Sometimes the most meaningful reasons to recover aren’t universal—they are deeply personal. They live in the quiet recognition of how toxic stress and trauma have shaped your energy, your relationships, the way you relate to yourself and even your health. Recovery often begins close to home—with your own lived experience. When you recognize you are thwarted from progressing, it can become a powerful entry point for change. These personal reasons are not about comparison; they are about listening inward and acknowledging what your system has been communicating all along.
This post is part of a series: toxic stress and trauma.
Part of reaching readiness to lean into recovery is grappling with the realities of living with trauma(s) compared with the pathway and the promise of recovery and living without. This post looks at three personal reasons that you might need / want to move away from and what you might need / want to move into as it relates to toxic stress and trauma(s).
If you are wanting to use these reasons to help someone else, maybe just share the post with them and let them decide if and when to read it and whether or not to consider it. Don’t try to convince and don’t push.
Toxic Stress and Trauma Keeps Us from Our SELF.
Recovery Reconnects Us with our SELF.
The SELF arises from many different aspects and processes. Trauma(s) involve a disconnection and sort of fracturing of SELF. It’s not the kind of fracture that happens when we break a leg- so is not visible on a brain scan. Rather, it’s an emotional, psychological, and spiritual fracturing that is experienced. The more significant the trauma(s), the more significant the disconnection and fracturing.
At least four things contribute to this.
First, toxic stress and trauma disrupt core things like safety, security, and survival. This experience undermines our sense of wholeness because what was previously experienced as solid and dependable within us and within our circumstances has given way, fragmenting our wholeness.
Second, toxic stress and trauma(s) in particular position us more frequently or consistently in survival defense states within the nervous system. As this happens, we become more defined by the limbic and reptilian brain and their qualities and abilities, that come from reactivity and survival, rather than the qualities and abilities of the prefrontal cortex that reflect such things as self-awareness, compassion, curiosity, creativity, flexibility, connection to self, courage, clarity, calmness, and soul or spirituality.
In fact, some approaches to trauma recovery believe that various survival parts arise to handle the trauma by fracturing off from the SELF.
Third, trauma(s) involve subconscious emotional learnings that were determined at the height of fear and overwhelm. They include core beliefs about how we see and experience ourselves. This can become significantly altered reflecting a loss of wholeness.
Fourth, trauma(s) in childhood that involve relationships with caregivers impact our sense of self, rather than providing us with our needs such that we would develop a solid SELF, the trauma(s) are undermining and leave us with insecure selves.
A loss of SELF has pretty big implications. It’s harder to feel solid in ourselves. It’s harder to love and care for ourselves. It’s harder to have self-awareness and grow forward through challenges and mistakes. It’s harder to know our likes and dislikes, our values, and our vision for our lives. It is harder to really know and connect with ourselves and others. It is hard to know and experience ourselves as spirit or soul and to cultivate this knowing into our sense of self and how we live our lives.
Restoration and recovery support reconnection with ourselves in a few important ways.
By regulating our nervous system and resolving triggers, we are more often able to function from a nervous state of social engagement which is a prerequisite for connection to SELF.
We gain awareness of the ways that we survived and any survival parts that we might be functioning from. This allows us to choose our responses more intently rather than reacting automatically from survival.
As we process the underlying trauma(s), we are freed from functioning from the reptilian and limbic brains. This allows us to function from the prefrontal cortex and the qualities of SELF.
We may also reconnect with our spirit or soul if this is our truth, further mending previous disconnection. This allows us to experience and live from our wholeness and the deeper truth of who we are.
Toxic Stress and Trauma Arrest our Development and Impede the Unfolding of our Potential.
Recovery restarts our Development.
The matter of IQ (intelligence quotient) came up randomly in a conversation with a man I was in relationship with several years ago. Although I never asked to know it, he proactively shared that he had been tested and knew his IQ but was not comfortable sharing it with me. He explained, that if he told me his IQ, I would know that he had not reached his potential. Can you relate?
Potential of course, is based on many factors, intelligence being only one of them. Many things need to develop and be supported to develop within us so that we might unfold into our potential. We can have all the intelligence in the world, but if we do not develop resilience, for example, we will fall back in the face of challenges. Or we can be provided all the external supports and opportunities but if we do not have the sense of SELF to step into them, they will merely fall away.
