Recovering from Trauma: My Process

This is a special one. It's both vulnerable and also really satisfying. I’m sharing my story of the 8 key processes that helped me heal from dissociation and PTSD that I accrued from various traumas, including sexual assault, child abuse, homelessness, bullying and harassment.

It's never the same path for everyone, but I hope that this episode will inspire you to try out some of these approaches or understand better how to support loved ones. If you are feeling stuck, have genital numbness, feel disconnected from your body and/or your sexuality, are dissociated, depressed/anxious, or lost in people-pleasing (fawning) in your life, sexuality, and relationships -- this is for you. 

I'm sharing the 8 critical steps that helped me heal PTSD and shift into post-traumatic growth, embodiment, and joyful freedom. 

Resources Mentioned:

Vagus Nerve exercises: Get on the newsletter here for the vagus nerve exercise video along with other free resources like the Wheel of Erotic Emotions: https://laurajurgens.myflodesk.com/wheel

The Feelings Wheel

Tara Brach's compassion meditation

Books:

No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz

The Body Keeps the Score by  Bessel van der Kolk (video synapsis here)

Waking the Tiger, Healing Trauma, and In an Unspoken Voice by Peter Levine

Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve by Stanley Rosenberg

Videos:

Peter Levine on Trauma and Somatic Experiencing

Trauma Release Method/ Trauma Release Exercises 

Learn more about me, get a FREE GUIDE to FINDING YOUR DEEPEST TURN-ONS, inquire about coaching, and learn how to get help with relationships and intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com.

Get a transcript of this episode by going to https://sexhelpforsmartpeople.buzzsprout.com/ Click on the episode, then choose the transcript tab.

Transcript

Welcome to episode 15. This is a special one for me. I am sharing my story of what worked for me in healing various traumas. I don't pretend this is the same path for everyone, but I hope that by sharing what I learned, it gives you some ideas for yourself for supporting your loved ones and lovers who've had trauma of whatever size and shape, and we all have to some extent, and helps inspire you to try out some of the approaches that worked best for me, if you feel called to do so.

So let's get to it.

Okay, episode 14, that is 14 weeks, which is three and a half months. And I'm pretty excited about that, pretty happy about that, that we are going strong here. So Today, we are not really going to dive into the nitty gritty of grisly stories of my trauma, but I will mention and touch on some sexual and child abuse trauma.

I probably will touch on a little bit around internalized misogyny, and I might mention some homelessness trauma. I might not. This is all in the service of looking at what works to heal from it and how it's totally possible to come out the other side feeling even better and even more joyful, connected, and empowered, in some cases, than people who haven't had those horrible experiences.

And I don't wish them on anyone. I don't even wish them on past me. But in a lot of ways, I am you. I'm grateful for the experience that drove me to the healing that enabled me to really feel frankly amazing these days and really connected to myself and really able to help other people. So I'm going to cover my own story and I'm not going to trigger warning this.

I'm instead going to trigger invite you. Because, frankly, the whole quote unquote trigger warning thing is usually either meant to be pseudo protective, so it doesn't actually help, in my experience. As somebody with very severe PTSD at one point, I can tell you that that doesn't, didn't actually help me anyway.

And it's often meant to cover someone's ass when they're talking about tough shit. And we're not, I'm not trying to cover my ass here, I'm just gonna let you know that, from my experience, As someone who was once very dissociated and had untreated PTSD for many years, it is not actually that helpful for people to get the trigger warnings of, it's like this flag of like, hey, let's try to insulate ourselves from the world.

And insulating ourselves from the world is not that productive or protective. It's actually just really disempowering. And instead, we actually need to invite ourselves to learn to Process our triggered emotions with self compassion and honor our own resilience. And I know what works because I'm basically recovered.

I would say I'm 95 percent recovered from PTSD. There are other a few things that will always be with me, which I just manage as part of my resilience maintenance. And I'm okay with that. So for example, I lift heavy weights and at my gym, people are constantly dropping giant barbells very loudly. And I wear earplugs because otherwise I start shaking.

