Understanding the Language of Your Body
“A traumatized body is not damaged — it is deeply devoted.”
What follows is an introduction to The Golden Path’s lens on trauma, somatics and a way of discovering safety and awakening in the body that meets the feminine heart.
There are many ways to understand and ‘work’ with trauma and somatics — teachings, teachers, education & studies, modalities, and lineages. This material is not meant to replace your own experiences or those studies.
The lens and teachings below are not fixed truths or conclusions. Nor are they professional advice or therapy. They are living invitations — a collection of insights, considerations, understandings, awarenesses — meant to be met with curiosity and possibility for how you might meet yourself, your body, and life itself.
Our animal body responds with instinctual languages of protection, safety and survival. These core languages exist in all of the natural world and are a reminder that we are nature.
The instinct to move toward the threat in an effort to protect, fight it or scare it off. This may show up like punching, throwing, hitting, kicking, screaming, running towards the threat, confronting head on.
Reactive, angry and tense, quick to emotional or physical aggression, regularly expressing judgements and disappointments, overwhelming feeling of being “wound up”, verbal and body cues of disgust, disappointment, withdrawal, closure, skepticism, distrust, undermining and sarcasm.
The instinct to move away, to create distance between yourself and the threat. This may show up as physically ejecting out of the space.
Constant thoughts/inspirations/ideas, over-scheduling, restlessness, feeling uncomfortable with quiet/stillness, overidentification with doing/being a doer, feeling bored unless entertained, checking the time/phone often, changing the subject often, avoiding confrontation, addictions and compulsions. The body and mind literally feel like it cannot slow down or stop, feeling an overwhelming need to escape or be done with a situation/conversation/experience, etc.
The instinct to become still, invisible. It is an immobility response. The body constricts, does not move or becomes limp and collapses to survive the threat by not provoking the threat/predator or becoming small/still it becomes invisible.
Signs may be “spacing out” or disassociating, feeling foggy and/or indecisive, feeling physically numb, unable to act or speak, feeling disoriented (not feeling the body in space and time — like a subtle anesthesia quality). Being stuck in Collapse as a subtype of a freeze may look like exhaustion, chronic fatigue, heaviness, depression, low motivation, emotionally numb, feeling flat, the feeling of giving up, what’s the point, etc.
The instinct to perform and please others to gain safety. We see fawning as a hybrid pattern — where the true self/expression becomes frozen while another part comes online to perform. In this case we hide our authentic response (which is often to fight or flee) and acquiesce to signs of “I am not a threat.” — I do not disappoint or confront and so on.
People pleasing as a baseline, being the “nice one”, feeling responsible for everyone, feeling exhausted from your relationship, chronic caretaking (caretaking to avoid another’s distress, avoid disconnection or confrontation), soothing, appeasing and/or deferral to our “captors” (Captors can be parents, peer groups, partners, children, clients) invisibility, exhaustion. Chronically saying yes when we really are a no.
Trauma is not the event that occurred. It is our body’s response to the event that was never able, not allowed or did not know how to complete the cycle of Regulation. In this case, our body does not orient to safety, it does not realize it has survived and it does not enter into a parasympathetic state. Instead it stays in contraction, tension, vigilance.
When life overwhelms us with an experience that is too fast, too soon, too much — our bodies flood with a charge of adrenaline. When we’re not able to discharge or metabolize that energy, it lodges in the body and becomes trauma.
The human body is designed to feel charge and discharge it.
A normal healthy survival cycle:
However, when the step of regulation is interrupted, the intense charge of energy remains trapped inside the body as it continues to believe it is unsafe. Traumatization occurs when the survival energy has nowhere to go, becoming a loop inside the nervous system rather than a movement through it.
From this place it stays chronically “on the look out” for anything and everything that can be a possible threat. This state of being shapes our being — we begin to make life choices, create an identity, behave, believe and express from a place of survival.
We also hold that trauma doesn’t even have to be “an event” — we can be traumatized by our own thoughts, memories, concepts or beliefs.
