How And Why To Release Emotional Trauma

“The Organs Weep The Tears The Eyes Refuse To Shed” – William Oslar, Father of Modern Medicine.

I heard this recently and it stopped me in my tracks. I paused and linked it to all I have learned over the last few years about the third component of vitality….your emotional state.

In Today’s World, we are so conditioned to suppress our emotions and to not deal them. We don’t listen to them. We have emotions for a reason. They’re often there as action signals for change. We are not listening to them though. We distract ourselves in this age of “hyper distraction” with entertainment / social media food / alcohol / drugs and rarely address our emotions. This is how we’re living these days and this way of living is paying its toll on us.

I’ve recently started to really gain a solid understanding about the importance of looking after your emotional state – namely, managing emotions such as stress, anxiety and depression, and releasing trauma and mental blockages. We are not taught about this at school. Doctors are not taught this. Our parents were not taught this. Yet it plays a major part in dis-ease such as cancer. When you reframe cancer as nothing but a symptom of toxicity in the body and unbalance of the body, rather than a disease we must all fear, it becomes so much easier so do everything we can to avoid it, and how to reverse it if we do get it. I’ve learned a lot about cancer over the last couple of years from some of the world’s leading pioneers and from watching The Truth About Cancer series and attending their live symposium in Texas in October. I now consider cancer as nothing but a sign of toxicity in the body and a suppressed immune system. (Cancer cannot grow in a healthy immune system.)

Genetics may play a part but remember that food is epigenetic – this means we can override a genetic predisposition to getting something by what we put in our mouth. Not many people know this. You can come from a whole family of cancer sufferers or diabetes sufferers and show absolutely no signs of following suit providing you don’t do what they do. If you do what they do, then the chances of it developing are much higher. So don’t do what they do; Invest time and money in educating yourself about how it develops and do everything in your power to be in a peak state of health and vitality. That means ignoring most conventional wisdom and what you see in the news unfortunately.

So why do I say all this? Where does toxicity come from? It can come from an unnatural food supply (man-made foods, trans fats, excess sugar, poor quality grains (like the modern wheat grain in America), poor quality udder milk, the chemicals our vegetables and fruits are grown in (pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides), GMOs etc. The list is endless. Toxicity can come from the environment – metals and chemicals we’re exposed to. It can come from drugs we take. (Remember that every drug bar none comes with side effects, every drug is a toxin, they all attack the liver and every one of them causes an imbalance in the body. Most suppress the immune system.) Toxicity can come from viruses / bacterial infections /pathogens / fungi etc that create toxicity in the body. Any exposure to toxins and ‘foreign invaders’ trigger inflammation – your body’s defence mechanism to what it perceives as an attack on it. All chronic diseases start with chronic inflammation. The great news is once we’re aware of these – we can reverse inflammation with relative ease. We must first be aware though, and we must measure for it! Again, we are not told how to do this and doctors do not test for it, until something serious happens. Why not test before something serious happens?

Toxicity also comes from emotions and this is what I want to talk about now. It took a while to get here but one of my greatest takeaways from some of the world’s leading pioneers at The Truth About Cancer live symposium was the importance of looking after your emotional state. NO ONE TELLS US THIS!!! Unless you invest time and energy and money into learning about this outside of your working hours, you will probably not learn about how to manage your emotional state and you will not understand how trauma affects your immune system and more importantly, how to release trauma.

Let’s start with stress. If you’re a highly “stressed” person, or rather, you allow external strains to affect you in a negative way, raise your blood pressure, go into ‘fight or flight’, over time, this can get dangerous. In the book Flow, Living At The Peak Of Your Abilities, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi gave the definition of stress as being an internal response to an external strain. It’s actually our own choice how we react to external events – a very interesting point. Do you know of someone who’s so chilled out it’s almost annoying, and doesn’t seem to ever get ‘stressed?’ Conversely, do you know of someone who allows themselves to get stressed by the most menial of external strains? Guess which person has more emotional toxicity in their body. I’m still working on become the annoying person who doesn’t let anything phase him 🙂

The fight or flight mode is an essential survival tool – it raises your concentration to a high power state, almost super human state of mind, your adrenaline starts pumping, your heart rates rises, hormones go crazy in your body as you prepare to escape from….the attack of that tiger… Sadly, in today’s high-paced, competitive, fast-paced world with an extraordinary amount of pressure to succeed and meet the demands of others, a lot of us are living in a constant state of fight of flight.

