not set boundaries, have low self-worth and self-esteem, and to be emotionally unavailable to attracting healthy partners and forming secure relational bonds. Today I'll explain how to release this trauma from where it's stored in the body and why everything you've tried up until this point to break your patterns hasn't worked fully. Understanding that because the body keeps the score, you need to focus on this kind of somatic inner healing so you can make permanent changes in your life and stop circling the drain with other solutions. This is proven by the countless women that learn these tools inside Heal Your Heart School and make a permanent change in their life, sometimes within weeks. You might have done quite a bit of healing work up until this point and are wondering why you're still getting triggered by a breakup with an ex, or you know these patterns of self-abandonment just still aren't going away. You get it all in your mind, but it's still going on. Abandonment trauma needs to be healed in a specific way, and it can't even be entirely healed by doing somatic therapies like breathwork, yoga, EMDR, or plant medicines. Because of the way your abandoned parts interact with your nervous system and consciousness in real time when your automatic nervous system perceives potential abandonment. Those therapies might clear a lot of your trauma, but the parts within you that are harboring this abandonment trauma need to be worked with directly in real time in order to feel safe, seen, understood, and secure. And keep in mind that this is a talking head video, I'll be explaining concepts that actually need to be carried out in a non-verbal, feeling, kinesthetic sense. Because the trauma your abandoned parts carry is largely pre-verbal, and they exist from an age where you didn't have access to speech or more complex cognition. So listen to these steps and allow them to sink into your body, and listen to what your body thinks of these concepts and go from there. So the first thing your abandoned parts need from you is to feel safe in your body. The reason your abandonment trauma gets locked in your body in the first place was because you didn't feel safe enough at the time to experience those emotions. You didn't get the reassurance or comfort you needed when something scary or overwhelming was going on with a parent or caregiver. And so that part of you froze up in time, which is why these parts are referred to as your inner child, they are developmentally very young. Your limbic system didn't learn from a healthy limbic system of an adult how to ride the wave of strong emotion. And so you didn't learn a real-time feeling of safety in your body. So if you're in a constant state of activation, fight or flight, or you've been overwhelmed with so much activation that you're now shut down in a state of freeze, you won't have access to feeling safe in your body. And in fact, low-level chronic states of activation are common with abandonment trauma. So you may not even know what feeling safe in your body actually feels like. Because if we don't learn how to securely relate to our own emotions as a child, we don't learn to self-regulate our own nervous system, because the two go hand in hand. So now as adults, we lack the natural capacity to soothe ourselves after a trigger occurs, and we get stuck in the on position. This is what a healthy nervous system does naturally many times throughout the day, shifting seamlessly between the sympathetic and parasympathetic states, because your window of tolerance is relatively wide, and your body has the skill to complete the cycle of stress and come back into regulation after any stressful event occurs. You see dogs doing this naturally. They will shake off excess stress that allows their nervous system to come into a state of relaxation. But because abandonment trauma is a hidden type of trauma we carry throughout our lives, we can feel like we're in a constant state of stress or running from an invisible threat. And that turns into a chronic state where we get used to it, thinking it's normal to live like that when it is not. And if that's the case, when you do get triggered, it can cause a significant level of stress in your nervous system where you are stuck on for an extended period of time, then dump down into freeze when it all gets too much for the body. And you cycle through the extremes of fight flight and freeze, never actually achieving regulation in the body. This is exacerbated by a narrow window of tolerance you have, because you weren't taught how to process a wide range of emotions and have a flexible wide window. You can now only process a narrow amount, and any more gets you overwhelmed. So how do we achieve safety? As a child, we could have gotten safety by co-regulating our nervous system with our caregiver's nervous system, if theirs was a safe nervous system to co-regulate with, and we would have learnt we're safe from the calm in their system. Now specifically for abandonment trauma, which was caused in a relational setting, i.e. a personal situation, caused you to feel or sense abandonment, it didn't just sporadically arise out of its own. This type of trauma needs to be healed relationally, so by feeling connected to and supported and loved by another, because that's how the trauma occurred in the first place. In order to feel safe in the body now, we need to mimic this process of co-regulation with parts inside of us that are unaffected by trauma, and experiences in the body that bring us into a healthy, regulated state, and teach the younger, more vulnerable and abandoned parts within us that there is safety inside us in fact. So depending on your level of body awareness, I want you to learn the process of resourcing. This is where you use an external stimulus to produce an internal sensation that reminds your nervous system that you are present, grounded and safe. In somatic experiencing, this looks like orienting, slowly looking around the room or looking at nature, whilst keeping half of your attention on the body and its sensations, tracking those sensations and noticing when you gaze upon something that gives you a pleasant sensation, which might feel like a tingling or a downward movement in the body. So you're welcome to go ahead and pause the video now, take a slow look around your room or look through the window outside, and see if you can rest your gaze on something that makes you feel good inside. Once