Welcome.
My name is Rade Lesny and I'm a somatic psychotherapist and a developmental trauma specialist.
I want to talk about developmental trauma to give you some understanding about the practices that I have recorded.
Developmental trauma is often understood to occur when there's a chronic mistreatment by the caregiver,
But it's much more complicated than that.
It can also occur during a medical procedure,
Birth complications,
Frightening events,
And failures of a caregiver that are not from mistreatment.
It can occur in the womb if our mother was anxious,
Depressed,
Or overwhelmed.
If mom or dad was anxious or depressed most of the time in our childhood,
Then the brainstem comes to expect this.
If a caregiver chronically misattunes to us or is unpredictable,
This can also contribute to developmental trauma.
When we don't feel safe,
Our nervous system goes into a chronic state of fight,
Flight,
Or freeze.
We could also call this being in an ongoing state of survival physiology.
According to the ACEs study that Kaiser did in 1995,
Childhood trauma correlates to various types of diseases and disorders later in life.
There is an allostatic load or wear and tear on the body over time that contributes to these diseases and disorders.
It's like driving a car and having the gas on and the brake on at the same time.
When we are in a chronic state of survival physiology,
Our heart can develop an armoring around it to protect itself.
The adrenals in the kidneys brace and contract,
And we know that the adrenals release cortisol,
Adrenaline,
Epipinephrine about every 15 seconds with chronic stress.
These are stress hormones.
The brainstem,
Which is the seat of the autonomic nervous system,
The fight,
Flight,
And freeze constricts.
The jaw tightens and the stomach shuts down.
When we are chronically feeling unsafe,
We can't be our authentic self,
So we develop a survival self to survive.
Our authentic self retreats in favor of the protection,
Security,
And safety of the survival self.
So what happens?
This causes us to disconnect from ourselves.
So we begin,
The left brain,
The cognitive brain begins to disconnect from the right brain from the body.
Our seeking system to move toward things gets shut down if it's not met.
The left side of the brain,
Our cognitive brain,
Then cuts off from the right side our emotional or embodied brain.
They stop working together.
The left provides protection and the narrative or story,
And the right holds the embodied implicit memory.
Implicit meaning below the level of awareness.
It also holds our trauma and it can overwhelm the left side of the brain.
We want the right side of the brain to take the lead,
Helping the left side to let go of judgment and agenda.
The clarity of the left can come through after being in the presence of the right.
So somatic responses must be included as part of the healing process in order to effectively address and resolve developmental trauma.
One way to begin to heal is to bring support to the body and to the nervous system.
We bring support to the heart,
The adrenals,
The kidneys,
The brainstem,
And the ankles.
As we bring support in with a trusted guide,
Then regulation can come on board.
Our capacity for regulation expands over time and we can be more and more in this regulated state.
When we move out of regulation,
We can get back to the state more quickly.
With these practices,
Over time,
The set point of our nervous system can change.
As our survival self feels safe through regulation,
It can settle and allow our authentic self to come forward and we get freed up.
Sometimes for the first time,
We begin to become who we really are.
This process rewires the brain and the nervous system.
These somatic healing practices that I have recorded were developed by my teacher,
Steven Terrell.
They are part of his transforming touch protocol as a deeply embodied way to heal from developmental trauma.
I hope you find them helpful as part of your healing journey.
