Healing emotional wounds frees you up to achieve your goals
Is there anything you’ve wanted to do in life, but your fears make it really hard?
That’s how I felt about my TikTok account. I had wanted to create videos for years. I wanted to be creative and expressive, like other people I saw on social media. They seemed so free and it looked so fun. When I went to create my first video, all insecurities and fears of judgment flared up and I got psyched out.
No matter how much I practiced my nervousness wasn’t getting much better either. I had been doing personal growth and healing work since 2002, but had reached a plateau in my performance anxiety. In 2020, I discovered trauma resolution that finally helped with deeper nervous system regulation and I decided to focus on growing my TikTok account to track how much I was really healing.
What exactly is trauma and how does it affect our brains and nervous system?
A traumatic event is a life experience that involves actual or perceived threats to your safety and well-being (or to someone close to you). It doesn’t have to be only a physical threat, psychological safety can also feel like life or death, especially to children. Belonging, acceptance, and approval feel crucial to children who depend on adults for survival.
Feeling helpless and threatened in this way with no integration, can change the way your brain and nervous system function, and the more trauma you have, the more easily you go into a survival state. The survival state is the most unregulated state and in it, you may be triggered by fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or feel helpless and in trouble. In a survival state, you can’t fully access your pre-frontal cortex, the part of the brain that is key to reasoning, problem-solving, comprehension, impulse control, creativity, and perseverance.
Benefits of trauma work:
- With trauma work, we free up bound energy and release stored emotional responses from the past, so you feel safer in your body in the present.
- Your nervous system becomes more resilient and the survival state isn’t triggered as easily.
- Feeling safer in your body frees up energy, allows you to open up your heart, and think more clearly. When your heart is relaxed and open, it informs the brain that it’s safe to create, awaken, and raise its consciousness out of survival.
I have a positive mindset. Isn’t that enough?
I’d had a great coach for decades. It was helpful, but it still felt like swimming upstream all the time. The fear of being judged created so much anxiety in my body that took a lot of effort to overcome. It was exhausting.
We can’t simply think or logic our way through a survival responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) because the responses come from the part of the nervous system that is involuntary and automatic. We can override some of our fears, but the responses will still be there – elevated heart rate, tension, shallow breathing, etc. It’s more sustainable for the long haul to actually integrate that which hasn’t been healed.
When I was first creating videos on TikTok, I was only able to make one a week. It took a lot of effort to overcome my insecurities and stop doubting my content long enough to film it and feel ok enough to post it.
After I integrated enough trauma, my nervous system no longer got stressed from the idea of being “seen”. I became more relaxed and started creating videos more quickly. After months of healing work, I started making videos daily pretty easily and even had fun. I did end up growing my TikTok account to 20,000 followers before taking a break.
Our dreams tell us where our hearts are. They’re not there just to torture us with what can never be. It’s a light calling us forward to our path of evolution. There is much more possible in our lives than we realize, especially when our energy and heart are freed up.
If you have a dream you’ve been wanting and have felt held back or know you’ve been deluding yourself into believing you don’t really want it, schedule a discovery call with me.
Let’s talk.