Trauma and Traumatic Anxiety: Using the Felt Sense to Heal

Traumatic anxiety, as described by Peter Levine, is an aroused state that will not go away. There is always a sense of danger lurking, an obsessive search for the danger and not being able to locate it, dissociation, helplessness, and a sense of impending death.

Denial and Avoidance of Trauma and Symptoms

Denial is one way people respond to trauma. The body is neurocepting danger, but the mind goes on as if nothing happened. Maybe someone claims nothing happened. Maybe the person is too resigned by their symptoms and doesn’t try to find a way back. 

Either way, denial and amnesia are ways people respond the experience of trauma. 

The mind can learn to dismiss the signals from the nervous system and emotional centers of the brain, even though the alarm bells keep ringing. The stress response system keeps telling the muscles to tense for mobilization or to collapse for immobilization. The organs are physiologically affected and only gain attention when an illness arises. 

Not knowing we are traumatized doesn’t save us from the aftereffects of it. The symptoms can be so intense, most of us attempt to repress the intense responses. 

If someone is able to release their denial, there will be a following release of compressed energy and a very pivotal time in their healing journey to not take lightly. If someone can let go of their denial, it means the person now feels safe enough to do so, they have hit the bottom end of their tolerance of their symptoms, or another trauma or trigger brings to the surface what has long been denied. 

Another way we respond to trauma is avoidance. Avoiding situations that could be triggering can be a temporary solution after trauma, but unfortunately this defensive strategy cannot withstand much stress at all. Stress will break down this defensive strategy and the person will be flooded with the original energy stored within the body. 

Avoidance is an attempt to keep arousal energy of any kind in check. But this also leaves us vulnerable to any shift in our energy to be a trigger for intense emotions and uncomfortable sensations. 

Eventually avoidance behaviors will make our world so small. We will constrict ourselves to a point where there is nothing left to avoid, and then what?

We begin to re-experience the original event we have been trying to avoid, but usually this is beyond our consciousness and shows up as emotions and sensations when aroused. 

This confused energy is funneled through the experience of emotions such as rage, shame, terror, and hatred and labeled as negative. 

These negative emotions then become so entangled with the energy of arousal, that any kind of arousal or life energy we feel becomes blocked, avoided, denied, because we associate it to negative emotions. 

If we begin to know trauma by the symptoms, instead of placing so much emphasis on the event, we will be able to connect the symptoms to their roots. 

A place where we can learn to discharge and heal from. The symptoms will naturally dissipate. 

Panic and Traumatic Anxiety

The past is not in the past if there is continuous discomfort in the body. There is anxiety and then there is traumatic anxiety. 

Traumatic anxiety, as described by Peter Levine, is an aroused state that will not go away. There is always a sense of danger lurking, an obsessive search for the danger and not being able to locate it, dissociation, helplessness, and a sense of impending death. 

This extreme anxiety surrounds the fear of entering into the immobility response and the experience of coming up out of it. Both of these experiences warn us that there is something wrong. 

People who have been through trauma experience the overwhelm of constant visceral warning signals of danger. In an attempt to turn off the continual sensations, the only option is to ignore what is going on internally, or to disregard our gut feelings. 

Unfortunately ignoring the warning signs doesn’t make them go away. Instead the opposite happens. The more we try to push away the sensations, the bigger and louder and more debilitating and bizarre they become. The more we try to hide from ourselves, the more susceptible we are to completely shutting-down or being overridden with panic and overwhelm. 

The fear of fear itself takes hold. 

Panic is essentially the fear of sensations in the body that occur during a panic attack. While identifying the trigger and the irrational component of it may be helpful to some extent, the heart of the repeated panic attacks is the fear of the sensations themselves. Panic feels like a full body emergency. 

During trauma fear is frozen. This experience signifies to the body that there is no escape. This fear of being trapped is at the center of panic. Flooded with fear, but no way to get out of it. 

The fear is so powerful that someone can become hostage to it, until the relationship to the sensations and visceral experience changes. 

The shift happens when we stop ignoring the body’s signals. When we know that suppressing our inner needs and cries doesn’t stop the stress response. When these messages become guideposts away from danger and towards what is nourishing. We develop trust in our ability to self-regulate.

Coming Out of Immobility

To lift ourselves out of the immobility response after a traumatic experience(s), we have to uncouple the fear that is associated with it. 

