notes on freedom
A weekly email series containing easily digestible morsels of info on relational trauma and how to find freedom from it.
THIS WEEK IT’S A NOTE ON…embodied safety
Trauma healing involves waking-up. Slowly, very very slowly, we become aware of the things we’ve been avoiding and supressing. We become aware of our old patterning, our traumatic beliefs, our wounded younger parts and our survival adaptations. We also become aware of our body, our emotions and our sensations.
Trauma healing, then, is a process of moving out of autopilot and disconnection, and into awareness and connection. But waking-up and reconnecting to what we’ve been avoiding and supressing can only be an expansive, healing experience if we can hold and tolerate what we are feeling and seeing.
Trauma healing involves widening our window of tolerance so we can ‘hold’ and be with the uncomfortable emotions and sensations we’ve been pushing away. If we can’t tolerate a new sensation, a feeling, a thought, a realisation, a memory – if it feels too much for us to handle – our nervous system perceives it to be threatening and pushes us into fight-flight-freeze.
Widening our window of tolerance is a slow, gentle process born from moments of comfort, safety and connection, not from moments of endurance and pain. Essentially, as we learn to feel incrementally safer in our body, we can tolerate (read as ‘be with’) more reality, more emotion, more sensation, more truth.
What I’m trying to say is that pretty much before we do anything else, we need to learn how to feel safer. Nothing can open, move, shift or heal before we feel just a fraction safer (and then, a month later, a fraction safer again).
Signalling safety to your nervous system is not the thing you do before you do your trauma healing. Signalling safety to your nervous system is trauma healing.
Like everything, it’s very easy to over think this idea. So, let’s keep it simple. Feeling safer in your body is about becoming aware of little, often fleeting, moments of relief, release, comfort or connection. Really, it’s as simple as noticing things that feel good to your body. Smiling, being in nature, placing your hand on your heart, a snuggly blanket, walking in the grass with your shoes off, laughing, cuddling someone, cuddling yourself, cuddling your pet, a warm shower, a bath, yoga, dance, any movement. Anything that feels good is where it’s at.
Embodied safety is the facilitator of deep healing and real change. If you want to change and heal, you start here – noticing, allowing and being in little moments that feel comfortable.
With love,
S. x
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Sarah Woodhouse is a trauma expert, research psychologist and writer who delivers people the knowledge and tools to recognise and overcome self-defeating cycles, to achieve personal freedom and success. Please follow her on Instagram, Facebook or X for all the latest updates.
