Form & Function

Maybe trauma is not an entity.

Let’s talk about emotions being stuck. Trauma getting “stuck in the body”. This language is so available to us now.

We, humans, the social forming kind of animals, are rather materialistic in so many ways. We need to give a palpable meaning, and a physical manifestation to all happenings.

I lost count of how many times I have read or heard that trauma gets stuck in the psoas. “Your hips hold emotion”, and it’s your job, the human that “stored this emotion” in your body, to release it.

“Shake it out.” “Push it out with all your might.” “Only you can heal yourself.” Poof! Now it’s all gone! That framing, I am coming to understand, is quite problematic. The same way that victim blaming is problematic.

I’m thankful for the pioneers that brought this language forward. The field of psychology has benefited tremendously by the brave and forward-thinking folks who have contributed to a better understanding of how our emotional selves correlate to our physical selves. There’s no denying of that.

I’m starting to understand that an event (in the case of PTSD), or a conditioning (or C-PTSD) don’t necessarily get “stuck” in our systems, and that narrative is starting to look shortsighted to me.

Let’s look at the analogy of a scratch (the trauma) on a vinyl record (the body). The needle gets stuck and skips every time it gets to it (the trigger). Solving a scratched record involves removing debris or smoothing the edges. While deep scratches often mean permanent damage, light surface scratches can sometimes be repaired to stop skips.

The problem gets solved by smoothing it out so that it no longer gets triggered. In the case of deeper damage, you can’t smooth it out, it will continue to skip once it hits the trauma. There isn’t much of a solution here aside from replacing the record. Now, you can’t replace your body, so what is one to do? Let it skip until it doesn’t bug you anymore? Avoid that track altogether?

Think about form. Our bodies reshape constantly, we look and feel differently every day Female bodies have a more intimate relationship with this. Maybe this familiarity is exactly what makes us more prone to deeper conditioning. Politics, capitalism, and the patriarchy want women shaped a certain way: fit, standard, productive, pleasant, available. Your lineage took a shape for your body as well. Your mother conformed, her mother conformed, and so on, for at least 14 generations.

The interference of trauma (as in a traumatic event), and of complex trauma (as in a repetitive or environmental occurrence) shapes our perception, our autonomic response, the speed of our heartbeat, the size of our pupils, the storing of fat.

In architecture, it is a widely known principle: Form Follows Function. If we apply that principle to our biology, it becomes easy to see: our pupil dilated so that we can capture more light and see where we are going so we can run away. The body stored fat so that you could survive on autophagy, because it predicted that food was not going to be available.

Cells, by nature, are intent on surviving. A cell’s only job is to stay alive. They have an innate intelligence, and the ability to self organize so that the shapes they create will always serve a purpose.

In that sense, with that awareness, your cells can reorganize into a different shape. Awareness alone will not reshape us. Neither is a few minutes of shaking it out here and there.

“Our relationship maps are implicit, etched into the emotional brain and not reversible simply by understanding how they were created” —Bessel van der Kolk

We often find it hard to tell what we can actually change versus what's out of our control. Our conditioning shapes how we see. Sometimes we stand powerless over situations we've simply grown accustomed to, convincing ourselves we had no choice, or that our attempts were the right move, but just didn't work out as planned.

The wellness industrial complex profits from this. It sells you release, recovery, letting go, smoothing out the edges, so the “record doesn’t skip”. The problem stays located in your body, in your past, in your individual healing journey. It doesn’t seem to point to what's actively shaping you right now.

Discomfort is not necessarily an indicator that we're on the right track.

Awareness is a necessary first step to reshaping and reorganizing our cells to rewrite the conditioning. There are more steps to take to get there, though.

You can't release your way out of a shape. Explore your patterns, yes. Keep exploring who you are, and how you arrived at where you are today. But know when understanding becomes its own kind of stalling. At some point, you have to intervene in the thoughts running your system without your permission, and you have to actively reshape.

You need to see the shape, and know what the shape was for.

Then you can decide if it's still yours to keep.