“Trauma is not what happens to you, it is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.”
Bessel van der Kolk
Cover art by Hilary Jones
To be very clear, what I’m sharing in this post is speculation based on personal experience. I can’t point anyone at any evidence that backs it up. I’ll start with what we do know – that there does seem to be a relationship between inflammation based pain, and trauma history. People with fibromyalgia seem to be more likely than not to have trauma history. There is growing evidence that what happens around trauma doesn’t just impact on your mind and feelings and that there can be bodily consequences – hardly a wild though, it is all the same system after all.
One of the psychological consequences of trauma, can be hyper-vigilance. You’re always looking for threats, you can’t relax. Busy spaces, people behind you, noise, unexpected touch or sounds – all of these things can cause panic and ptsd responses for some people. But of late I’ve been wondering whether that really is a purely psychological issue.
I carry a lot of tension in my body, and this contributes to experiencing pain and stiffness. Anxiety and stress in the body manifest as fight/flight/freeze/appease responses – that’s been established. So, we might fairly assume there is some kind of process that precedes fight, flight etc. Normal people do not spend all of their time poised to run away, and get to be happier and healthier as a consequence. Cortisol and adrenaline are part of this mix, for sure. What if being on alert all the time is a bodily process? What if hyper-vigilance is something that happens not just in my head, but in my tissues? Could that be why I spend so much time sore and in pain?
If that’s so, then the next question is, how do I persuade my body to stand down? How do I persuade my body that I am safe enough now, and that I do not have to be poised to run away or ready to freeze and disassociate? How do I teach my body to feel safe? I shall be exploring this and will come back if I make any progress.
After my first and rather speculative blog about hypervigilance in the body, I immediately started running into information about this. Apparently it is a thing, and there is proper research out there, and poking about with a search engine can lead you to articles and information. Hypervigilance is not simply a condition of the mind. I’m finding that just knowing this has changed how I feel about it.
I know from experience that pushing and training my mind is an option I have. I can be fairly brutal with my head in terms of what I demand of myself. Most of my coping mechanisms depend on making my brain deal with things. I know it is much harder to push myself emotionally that way. It doesn’t work at all with my body. I can force my body to ignore pain and distress, but they don’t go away. I’m increasingly suspicious that forcing my brain doesn’t really solve anything, it just moves the problems around, but that’s a post for another day.
If the hypervigilance is in my body, then I will have to work on calming my body, not forcing it to deal with things. If I want to be better. There are often issues for me around the work involved with being better, the inconvenience it might cause, and what I might have to ask of other people.
I’ve also been talking recently (in this post) about what soothes and comforts my body in the first place – and not much does. Putting the two together has at least given me the mechanics for why I can only nap with a cat. That I have issues with light is a hypervigilance thing. I don’t sleep well with lights on. But, cats calm me, and the presence of a cat can be more powerful than the impact of light.
I think one of the missing pieces in this puzzle may well be kindness. Being kind to me has never seemed like a priority. I push through fear, and pain and difficulty routinely. Feelings of safety, comfort, relaxation, release, tranquillity and ease have never been much of a priority. I suspect that part of why my body is always tensed for the next threat is that I don’t give it much time off, or recovery time, nor do I do anything much restorative after difficult experiences. That in turn depends on stories about what I should be able to do, what’s normal, what’s a reasonable expectation, and that I was probably just making a fuss in the first place.
I’m not currently sure what to do with any of this. I find it useful having explanations for what’s going on. Whether the answer is simply to accept this is how things are for me, or to look at what it would take to make changes, I am unsure.
Nimue Brown
Nimue Brown is an author, dreamer, folk enthusiast and parent. She has her own blog as well as patreon. She is always exploring life as a Pagan and seeking good and meaningful ways to be. She has published many renowned books on Druidry including ‘Druidry and the Ancestors: Finding our place in our own history‘ and ‘Druidry and Meditation.’ Read more about her here.
Collaborative online journal on folk belief.
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