*Trigger warning* This episode talks about trauma, what it is, signs of trauma, complexity of trauma, self healing, etc. If you have experienced trauma that has significantly impacted you please proceed at your own discretion.

In today's episode of the Live Life Extraordinary podcast, we're going to be talking about trauma and about self healing. Everybody on Earth has experienced some sort of trauma at some point within our lives. We often believe that trauma is a major event like what war veterans experience or someone in an abusive relationship experiences or someone in a really bad car accident experiences. But trauma very simply put, is anything that dysregulates the central nervous system. So you could be walking out of the bathroom at your house and someone that you live with as a joke could jump out to scare you and if it is a form of dysregulation, it was a form of trauma. It seems really, really silly but it's important for us to recognize this because there are a lot of traumatic experiences that happen in our lives and unless we are learning what trauma really is, and how it presents itself, and how we can heal it and move through it and process it, then we're going to continue to live with all of these experiences ingrained in our body, our minds, our hearts and our souls. And it's going to hold us back from being the version of the self that we want to be and living the version of our lives that we desire to live. 

In terms of trauma, the complexity of trauma has nothing to do with how severe the trauma is but at what age you experienced the trauma, which I think is very fascinating. Simple trauma is any type of trauma we experience in our adult years, complex trauma is anything we experience in our childhood years. This is because between the ages of zero and seven, everything that we are experiencing as we are in those developmental phases, gets ingrained within our bodies and our minds as the foundation. So if we are starting life in very traumatic situations, we are forming a foundation based on these situations, and then it's a little bit more challenging to heal from them. 

Regardless of whether you have trauma that's simple or complex, there is space for healing. If you’re an adult and you're not sure whether you have any trauma that you're holding on to and that's inhibiting your life, some of the signs that you can recognize of trauma are being chronically upset, whether that's chronically anxious, or depressed, or frustrated or angry or sad, or anything like that. And it might seem like there's no root to it, like “I just always felt irritated and I don't know why” or “I'm just always so frustrated and I don't know why”.

Another thing is chronic pain. If you are somebody who has chronic pain and you've gone to a doctor and a chiropractor and a massage therapist, yet for some reason, there seems to be no root cause, it could be mental and emotional trauma that has been stored within your physical body that is now being stuck there. Unfortunately, as humans, we are taught to be strong and to be rigid, and to hold ourselves together and to pull ourselves together, so we don't allow ourselves the time or the space to sit and  process what we've gone through and release it.

Resources I’ve used to heal trauma: licensed therapists, yoga, breathwork, EFT, Meditation.

Regardless of where you're at in your journey. My hope is that this was informative, and gave you some new perspectives so that you can move forward in an empowered way. Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode, and I cannot wait to connect with you again in another episode of the Live Life Extraordinary podcast.

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