We often experience powerful surges of emotions that can be frightening as we reemerge from the depths. This rise in energy has been bound up with terror and rage for some time, and can create more fear as it surfaces. Unfortunately, this fear can trigger another bout of immobility, and thus continuing the vicious cycle of trauma. 

The cycle of trauma looks like this:

Arousal- unsuccessful escape- fear and helplessness- immobility- arousal 

When aroused again, and experiencing another incident of not being able to escape, we continue on this circular timeline, but on a physiological level, the amount of energy necessary to immobilize again has compounded. We see more symptoms, more frozen energy, as the immobility becomes more chronic and intense and requires a larger energy expenditure to contain it. 

The more energy being used to contain trauma energy, the more symptoms we experience.

The beautiful piece here, is recognizing the drive to complete the stress response cycle and move out of immobility is ALWAYS there, no matter how much time has passed. 

The movement out of immobility and back into life looks like:

Immobility- arousal- discharge of energy- successful escape- empowerment

The arousal cycle is part of being human. But trauma introduces fear into this process and we learn to distrust arousal. 

The healing happens in real time. When we can use our felt sense to mobilize the powerful energy of bound trauma. 

Sometimes it happens in condensed moments, and other times in a gradual process. The most important piece is not letting the return of energy, or the next arousal to overwhelm us and send us back into immobility. 

The Felt Sense

Peter Levine said, “The felt sense encompasses the clarity, instinctual power, and fluidity necessary to transform trauma.” 

Felt sense is a physical experience, rather than a cognitive one. It is felt by using body awareness. How do we feel about a person or an event in our bodies? Where do we feel this in our body? What is the description of this sensation in our body? 

Felt sense is all encompassing and alive in the moment. It makes any experience or memory more intense. It can be experienced in pieces or fragments, or name your entire aura. It may begin to gather information through your senses, but it also interprets information from the tension being held in your body, the posture you hold, and the movements enacted. Felt sense is about noticing tightness, temperature, pressure, constriction, expansion, and many more sensations. 

Developing a felt sense means going below emotions. Emotions and thoughts do contribute to the felt sense and can influence it. However, felt sense is simply awareness to internal body sensations. To get underneath emotions such as anger, or sadness, or anxiety we need to discover the physical sensation that exists deeper within the body. 

The felt sense is where and how we meet our symptoms, which can be a reflection of our trauma. Instead of going head on into the trenches with trauma, we enter through the felt sense to free up the energies that have been frozen by the trauma. 

It is helpful to establish a baseline understanding of what pleasure and relaxation feel like. This helps to create an anchor to come back to when experiencing the felt sense of distressing emotions and past experiences. 

A portal to connect to the felt sense begins with awareness to breath, movement, postures, body language, and gestures, especially while discussing traumatic experiences. Noticing when language says you are fine, but when your body says you aren’t. This discrepancy can be enlightening and distressing simultaneously. 

Noticing felt senses for the first time can be extremely triggering. The body may become defensive in posture and may showcase how the body responded to the traumatic event, known as somatic reenactment. 

It’s important to not allow the exploration of felt sense to become an experience of re-traumatization. To go slow and to respect any freeze sensations that arise. It is not helpful to continue to explore the past if the body becomes frozen. 

Through the felt sense we can learn to reconnect physical sensations to psychological events. This connection gifts us the return to self and the reconnection to the parts of us that have split off and fragmented from trauma. 

Emotions get entangled with trauma symptoms. We need to recognize the felt sense that underlies the emotion so that we can resolve the trauma. Sensations are derived from symptoms and symptoms originated from blocked energy. To heal trauma, we need to get to that energy, so that we can release it. Within this energy is the power to transform the trauma. 

The felt sense is what invites us home to our bodies. By attending to it, we find more grounding and more sensuality within our experiences. Through our felt sense we become reconnected to our instinctual voice and guide that was cut off from trauma. 

The felt sense is at the center of being human and sometimes we don’t even become aware of it unless we are attending to it. It is complex, ambiguous, and always transforming. It gets our attention through varying degrees of intensity that ultimately can shift our perspectives. The felt sense is part of who we are and how we experience this. 

The felt sense is a way to gently reinitiate the instinctual processing of energy, and therefor, completing the stress response cycle and protecting against further post-traumatic stress.