It's okay. It's just part of life. I don't love it when I don't have my earplugs in. But I'm not super derailed. It just takes me a couple of minutes to take care of my nervous system, to breathe, to de escalate. And so I wear the earplugs. I don't try to arrange the world to my liking to protect me because there will always be surprises.

There will always be triggers. And it's way better and way more empowering to learn how to take care of me When any of those things happen and know that I can. So it's actually okay to feel triggered. We are not fragile or breakable or incapable. If you've had trauma and you are here listening to this, you are strong as fuck and you are resilient as hell.

You're a survivor. And so it's okay to have feelings come up or even flashbacks. And I think those things can actually serve us if we let our bodies start learning how to process them. Our minds keep offering them up to us, hoping we'll finally deal with our shit using this amazing tool we have, our bodies, which is where the trauma is actually stored.

And if I've learned anything on this journey, it is that bodies are amazing. They can hold the full range of human emotions. If we let the sensations of those emotions move through us with breath and acceptance and even movement. Shaking, twitching, throwing a tantrum with your fist, punching the air, whatever your body wants to do.

The emotions do indeed move through, if we let them. It's when we stuff it all down and refuse to let it move that we get stuck in the not healing land. And I was there for decades. So This is not so much the story of that place, the not healing land. It's more the story of the better place I wound up.

And really it's actually the story of how I got to that place, the transition, reclaiming myself and liberating myself from the not healing land. So instead of shying away, if you feel like you could be activated, hearing about hard stuff here today or in any episode or in life in general. I want to invite you to just stay with your body's response and let your body do what it wants to do.

So today I'm going to talk a bit about our collective experience of traumas and harms, and then give you just a little bit of background on my story, some of the sort of brief lowlights there to see how I got stuck in the no healing place for years. And then I'm going to talk about how I found my way out of that and the eight key healing processes that radically changed my experience to one of claiming freedom and joy in my body.

I'll offer some pathways into those, whether you want to try some on your own or with practitioners, including what kind of practices and practitioners might help you. So. Whatever your personal experience, we all have a collective experience of sexual repression and trauma, even in little ways. If you grew up as a girl or a trans person, this might be especially true, but even for boys, and for some people more than others regardless of gender, if they've experienced assault, bullying, abuse, molestation, all or all of the above.

And even for people who didn't have those sort of big T traumas, there are accumulated little T traumas that can be devastating. And so this topic is really relevant to everyone. And there are different flavors by gender, and I am not going to shy away from calling that out because our society is so gender focused, so obsessed with this obligatory role play that we force people into based on how one body part is configured at birth.

And it is indeed worse and more dangerous for girls and trans people most of the time in that way. The everyday sexually oriented and gender based traumas accumulate in horrific ways for girls and genderqueer kids. Shaming, harassment, threats oriented at you because of gender and sex is a regular occurrence if you are a girl or a trans person.

And I mean, I was sexually harassed for the first time when I was seven on my way home, walking my way home from school by a boy who followed me and like ran in front of me and shook his dick at me and then stalked me. And it went on to get worse in middle school and high school. And later it came from all directions.

And in my experience, all girls are sexually harassed to some degree. It is unfortunately accepted, including by us, including by women and girls. This is our normal existence. We are, it is normalized for us, which is the only reason I can see that we are not rioting. But I do indeed wish we would sometimes.

And society teaches us that we don't deserve better. When I taught university, Way too many of my female students had stalkers, and the university did absolutely nothing about it. In fact, they protected a lot of the sexual harassment and stalking on campus. They protected male professors who sexually harassed students.

And this was literally like a year ago. This was not ancient history. It is happening today as we speak at universities around the country. And even just growing up in a world where the vast majority of media depicts women as helpless victims or whores and men as perpetrators or entitled to sex, these stereotypes harm both women and men.