you've found something to look at, really pay attention to the somatic sensation in your body that feels pleasant. There will be something in your body telling you that this is pleasant to look at. What is that? Allow yourself to drop into that, like swimming in a beautiful, clear lake. You're just lapping up the goodness of that sensation in your body. This is called resourcing, and it's a somatic sensation that can allow your abandonment trauma to co-regulate with. The next step is titration, which is a chemistry term, but it's used in somatics where you gradually introduce the strong emotion or trauma that needs processing in small, manageable doses. In terms of co-regulation within you, you're switching back and forth between your feeling of the internal resource we just established and the feeling of the abandonment trauma in your body. I like to describe this process as touching the edges of your trauma, instead of diving into the depths of unprocessed grief and sadness, you're just brushing the edges of them and noticing the effect that they have on your body. When you've had enough, you switch back into your internal resource. If you dive headfirst into your emotion, you'll likely experience a significant backlash internally. You'll overwhelm your parts, and you will break trust in the somatic process. Also, you need to reaffirm to your critical parts that think you can't be healed, because likely you've done things before where you have overwhelmed your system, but it's just simply human nature to go too fast too quickly, particularly when it comes to this work. This kind of work I'm teaching is extremely subtle and intuitively guided. You'll know you've touched on and have started to release your abandonment trauma when you feel subtle shifts of sensations in your body. Perhaps there'll be a more significant experience, like a client of mine who recently had a shooting pain of energy up one side of her body that stopped as soon as she stopped doing this internal work. Of course, once the butt of your abandonment trauma is shaken loose a little bit, you'll probably feel the urge to express somatically in more overt ways, like crying, shaking, dancing, or even screaming. These are all great signs. Your body has picked up on excess energy that it needs to shed, so let your body move in the way that it needs to move. But like I said earlier, somatic therapy that just involves gross movement like dancing, breath work, and yoga work with these larger, more general swathes of energetic trauma you've stored in your body, but they don't work to contact deeply the most vulnerable core wounds inside of you. Now, the reason this modality works is because you are using the power of co-regulation to heal a trauma that was created in relationship where co-regulation wasn't present. Your abandonment wound learns what it feels like to feel safe. It feels accepted and belonging in your internal family of parts within you. Rather than being the exile, the carrier of all the bad emotions that are unpleasant to feel like grief and sadness and loneliness, in that connection it learns to release and let go of those burdens quite naturally. If you were to describe your abandonment wound as your inner child, which I often do, your inner child is being connected to by a wiser, more mature, and secure part within you. Your inner child learns that it doesn't have to carry the torchlight of its past anymore, that it's safe to release what it's carrying because it can now trust you, your higher self to make the right decisions and choices that are in everyone's best interest. Now, I want to be fully transparent because as you know, I teach this work in Heal Your Heart School, and I see a real barrier that my clients come up against that I want to discuss with you if you're going to do this work. That barrier is that your abandonment trauma is covered over by a protector energy inside you that makes it difficult for you to contact and feel your vulnerable part, your inner child, and go through that titration process. Think of these internal emotional defenses are the protectors. The ways that we habitually avoid feeling things, or we block ourselves from processing our emotions, or we just avoid or distract ourselves, or keep ourselves busy so that we don't slow down enough to feel. The workaround here is to understand that your inner defenses genuinely believe they are doing the right thing in distracting you from your vulnerabilities, and that avoidance and distraction and busy work is a good thing. In fact, I commonly see people trying to heal from their protector parts. They do all this healing work that doesn't actually amount to anything, but they feel productive because at least they're doing something. It's busy healing work, but they don't see any permanent change because they haven't accessed the deepest abandonment trauma. You'll likely need to start by connecting to your inner defenses, the inner protector standing guard at the gate, stopping you from feeling feelings that your abandonment trauma holds. For example, if when you start this work you feel a strong urge to flee or distract yourself, I want you to take a breath before you follow that urge and ask yourself, what am I trying to avoid feeling in this moment? See if you can stop and lean into that emotion just a little bit. Sometimes defense is purely a habit, but sometimes it's genuinely because you aren't ready to feel that emotion, and I want you to pay close attention to that. Don't force yourself in. Respect your protectors. Work with them in overtime by listening to them. You will gain their trust, and they'll see that you're genuine. You want to peek under the hood because you now have the emotional and nervous system capacity to do so. You didn't back then when you were a child, but you do now as an adult. So this has been an in-depth video into the deep work I do inside Heal Your Heart School. So if this video has spoken to you, I highly recommend you book a call to speak with me about how I might be able to help you. We can go through this whole process, and I can show you what healing is going to look like for you. You can book a call with me at the link below in my calendar. And here are some next steps for you to watch so you can move one step closer to healing your abandonment trauma, being emotionally available, and having beautiful, genuine, authentic relationships. And for now, I'll see you in the next video.