A traumatized body is not damaged—it is deeply devoted. It has worked overtime to protect you through real and imagined threats, often for decades.
To honor this devotion, we now take the steps to teach our body (and retrain our brain) to know how/when the danger has passed.
We do not need (nor do we really want) to eliminate our survival responses.
We simply need to help them rest once they have done their job.
The question is not: “What’s wrong with me?”
The question is: “Is my body’s response still congruent with my current reality?”
This takes presence and attunement to all the subtle ways the body will respond from survival.
Let us learn to move slowly enough inside that we can pause to speak safety into the body, to acknowledge ‘the danger has passed,’ — so She may rest, repair, and unfold naturally back into aliveness.
Not only is our body benevolent, but She is also Sovereign. She is not something to control, fix or lord over. She is a living intelligent being that deserves honor, respect, gratitude and admiration.
She digests, dreams, repairs, grows, and regulates without our conscious command, every single day. She is the very embodiment of being ALIVE.
Our role is not to dominate Her but to partner with Her. To listen to her subtle (and not so subtle) cues, to attune and even lovingly anticipate what She might need or want to feel safe, to honor Her innate wisdom…wise well beyond our mind…this body has existed in many different shapes and forms over not just this lifetime, but many lifetimes.
When we begin relating to our bodies rather than trying to dominate or lord over Her, our trauma (trapped energy) unwinds through the power of respect, curiosity, and tenderness — there you will find She reciprocates well beyond anything you would have imagined.
“Desire belongs to the mind—it dreams without limit.
Capacity belongs to the body—it has seasons, rhythms, and needs. We can stretch, reach and strive into more capacity, however if we wish for sustainable expansion, a place where we can receive and give more, this expansion takes respect, gentleness, attunement and time.
Learning to honor capacity over desire is what keeps us in right relationship with our energy, our growth, and our healing.”
Regulation happens when the nervous system comes down from activation— this might look like trembling, crying, roaring, shaking, deep breathing — the body completing its natural “discharge” cycle that it could not before or has not yet.
Modulation is the ability to move between the states of the cycle (Activation, Survival Response, Regulation) easily and fluidly, without getting stuck. We will always have (and want) our Nervous System cycle of protection, safety and survival to stay intact — we aim however to modulate well, so we do not become stuck in an exhausting state of survival looping behaviors and thinking.
Our success with somatic work depends on our ability to identify the difference between capacity and desire.
Desire is of the mind. It’s what you want or what you think you should be experiencing. Desire is infinite.
Capacity, however, is finite. Our bodies have limitations and these limitations are always changing based on seasons, hormone cycles, quality of sleep, what we’re eating, what we’re navigating in life at that moment.
Learning how to respect our limitations and work with our current capacity, instead of orienting to desire, can keep us in reciprocity with what we think we want & need vs what is actually possible for our body to give and receive in the now.
Capacity is a term that simply means the amount of room inside oneself to handle high sensation.
A body that has built resilience and capacity, is one with more space, more ease, and less constriction.
This means when high sensations enter the body they’re able to move freely through us instead of getting stuck inside of us and stored somewhere.
Life is inherently activating and stressful. There’s no avoiding it. Activation and stress is everywhere.
We can brace against it or we can expand into it. When a regulated body meets a stressful situation it can release the stress and trauma much more quickly and build resilience to experience future stressors with greater ease.
Safety is not a place outside of you. It does not exist in another being, experience or environment.
This doesn’t mean a particular environment or person doesn’t have an effect. It certainly can, but the most profound shift comes from your body trusting and connecting with its own capacity to meet what is.
“Please remember you are a multidimensional, multilayered being.
Your regulated Self and your dysregulated parts can coexist — both are welcome, both are holy.
There is nothing to fix here. Only attunement and care. More of you to Love.”
We all have access to the full range of survival responses — fight, flight, freeze, fawn — depending on the threat and our belief about our capacity to meet that threat, we will draw upon different responses.