They harm all of us. I see so many male clients who are afraid to fully feel into their own sexuality because they are terrified of being associated with being a perpetrator or a predator. They feel like their sexual energy is somehow inherently predatory, and it's not. And it's so sad that that's taken away from them, too.

This fear of doing harm by just being male in the world, right? This happens to a lot of really good men. So we all have traumas. Even if they are just the daily accumulations of society's biases, shitty general attitudes about sex, consent, autonomy, homophobia, patriarchy, racism, all kinds of, you know, all kinds of biases we see in society accumulate within us.

So, for me as a girl, I had my share of harassment. And some other unfortunate stuff. So I had an alternately abusive and neglectful alcoholic mother. And I was an only child of a single mother who was incredibly dysfunctional. So I was alone with her, or with me, and just me was much safer. I've learned to like being alone a lot early on.

And I experienced, you know, a lot of consent violations early in my life. So I had a doctor stick my finger in my vagina with my mother's consent, but not mine when I was six. And then I was repeatedly raped at 14 by an 18 year old who said he was my boyfriend. And I was incredibly confused. I was also very, very alone and trying very hard to get out of an abusive home.

So. I blamed myself for all of that and put up with it for a long time because I didn't really think I ever, I was going to get any better. I didn't think I deserved better. And after that, I spent a lot of years trying to get care and approval through sex, but being totally numb or actually in pain the whole time.

And then I minimized my experience. I didn't even see the truth of it or the trauma. I just thought others had it worse. And this is really common for a lot of my clients with trauma. We often think others had it worse. And so, ours doesn't matter. We're comparing pain. It's really important to let go of that and stop comparing pain.

Ours isn't any worse or any better than anybody else's. Pain is pain. Right? And when we shame ourselves for, and tell ourselves that, you know, whatever happened to us was our fault, we don't give ourselves a chance to heal. I didn't even realize it was normal and common to make it my fault. I thought that was what people did about, you know, other sort of more dramatic types of sexual assault.

I thought mine was not as dramatic. And I really didn't allow myself. to even call it rape or allow myself to be angry until I was in my early 40s. I mean, I just knew other people that were raped and I didn't even apply the same reasoning to me because I didn't, I wasn't hit and it wasn't a stranger. I hadn't understood what was happening and it hurt a lot, but I thought that was because I was too stupid.

That I just was too naive and I got myself into that situation. That's how much self blame I had. And I hear this deep shame all the time from people who've been raped or molested, especially as kids, and even more so if they were very young and there was genital pleasure, which is, look, just your genitals doing what they are made for.

But if, you know, they were three or eight or or whatever and someone touched them and they remember actually liking it but being confused. That is not consensual. No one that young is capable of consent because they can't understand what it is that is even happening. It is fucked up and it is in no way your fault if that was you.

Nor was your body wrong for responding in any way that it did, whether with pleasure, because that's what genitals are for, or with shutdown and pain or both. And regardless, we usually get shut down later. The body armors up. So for me, the land of not healing lasted many years, decades, and it was a time of sexual dissociation.

People pleasing through sex, not listening to my body, generally not hearing or respecting my yes or my no, I didn't even really, I thought it was kind of all something I was supposed to do in my head. I didn't really realize that I was supposed to check in with my body. And I was lucky enough to have an amazing kind partner.

But I just had this load of baggage. None of it was his fault. And even though I could get off with masturbation, I just kind of tolerated intercourse feeling numb because I thought that was what my partner wanted and what I owed him. And I didn't even like my vulva. I felt it was gross and shameful and defective.

I had all this shame around it. Even when I enjoyed masturbating. So just lots of confusion, repression, and shame. And that is a really common refrain for people who've had trauma. And if you are in the not healing place, it will sound familiar. I had zero idea how devastatingly harmful all this was to me, not the past trauma or the current trauma I was putting myself through, by running roughshod over my own body, forcing her to have penetrative sex for someone else's pleasure, not mine.

And it was a while until I understood the sheer brutality of that, the abandonment of myself that that represented, and how much I needed to heal trust. I had a bunch of unrecognized PTSD from the sexual trauma, but also from many years of serious child abuse and homelessness. And I thought only people who went to war got PTSD.