You may have heard of the stress hormone cortisol. In short bouts, this is a very useful hormone. On a chronic scale, when you’re consistently in fight or flight, this creates toxicity in the body. It causes inflammation rather than suppress it (as it is normally good for). Stress alone can create dis-ease. This is why it’s essential to release stress from the body and to do so regularly. We’ve all heard that exercise is a fantastic way to do this. (Aerobic exercise is the no.1 method for emotional renewal according to Tony Schwartz, who wrote The Power Of Full Engagement.) This is just one reason to be physically active. (There are hundreds more.) I don’t like the word exercise – it creates a visceral reaction to some people! It just means moving your body. Other obvious ways to release stress are yoga, meditation, martial arts like Tai Chi, conscious breathing, going for a massage, relaxing in a spa, talking with a therapist. There are more. Of course, there is TRE which I will come onto in a minute.

Toxicity can also come from emotional trauma. It can come from emotional blockages. This is the part that is most often overlooked. If you’re a walking, talking, breathing human, you are carrying around trauma believe it or not. Unless you were taught from a young age exactly how to release this, you will be carrying around a degree of trauma. For some, it’s severe and is what many people will regard as trauma. For others, it might be as ‘menial’ as a really bad argument that happened in your childhood that left an imprint in your mind and in your nervous system. We often won’t regard that as a traumatic experience but it’s there, manifesting in some way, in your body, maybe an organ…

This is where TRE comes in. TRE stands for Trauma Release Exercises. TRE is effective for all sorts of emotional renewal – whether it’s stress or minor trauma or severe trauma, or anxiety or depression, TRE is an affective tool to release this strain and toxicity that is building in the body.

This is my understanding of TRE: Imagine what happens when a dog or animal is scared. What do they do afterwards? They shake themselves. This is a form of release of the traumatic energy that built up in the body. It built up in the nervous system. Do humans do this? Of course not, we’d look pretty silly now wouldn’t we. Actually, the reason we don’t do this is as we grow up we’re indirectly taught to suppress our emotions. TRE is a way for the body to release trauma from the body by way of shaking and vibrating of the muscles.

Before I did TRE, I became aware of how the body can release trauma by shaking. I had a healing session with a lady and I had no idea what was happening with my legs. They started to shake uncontrollably. She explained to me that this was trauma being released.

So when I had my TRE session, this made absolute sense to me. I first went through a sequence of exercises to fatigue the muscles in my legs and across my abdomen (where we store most trauma.) I then laid on my back and was guided to a position where my legs felt like they developed a mind of their own. It wasn’t just muscle fatigue. The shaking sensations came in waves. They didn’t happen constantly as if I were doing a deadlift in the gym. This was effectively my nervous system providing an outlet for stored trauma to be released from my body. It was liberating and afterwards I was asked how I felt. My response was “super chilled.” I could have fall asleep in fact. Instead, I decided to go and write about it.

If you’d like to to hear more about how Anahita came about to study and retrain as a TRE coach, have a listen to this podcast about how she healed her chronic pain. All doctors wanted to do was give her drugs / pain killers and narcotics and / put her on antidepressants. Thankfully she ignored that absurd advice and went on her own journey of self-healing. Little did she know that the chronic pain had very little to do with the mechanics of her body – and was mostly, if not all, down to the mind-body connection. It’s a great interview even if I do say so myself…

One of my favourite quotes from Anahita was “If the doctors are not qualified to find the root of my pain, they are certainly not qualified to treat the symptoms of it.” Boom!!

A snippet is here: