Understanding Your Trauma Pattern and Looking for the Off-ramp
Do you ever find yourself in a familiar pattern of dysfunction or dysregulation? Maybe you have a familiar trigger or a context that is consistently activating. Maybe you have repeated sources of conflict with a partner. Your reaction is familiar, you have a default way of coping perhaps, and my guess is it’s not working for you.
Perhaps you’re thinking: “I can’t keep doing the thing I’m doing, but I’m terrified to stop.”
In my training in Somatic Experiencing, when working with a nervous system that has experienced trauma, we’ve been taught to consider the trauma pattern. Think of this as your trauma super-highway––the very easy to find way through, the path with the least resistance but that is costly and lifeless. Often at this stage, it can seem like the mind and the body are working against each other. A part of you knows it’s not working, but part of the grip of the trauma pattern is that it’s such an easy groove to find. And at one point, it was your survival skill, your way of getting through.
It’s helpful to start with some awareness of your trauma pattern.
What’s the thing we always do (the trauma pattern) and would it be helpful to do something different?
How to exit the cycle and return to life
Ok, so let’s say you’ve established there’s a trauma pattern. You know it generally goes from: triggering event, to feeling heavy in your chest, to tears, to starting to feel disconnected from yourself, to withdrawal from others, then maybe you get a terrible headache and have to take the day off…etc. This is an example of something that could be a trauma pattern.
Again, this is that trauma super-highway and your system can find that groove pretty easily.
Instead of getting on that super-highway, can we look for the off-ramp? Where is there a tiny opportunity to interrupt that pattern and try something new?
In the above example, maybe once you start to notice the heavy feeling in your chest and the tears start, you do something different, like calling a friend or going for a walk, rather than the go-to of disconnecting and withdrawing. Maybe you take the day off before the terrible headache hits.
What is the “something new” here? It could be a new way of responding to your symptoms, it could be a new sensation in your body, a new idea for how to cope, a new source of support. If you usually zero in on your symptoms or perseverate in your thoughts, maybe this time you try shifting your attention or focus away from the source of discomfort for a moment.
We don’t know exactly what will happen when we start following a new path. Just like a map of trails, if we explore a new one, we may not know if there’s a viewpoint, if there’s a bear to encounter, if there’s a bench to rest on, if there’s a steep hill to climb, if it takes us back to the parking lot. But if we only ever follow the familiar path, we won’t know where that off-ramp could lead to.
It’s possible it leads to a river teaming with life. That is the fullness of life when you live outside of your trauma pattern.
Finding your off-ramps
We can also be looking for and exploring multiple different off-ramps. In working with trauma from this lens, the more off-ramps we find and build to get off the trauma super-highway, the more ways we have of interrupting the trauma physiology (the go-to response of your mind-body system). So keep looking for that new and different way of being. And repeat the new and different thing to make that off-ramp more accessible and available to your system. Given the trauma pattern is a well-worn path, we need to really establish familiarity with the new path to make sure you can find it again next time you need it.
If any of this is feeling familiar to you, if you find yourself navigating a familiar trauma pattern, a nervous system desperate for an off-ramp, I hope you’ll consider how somatic therapy with a nervous system lens can help facilitate healing. Another way is possible.