I didn't, truly did not realize how incredibly common it is among people abused as kids and among those who've experienced sexual assault. I went to A lot of therapists and none of them ever suggested that I might have, I wouldn't, I did not have a good experience with talk therapy, which we'll come back later, but all the symptoms were there.

I just thought I was weird and messed up. And I had severe depression for many years. I was on antidepressants for many years. And yeah, nobody actually even asked me or gave me a test to see if I might have it. have trauma. I went yeah, I went to a lot of shitty therapists as a very naive and undiscerning consumer.

I went thinking they had a degree and so therefore they knew what to do with this. I didn't have any standards for them and I didn't know that most talk therapists are actually not trained for or competent with real trauma. So what happened was I would just sit there and recap my experience. my story, like all these things that happened to me, and I would just re traumatize myself.

And I would leave feeling more disempowered than I did before. I would leave feeling worse about myself. And this went on for years. I was trying to get help, and none of them were ever saying, Hey, look, I'm not equipped to deal with this. They were just sort of acting like a brick wall. I would talk, and I would get nothing back.

Occasional questions about the details of the story, but just to elucidate more of my own. Same story, re traumatizing myself. And I never was able to shift out of that or get an alternative view or get real compassion or connection from any of those people because frankly they weren't trained in it and they weren't even trauma informed enough to know that they needed to step back and refer me to somebody else.

So the process back for me, the land of post traumatic growth and healing times, they were hard in some ways but In many ways, actually, if I'm being completely honest, which I have vowed to always do here, but they were also really joyful and beautiful and so liberating and just, I wouldn't trade that type of hard for anything.

It was clean pain, right? It was processing the grief and the emotions and really learning to reconnect with my body. I am in such a better place now and so grateful for it. So I want to share with you the eight big things I did that totally changed my world. Number one, was hiring a coach. And I don't just mean getting coached.

I mean, actually taking the step to hire someone, to go all in on myself, to decide that I was worth it. It took a lot just to start. The investment of time, money, effort, just on me felt selfish. Investing in myself and my own growth. I could justify spending like stupid on stupid stuff. You know, I could justify going on like, I don't know, buying a bunch of crap at Ross or something.

But justifying spending money on my own healing. It took a big step and it was Deciding I was worth my own money. I didn't need to spend it on commodities. I really needed to just tighten my belt and invest in myself in my own capacity for joy. I do think it can, you know, this is, this is for me. This is what worked for me coaching rather than therapy because I, as I, you know, the therapy did not work for me for many years.

That's not to say that there aren't you. great trauma informed therapists out there, and I actually recommend many of them. I recommend very specific trauma modalities to many of my clients, and I refer to therapists all the time, and they refer to me. So I have great relationships with a lot of therapists, but the type I was doing, the talk therapy wasn't working.

So for me, hiring a coach and really investing in focusing on my present and future. And reworking my story so that I could stop being the victim and start being the hero, not getting stuck in those old ideas about myself and my past. Really starting to see that I could be different. Coaching is very future focused, very present and future focused.

So that was what I needed and really helped me actually realize that I. I, in the moment, was not actually unworthy and unlovable. I realized it was a choice to believe those things and that I could choose differently. And to be honest, I didn't even hire the best coach in the world at first, which I now know after having received lots of love.

Received loads and loads of coaching. I'm becoming very discerning about who I work with. And I still get coached because everyone needs someone from the outside to help them get perspective and see things in new ways. Someone who's going to be honest and not tell you what you want to hear. But it didn't even matter that much that she wasn't the most amazing coach in the world.

She was the coach I had at the time. And I did the work. I decided I was going to invest in me and I'm actually really grateful that she was a great salesperson. So that helped me get started and I was able to kind of follow the breadcrumbs then as I moved through all the other seven steps. And You know, I did find eventually some other support personnel, right?