Inner development unfolds based on genetic makeup, temperament, personality, and what is happening within us, as well as through the interaction with safety, stimulation, and supports in our environment.
If the safety, stimulation, and supports within our environments, especially with our caregivers, are largely appropriate and adequate, we thrive. Our development unfolds along a trajectory that is pretty close to our potential.
If the safety, stimulation, and supports within our environments are limited, inadequate, or harmful, we are thwarted. Our development unfolds along a lower or lesser trajectory than our potential. The more time that passes, the wider that gap becomes and the further we fall behind what could have been.
Toxic stress and trauma not only impact our overall and day to day functioning, they impact our development. Nervous system dysregulation, brain alterations, prolonged stress load, encapsulated trauma memories, emotional learning constructs, and all of the adaptations that result thwart our potential. They can’t not.
They can impact learning, trying new things, and taking risks. They can impact how we respond to challenges and setbacks. They can impact our motivation. They can impact play and rest. They can impact creativity. They can impact dignity and sense of worth. They can impact hopefulness. They can impact our belief in ourselves. They can impact our mood and how we handle our emotions. They can impact our general outlook on life and whether we see the glass as half full, half empty, or broken. They can impact what we think is possible and what we think we are capable of. They can impact supporting and standing up for ourselves. They can impact our sense of control and efficacy in our own lives. They can impact the values we hold. They can impact our sense of responsibility and stepping up and taking accountability when we’ve messed up or harmed someone. They can impact our spirituality and our experience of connection with what is beyond.
Leaning into our restoration and recovery helps us first to resolve the underlying toxic stress and trauma(s). It also helps us recognize and face what is. And grieve the gap between our potential and what could have been and what is.
After that, we get to decide to what degree and in what ways we want to engage in arrested development or expand into our missed potential. And because we have resolved the underlying toxic stress and trauma(s), and how they are impacting us, we have renewed energy and capability to grow ourselves in new ways.
Toxic Stress and Trauma Acts like a Kindling Process that Can Contribute to Many Health Issues.
Recovery can Start to Halt the Health Impacts and Potentially Even Start to Reverse Them.
The more we learn about the neurophysiology of toxic stress and trauma, the more we understand the wide-ranging impact they have on our health and well-being.
Essentially, stress related conditions and trauma(s) involve many neurophysiological changes (e.g., ongoing stress activation, dysregulated nervous system, changes in the production of several neurotransmitters, changes in the immune system’s response). It can even result in epigenetic changes that alter how a gene is expressed e.g., silencing how the stress response is regulated.
These changes lead to a physiological kindling process through time that can result in any number of or multiple physical health issues.
Adverse Childhood Events (traumas) are linked to far greater likelihood of a variety of diseases including but not limited to cancer, lung disease, diabetes, asthma, headaches, autoimmune disease, fibromyalgia, tumors, depression, ulcers, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, ischemic heart disease, multiple sclerosis, lupus, irritable bowel syndrome, and chronic fatigue.
For more information consult these posts: Toxic Stress and Its Toll; Types of Trauma
Doing the work to restore and recover ourselves from toxic stress and trauma can significantly contribute to changes in our affected neurophysiology.
Regulating our nervous system such that we are not in a constant state of stress response activation is hugely beneficial to our health. We are designed to have temporary stress activation and then return to equilibrium. Getting ourselves back here is life and health changing.
Learning strategies for healthy coping and self-care contributes to our health and well-being, including potentially reversing physiological changes.
Returning ourselves to lives that have rest and restorative sleep helps to settle the body and resume the natural detoxifying and cleansing processes.
Shifting the damaging lifestyle factors that we used to cope and survive such as substance use, emotional eating, gambling, self harm, and high risk taking improves our health and well-being.
Processing grief, loss, and distress unburdens things.
Developing positive social supports improves our health status.
Releasing the encapsulated traumatic memories, in the case of trauma, also frees us and stops the internal distress that has been broadcasting since the trauma occurred.
As you may know from personal experience, toxic stress and trauma(s) can have significant personal impacts on us in terms of our sense of SELF, limiting potential, and contributing to health issues. These can be compelling reasons to reach for recovery if you need to.
And while recovery isn’t easy, there is a beauty to it. It is compounding. As we gain recovery, we gain SELF. And as we gain SELF recovery becomes easier and faster.
With Humility, Hope, and Heart,
| Related Posts: Blog Category: Stress and Trauma |
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