Information alone doesn’t heal your nervous system

Trauma healing has become mainstream! Something I thought I would never see happen.

It’s indeed wonderful that we now have so many books on this subject and so much useful information online and on social media.

With so much data available it’s easy for our minds to do what it knows best. To search, to try to understand, to figure out. Easily becoming an expert on the subject.

It’s important to notice that trauma healing and nervous system regulation take place within a completely different paradigm. It’s an experiential approach. Although somatic psychoeducation is part of the process, needing to have full memories, making meaning or fully understanding why certain things happened is not crucial for it to work.

As Dr Peter Levine says:

“ You don’t have to know the facts of your story to be able to reprogram the symptoms or the outcome.”

In Somatic Experiencing (SE) we access deeper parts of the brain through the body.
We get in touch with “lost” memories not by trying to make sense of our stories. But by slowing down and accessing sensations within the body. This is called bottom up approach.

The beauty of this view point is that it also allows us to still make meaning and engage with thoughts, but these activities come from a deeper place while in touch with the body

With this in mind, please continue to enjoy the array of information you can find online on this fascinating field, but never forget to put into practice what you learn by adding resources to your daily life (see my highlights titled “Resources” for info on this) and if possible give yourself the gift of working with a practitioner you feel safe with, so that you can start to feel what’s like to co-regulate with another human being who is regulated themselves.

Your own system truly welcomes co-regulating with another human being, as this is something many of us didn’t experience growing up.