I found a good trauma therapist who did EMDR, which I'll talk about in a moment, a sexological body worker, which I'll talk about, and also, you know, other coaches along the way who had the expertise I needed. And it all costs money and it was so worth it. The value is just huge because the return on investments when you invest in your own brain is so is the highest possible return.

I will always have those skills and experiences now. And what the heck is money for if we're miserable and stuck? Personally, I knew I'd rather eat ramen, sell my car, take an extra job, move in with friends, whatever, so that I could. get the coaching I needed to get out of my own way. And then actually I wound up doing a lot better financially.

And that's what I see with a lot of my clients too, is when we finally heal our wounds and believe we are worthy, we get that raise, we get the new job, we start that business, whatever it is, our healing actually helps us make money. So number one is get expert help of whatever flavor works for you. The right kind that doesn't just feel like you're staying stuck in your old stories.

And decide your worth, the investment and worth taking action for your joy in this life is the return, which you'll also get loads of other returns, including materially. And number two, you know, I actually think number two came before the decision to get coaching, and it was letting go of my victim identity.

I decided it was up to me to take responsibility for my own. healing. I was able to do that because I learned the difference between blame and responsibility. When I was stuck in thinking that I had to either blame myself or blame other people, that the only option was blame, I just couldn't get anywhere.

But when I decided to shift into thinking, okay, what if it's not blame? What if it's just that no one else can be responsible for fixing me? And This is the only way I've found that really works to untangle victimhood. Which is just such an incredibly disempowering place to be. There's just nothing you can do from there because all the power is elsewhere.

Right. But here's the thing. Okay. So just because awful shit happens to us doesn't mean we're to blame, but we are responsible for cleaning it up because no one else can. The mess is in our yard. You know, it's like having a dog that craps on your lawn. You didn't do it. You didn't crap on your lawn. But you are responsible for whether or not you live with crap on your lawn.

And it's such good news that we can be responsible for ourselves and our own pain. Our pain is ours. And it may have been related to what happened to us, but we made it mean all the bad things. We made it mean all the bad things about us that were unworthy or unlovable or unfixable or broken. We are making that meaning happen, which is really good news because it means it's in our control to change that and let it go.

We don't have to wait for someone else to do it. No one else can. So letting go of being a victim was, and just noticing it wasn't serving me anymore, was huge. So that was number two. That enabled me to do, that and coaching enabled me to do number three, which was to really start learning how to reassociate with my body and feel emotions.

in my body, whatever they were, the whole range of human emotion. I stopped buying this weird American idea that we're supposed to be happy all the time. We are not supposed to be stuck in one emotion all the time. That doesn't make any biological sense. It is not actually feasible. So chasing it is pointless and will make us miserable.

The quote unquote pursuit of happiness is definitely something that can make you miserable. So look, feeling the whole range of human emotion, having a rich life where I actually experienced everything. That is more fulfilling. And I like it better. I don't always like it better in the moment. Sure, I might want to feel happy instead of, I don't know, terrified or, you know, miserable in some way, shape, or form.

But the contrast is actually beautiful. And the contrast of negative and positive emotions really lets us enjoy the positive emotions more. So learning to reassociate with my body's feeling of emotions, the sensations in my body, Whether, you know, contentment and love, or despair and grief. I learned my body could process those if I stopped trying to suppress them.

And I just allowed the emotions to be sensations. They move through. I work with clients on this all the time, and I still think it is the biggest Game changer for lives. It is just, if you learn nothing else, please learn this skill of processing emotions in your body. Because it will make your life infinitely better.

It will help you live much more intentionally and less reactively, but it will also make everyone else around you feel so much better. It is so safe to be around people who are not reacting to their emotions, blaming them on others, just sort of. It's sort of kind of getting blown around by the winds and storms of emotions.

And we'll do a very mini version here today at the end to teach you a little bit about this. So that was number three, reassociating with my body through learning to feel emotions. Number four was doing a deep dive into studying and practicing self compassion. I think this is so critically important for people with trauma, really getting just deciding that you are going to learn how to be compassionate to yourself.

