299: How Trauma Works

Last week on the podcast I talked about anxiety, I was going to talk about anxiety and trauma on that episode, but I decided to break it up into 2 episodes.

Part of my free training I host has 3 key pieces that you need to understand and get right before you will finally experience freedom from anxiety and trauma.

They are awareness, clearing, and communication. If you don’t have all of these pieces, you will continue to struggle with anxiety and trauma. If you want to go watch my free training, you can go to my website www.meganhillukka.com and you will find a link that will bring you there.

But I’m going to share about the awareness portion today on the podcast.

Because if you don’t understand how anxiety works or you don’t understand how trauma works, then you can’t even get started in the first place.

I have had many clients tell me that they go to the dr, and all they are told is they have trauma, of they are diagnosed with anxiety or trauma. Most people don’t know how it even functions, or why they are experiencing trauma or anxiety.

So let’s talk about trauma today.

Usually, with trauma, there’s something that happens like a trigger, and this is something that triggers a response that is out of control that just happens to you.

I’m first speaking of what it feels like, and then I’ll speak to how it works. But for example, for myself, I would put my daughter to bed and try to put it in God’s hands. I would be like ok, she’s safe, she’s on her back, there are no blankets in here, and then I would lay her down and think, I’ve done what I can, and then lay down, 5 minutes later I would pop up in an absolute panic.

I had no control over that. It just happened to me. It was terrible. After Aria died I was diagnosed with PTSD and I really couldn’t function. I couldn’t be the mom I wanted to be or the wife I wanted to be it. It made me feel crazy and like I was losing my mind.

Trauma symptoms can be all over, you can have a trigger, but maybe you don’t, and maybe you have a million triggers.

Some symptoms of trauma might be:

-startling easily

-nightmares

-panic attacks

-out-of-control bodily reactions

-constantly on edge

-reliving a traumatic event

-getting really angry really fast

It can be something that’s in your life constantly, or something that’s only in a certain season, a certain time of year, or a trigger around a specific event, word, experience whatever.

If you want to take a free quiz to see if you have trauma or anxiety, go to my instagram megan_hillukka, DM me the word QUIZ and I’ll send you the link to take the free quiz!

Okay,

So if you’ve learned anything about trauma, you have probably heard about what most people say about trauma currently that it’s stuck energy, or stuck emotions in the body and you need to release them, either through movement, through feeling it deeply, or whatever. Most modalities for healing trauma can be retraumatizing, or they are very painful as well. Most of the time you have to relive in detail what happened to you, share it with the therapist. It’s not fun.

And, most ways of viewing trauma currently also take years of a lot of work, effort, and time to heal. It’s a huge thing to have trauma and a huge deal to heal it.

It’s exhausting.

So- enter RRT.

This is the way I view trauma through the lens of RRT. trauma can be healed in just a single session. I’ve worked with many people and we’ve healed extremely complicated traumas in just one or two session together. A mom who felt like her trauma was too complicated for therapy experience healing in 2 sessions or two hours total. And she messaged me not long ago that she experienced an event that was related to the traumatic event, and she was able to just keep watching her kids. In the past she would have had to take the whole day to calm down, and it was fine.

It’s incredible.

So let’s talk about how we view trauma through the lens of RRT.

When a traumatic event happens, it’s like a hand slammed into wet sand. Then when you take the hand away, there’s still the handprint there.

So when you take the hand away, and there’s still the hand print. Mind reads this as if the hand is still there. So even though an event can be over, mind will continue to read the event as happening, again, and again, and again. Because it doesn’t know it’s over, it thinks it’s still there, and the mind will continue to try to protect you or stop it from happening, until it knows that it’s finished.

So, when information comes in that’s not painful or disturbing, it can get fully processed and go into memory. But when it’s something we might call painful, or disturbing, it gets kinda stuck and not fully processed through. When it’s fully processed it’s a memory that you can recall, but you’re not stuck reliving it. Like you can remember what you ate for breakfast but you’re not confused if you are eating breakfast right now or not.

But when a memory isn’t fully processed, mind doesn’t know that it’s in the past, and so sometimes it can feel like it’s happening again or happening right now. What you might call a trigger.

So going back to the hand in the wet sand, all we have to do is wipe the hand print out of the sand, so the mind is no longer reading the event as happening. So it gets it that it’s done.

This is how easy it is. It might not sound easy to you, but from my perspective and being able to wipe the hand print clean for a lot of people, it’s so much easier and lighter than any other healing modality out there. Because i know how to wipe the sand clean. How to update the mind.

What we do is get the mind to understand that an event is over and it’s not happening anymore, and then triggers just completely disappear.

Like completely.

I shared on my IG that I have no triggers after my daughters death. Like none. And someone commented that this just doesn’t seem right after something like that. And I get it. If someone wants to keep that story, or wants to keep living in trauma, I guess they can go ahead, but as the one who had experience trauma and triggers, it’s such a relief to have none. To not be triggered and to have calm, peace, and ease in my body.

So it’s not a matter of having to feel it deeply, or years of effort and work, though that may help and can work as well, but I’m all for healing trauma as easily, quickly, and effectively as possible so you can get back to living your beautiful life and release the chains that trauma put on you and your life. And I’d rather you not have to suffer for years and years trying to heal it.

It’s actually super simple, and with the right tools, trauma can be wiped clean from the mind, so it’s like something that happened in the past, but not something that is happening right now.

If you want to learn more, go watch my free training, where you can learn more about what I do, RRT, and how to heal anxiety and trauma for good. Go to my website www.meganhillukka.com to register and watch this free training, already hundreds have watched it!

Until next week, take care!