Yetis & Trauma: 2 things they have in common

The Head Trash + Healing Show with Alexia Leachman

I’m feeling very called to get back to work on clearing trauma at the moment.

A few months ago I went all in with it when I was really ill. My mind had pretty much shut down and healing was my sole focus as I kicked off a physical healing protocol, but it would need time; I needed to detox The Thing that was making me ill, and then my body needed to heal from The Thing. I wasn’t good for much while this was happening so I thought I’d double-down and support my physical healing with emotional healing.

Why not clear some more of my shit? There was a lot of crap going on for me on all levels so this seemed like a good idea. I’d been dabbling with trauma clearance just before I was ill, so I decided go all-in and hunt down more of my unresolved traumas.

Why traumas are like yetis

I found that hunting down my unresolved traumas is like hunting down the Yeti. You only know they’re there by the shit and footprints they leave behind.

Well I had the brown stuff in bucket loads, and I could see the footprints in my triggers, self-sabotaging habits and inner conflicts, so I knew it was lurking. But when I delved into the various life aspects I was struggling with, the truth was I didn’t actually know if I had indeed experienced a trauma around this particular theme in my life. And, if I had, what that experience might have been.

When I’m working with women on their pregnancy and birth phobias, most of the them have experienced trauma from their own birth experience (as I did). Even though most can’t remember their birth experience, having your own birth as a thing in the mind to focus on is helpful. But when you have no idea WHETHER there is a traumatic experience in there, and WHAT the experience is … well, that’s just tricksy!

I figured it must be there because of the footprints and the crap but I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was. It felt nebulous and shifty – like it was trying to escape or avoid detection (fears are very good at doing this). This meant I needed to cast a super huge net to catch the bastards.

Getting creative with clearing my traumas

Pretty much straightaway, I found I needed to leave the safe shores of the trauma clearance methods I knew and I needed to make shit up. Or, as I prefer to call it; follow my intuitive guidance.

So I decided to crack on making a few assumptions;

1. Yes. Trauma was the culprit of my various head trashy nightmares
2. There’s probably more than one of these ‘traumatic’ events that I might have experienced in my life around each theme
3. I probably have no recollection of most of these events or experiences
4. Some of these might have happened while I was in utero

Now, because I’m a curious, businessy numbers person I was interested in HOW MANY traumas I was dealing with here.

How many unresolved traumas did I have, EXACTLY?

I found that I had anything up to 100+ experiences that my emotional system had deemed ‘traumatic’ that I was carrying around with me related to any particular theme.

Here are some numbers;

• Lack of self belief 10
• Feelings of insecurity 8
• Taking action 18
• Inaction & procrastination 94

So taking action was traumatic.. as was NOT taking action! No wonder I was struggling and going around in circles.

Tug of war aside, these numbers blew my mind… … until I stopped to think about it and then realised they make perfect sense.

Our lives are packed with experiences, some of which are traumatic

We’ve had LOADS of life experiences. And a fair few of them will have left an emotional trace and made us stop and think about how we might behave differently next time… especially to avoid The Shitty Thing happening again. And so a destructive or self-sabotaging pattern gets embedded.

These numbers were also crushing.

Up until this point I had been clearing my traumas one-by-one. I was NEVER going to get this shit cleared if I had to clear each of these bloody traumas one-by-one!

Until I spoke to a very Wise and Wonderful friend who highlighted the bleedin’ obvious – why don’t you clear ALL of them at once?

Can I do that???

Apparently no permission is required. You can do what you bloody want.

So I tried. And it turns out I can!

You can clear more than one trauma at once

Oh lordy!

It reminded me of the time when we were renovating our Victorian house in the UK and we finally got a wallpaper stripper. Suddenly I needed to strip ALL the walls, RIGHT NOW! Most sensible people do a room at a time. Not me! ALL. THE. ROOMS!

Well, if you take this same approach to your trauma clearance, then your emotional system is going to look a bit like my walls did. Like a bomb’s hit it.

Yep! Taking this approach kicked off the Mother of all healing crises. Not only was my body trying to heal from The Toxic Thing, but now my emotional system was healing from The Great Trauma Purge (my very own Great Reset). For about a week afterwards I slept 16 hours a day and ate like a gannet.

But oh my goodness. When I eventually emerged I felt different.

I felt lighter and more at peace. I feel like I have more trust in myself. The urgent gotta-do-it-all-right-now energy had evaporated. Replaced by more patience, slow-ness and present-ness. The part of me that always made me want to BE MORE because I wasn’t ENOUGH… feels almost gone. I give less of a shit about stuff than before. I thought I was pretty good on that front, but now I’m much more like some of my zero-fucks-to-give friends.

I’ve had a break now and I’m already feeling the call to jump back in.

Next on my list are the traumas at the root of my dog allergies and eczema (the kids want a dog!). As well as my abandonment traumas – of which I have 121!!!

So if I disappear again, you know why.