And especially if you're somebody who had a lot of child abuse, like me, you did not learn compassion for yourself early on, most likely, unless you had somebody who taught you. You know, who wasn't your abuser. This was really new to me. So cultivating care and compassion for my physical self, my emotional self, and inner child, and my sexual self.

I practice through meditation and I highly recommend Tara Brock's excellent meditation. free online meditation library. I will link her site in the show notes and all her books too. I also created a whole new method of fantasizing so that I could do self pleasuring with healing fantasies, which is something I actually now teach to clients who want or need it.

I was really powerful for reclaiming my sexual autonomy and love for myself, approval for myself as a sexual being. Part of. Self compassion was also really doubling down on work life balance and stopping overworking, learning to take naps and breaks. learning to boil work down to the essentials and say no to everything else.

Incidentally, it made me more successful than ever at work. And this is while I was a tenure track professor at a major research university. So the expectation was that I work, you know, 80 plus hours a week. And I just said no to that and did it in, you know, about 34 hours a week. I was more successful than any of my peers at the same level.

I got more grants. I got more shit done. I published more papers and higher level journals. It is not overworking does not mean quality. It's just like butt in chair is quantity of time. It is not necessarily quality. So saying no to overworking does not have to mean sacrificing quality. So all the practices of self compassion.

I had to actually practice them very intentionally and get a lot of help because being kind to myself did not come naturally. I had lots of practice beating myself up for many years and it is, it is toxic. If you beat yourself up you are essentially bringing abuse with you every single hour of every single day.

You are abusing yourself and it really feels like it. It really does. Stopping that was so incredible. When I actually stopped beating myself up, I stopped taking antidepressants and was fine and knew that I would never need them again. I was able to stop drinking because I didn't need it to numb out the critical voices anymore.

I didn't need it to manage my emotions anymore. So really big life changes. Number five was I started reparenting myself. I did a lot of inner child work. Now that I could bring compassion to her, my inner child, it was deeply healing for me. And I believe we have, we have an amazing capacity to time travel within ourselves.

It lets us actually go back and give our little selves what they didn't get. You can do it yourself. Or one of the best modalities for supporting this is called Internal Family Systems or IFS. And I really recommend the book, No Bad Parts, very highly. I will also, I'm going to link all the books and resources I mentioned in the show notes today.

You can find an IFS therapist to help you. They're a little bit thin on the ground. Most of them are private pay like coaches, but Doing some compassion work with your inner child, whether self directed or supported, is I highly recommend. So number six was I started listening to my inner compass in my body.

So you can think of that as my gut, my north star, whatever you want to call it for you, and letting that guide, that inner compass, be more important than anyone else's opinions or wants. So This is like practicing 110 percent consent, right? I have to be totally on board and feel it in my body when I'm even considering saying yes to something.

It is the opposite of people pleasing. And it was so hard to do at first. It literally felt like the world was going to end or I might throw up if I listened to myself instead of doing what other people wanted or what my brain thought I quote unquote should. And so it's If this feels super scary to stop people pleasing and really only say yes to things that you are 110 percent on board with, if that feels terrifying, that is okay.

That is a fine place to start and it is normal. This, for me, was a big part of trauma healing and it was the healing of the fawning part of the trauma response. The people pleasing at our own expense. When we heal that, we stop that behavior. It actually becomes the source of the most delicious feeling of having your own back, of trusting yourself fully, of knowing in your bones that you will not be an asshole to yourself.

It helps you become so incredibly brave and it feels amazing. At first, it felt, I was worried in my brain that it would damage my relationships. And there can actually be some transition challenges when people are used to you fawning and people pleasing them, and they all of a sudden have to, like, oh my gosh, you have boundaries and you're not going to just do stuff because I said, because I said I wanted it.

Right? There can be some transitions. Ultimately, it makes your relationships so much better. When you show up authentically, people can trust your yes. There is no resentment. Everything feels clean and real, authentic, and truly safe. People feel safe with you because they know you won't bullshit them. And it really enabled me to learn true kindness also.

How to support other people in their authenticity, how to support. Port them and celebrate them when they say no to me. I love that. How to let us all be human and make mistakes. Right? So that one, that 110% consent or being like gut led, whew. That was when I really started feeling powerful in my own life.

And you know, part of that was learning what I wanted and liked sexually as well as in the rest of my life. So. For me, sexually, I didn't even know if it was possible for me to like inside the vagina stimulation or any sort of penetration or insertion. I had been feeling numb for a really long time. So I got myself a really lovely dildo and took my time by myself, very much at my own pace, listening deeply to my body to discover.

If, how, when, and under what circumstances I actually might like these sensations internally of having something in my vagina. And I discovered I really actually did like the sensations, but only if I was super duper ready and already very aroused. And so that self discovery process. put me back in the driver's seat.

And it now keeps me from people pleasing with sex in all kinds of ways and not going too early to insertion. So I highly recommend that for anyone who's had any sort of insertion based violations of your body, even if it was just having some penetrative sex before your body was ready, sometimes actually taking the time to discover on your own terms, with a toy, what you actually like and under what conditions.

Number seven, processing trauma somatically. I started doing this really throughout the whole healing process and it's important to understand that trauma is held in the body. I didn't know that at first. You know, I thought this was something in our minds, like our minds got messed up somehow from some sort of traumatic experience.

I thought it was psychological. But what we now understand, all the research shows, that trauma is actually really held in the body. It is not so much psychological as it is physiological. And it's physiological in a way that has psychological effects. If you haven't yet, I highly recommend a few books. So please read The Body Keeps the Score, or any of Peter Levine's books, Waking the Tiger, Healing Trauma, In an Unspoken Voice.

Those are a few of his books. And I'll put those in the show notes too. But just know that trauma is not stuck in our heads so much as stuck in our bodies. And I did most of my work in

So I was in the middle of the lockdown, and I was self led using books and videos, the ones I mentioned, and also some videos on trauma release method, which is TRM is the acronym, and somatic experiencing videos, and I'll put a couple of those in the show notes too. And I worked with an EMDR therapist, so that's eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.

And I highly recommend that method for people with trauma. In fact, I usually suggest clients with unresolved or unprocessed sexual trauma do a round of EMDR before we work on reconnecting them with their sexuality, with me. And that is the type of therapy EMDR is that I, I just generally endorse for trauma work.

So if you do nothing else. You don't need to read the, if you don't read the books, if you don't watch the videos, totally okay. But just let your body guide you. Let it cry. Let it shake. Let it twitch. And see if you can stay connected to the sensations. and let the emotions just be there and move through you.

And part of this for me too was also working on somatic exercises to retone my vagus nerve. So that is the mother nerve basically for connecting your mind and your body. And it innervates all of your organs and really plays the key role in switching from the fight flight to the rest digest state in the nervous system.

Back and forth. There are some simple exercises that can help a lot with retoning the vagus nerve so that you can deescalate nervous system responses when you, your nervous system is sort of almost stuck in an overly active state, in closer to that fight flight all the time, right? After years of holding trauma, that can really, it can, it can be kind of stuck there.

I have a short video showing you how to do those exercises. They're really simple. You can do them in five minutes a day. If you want it, you just go get on my newsletter and you'll get it during the initial series of all the free stuff you get. You can sign up for that at laurajurgens. com. And if you'd prefer not to do that, you can also get the exercises that I cover in the book by Stanley Rosenberg called Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve.

Again, it will be in the show notes. Okay, so we, this is a long episode, I know, and we are at number eight. This is the last one, but it is not the least important. And it was very incredibly important to my process and underrated as a healing modality. And that is touch. Humans are wired for touch. It really is the earliest kind of healing.

language for us. It is so intrinsic to our sense of safety as a species. And I wasn't really ready to fully let it sink in and be therapeutic until later in my healing journey. So keep in mind, this may be a later stage for you, depending on where you're at, where you're starting. Touch may feel scary, but at some point, I want to invite you to think about doing some touch based healing, because touch is really important for healthy attachment in humans.

It helps us relax into feeling the world as safe. It helps us release a lot of that armoring that we hold, this sort of deep clenching that we acquire from trauma. And for me, learning to ask for the touch I wanted, and then to get it. to actually receive consent based touch. Oh my gosh, it released this deep tension in my body I hadn't even realized was there.

And I did this with experienced practitioners, which is very important because we know, experienced practitioners, we know how to fully attune to you and also stay grounded in our own energy and boundaries, which creates a deep sense of safety for the client. If you need this and are ready for it, but aren't near me in Asheville or can't travel here for an intensive, I am happy to recommend other practitioners nearer to you.

So please reach out if you feel like you're ready for touch based support. If you've had sexual trauma and have a lot of armor in your genitals, which can generally feel like numbness or pain, then working with a really attuned sexological bodyworker is a great idea. And that modality is illegal in most states except for California in the U.

S., but it is available in other countries as well. I actually traveled to California. There are some people who do it anyway. But it is a really can be a very incredibly healing modality. It was a game changer for me. And I'm actually going to have my own sexological body worker on this podcast soon to tell you more about the practice.

So number eight is doing a tuned touch based de armoring work. That set of eight practices is what worked for me. And I've seen. Parallel journeys for other people and helped people move along these resolution pathways. So I know they are really powerful and really work for many people. It doesn't mean it's the only things out there or that everybody else will completely agree with me, but this is my experience and the ones I recommend to those who feel stuck with Trump.

Okay, so a short exercise today, an introduction to just feeling emotions in your body. The first thing to do is just take a breath. We're going to practice with whatever is here for you right now. Notice that you are having an emotion. We are all having emotions at all points of life, as long as we are conscious and often even when we're unconscious.

They are just chemical cascades generated by our perceptions. So you're having at least one right now. And there's usually one that's kind of dominating. It's just bigger than the other ones. Emotions last roughly 90 seconds to a maximum of about 10 minutes and only longer if we suppress them or feed them with some sort of like loop, loop of thoughts or anxiety or something.

So let's just start with whatever emotion you're having now. And when you get really good at this actually, you can call up emotions intentionally with intentional thoughts, either to practice or just because you enjoy how they feel. So first, just notice the sensations in your body. Actively scan and look for them.

Go from your head to your feet. Where are their sensations? Is there a weight to that sensation? Does it feel heavy or light? Is there movement like tingles or vibrations, expansion or contraction? Does it feel hard or soft, warm or cold, tense or relaxed, energized or shut down? Just Notice the sensations and then try to see if you can start describing them to yourself.

The next step is to try to see if you can name the emotion. And the easiest way to do that is to take a look at the feelings wheel, which I'll also link in the show notes that just has a big list of all kinds of emotions. And emotions can be described by one word. So you know, it can be an emotion if it's sort of a one word descriptor, right?

Excited, confused, dejected, right? Those are one word descriptors for emotions. So try to name it after you feel it. Then just accept this emotion as a normal part of human life. If it's a pleasant one you can really lean into feeling it, and if it's an uncomfortable one, accept that too. It's okay to have the full range of human emotions and this is just a part of life in this moment where you are having this one.

Accept that you can feel the sensations of the emotion without having to act on it or do anything about it. Just follow the sensations with your consciousness and with your breath. You can direct some breath to those sensations. Just notice them and notice how they change or dissipate if you allow yourself to just follow them through and breathe through them.

That's it. Congratulations. You have just processed an emotion. Alrighty, my smart, sexy people. So next time we are going to talk about how partners can support their lovers who have trauma. That's going to be kind of a short and sweet episode, and I will see you here for that soon. In the meantime, please share this episode or the podcast in general. You never know who actually really needs this support and you could be changing someone's life by just sharing a resource. Thank you so much for listening and I will see you here next week.