Point of no return – the trauma ejection cycle
I notice in my trauma coaching clients a clear division between those who seek to stabilise or release trauma, and those who’ve passed a point of no return where their trauma is erupting of its own accord. I’ve been seeing it for a while without having a name for it; it seems to be largely unrecognised. I now call it the trauma ejection cycle.
The dividing line between these two patterns stems from a 180-degree flip in the way psychic homeostasis operates to keep us functioning as well as possible, given our specific life conditions.
Trauma ejection is the systematic expulsion of trauma from mind, body, and psyche. I use the term ‘ejection’ because it’s a buckle-your-seatbelt, no-going-back, emotionally challenging ride—the very opposite of how homeostasis usually stabilises us.
Homeostasis
Psychic homeostasis works to stabilise the presence of trauma in the same way that physical homeostasisstabilises physical processes, such as through blood coagulation in the event of injury.
In Trauma formation: how fight-flight becomes freeze-fawn I describe how psychic homeostasis stabilises trauma through brain fog, numbness and paralysis. When neither fight nor flight are viable, we flip to two alternative behaviours, freeze and fawn, which manifest at the mental, emotional, and physical levels:
- Mental fog—an inability to perceive workable solutions
- Emotional numbness—shutting out the pain of the survival threat
- Physical paralysis—the effect of undischarged adrenaline
From what I can see, homeostasis deliberately sacrifices functionality by reducing our threat perception, making us incapable of grasping how much danger we’re in. It does this to stop us crossing the threshold from functional to non-functional.
That our own processes would deliberately reduce our capacity to function seems to go against all sense. But remember the governing principle: homeostasis always seeks to keep us functioning as well as possible, given the prevailing conditions.
The big rider is ‘given the prevailing conditions.’
The main threat to survival is not the danger we face, but our emotional overwhelm in the face of it—because overwhelm totally incapacitates us. A sensitive child growing up in a household with an abusive parent blurs out all trace of the abuse and emerges into adulthood believing they had a normal childhood. It’s the only way to survive.
As we get older and more aware of our inner life, brain fog, numbness and paralysis may increase as homeostasis works to contain the trauma. Our functionality decreases, yet homeostasis achieves its goal of keeping us going—buying time to find a solution.
Trauma ejection
Yet 30 or 40 years later the trauma may become too impactful to be contained. Instead, a trauma ejectioncycle initiates. An impactful event—such as the death of an abusive parent—can trigger a full-scale trauma ejection.
Trauma ejection often begins with the sudden release of pent-up emotions around a historic trauma event. It continues in a sustained and systematic way over years with a gradual revelation and peeling away of multiple trauma layers:
- Current-life trauma
- Generational trauma (from recent/known ancestors)
- Ancestral trauma (from remote/unknown ancestors)
- Community trauma (from collective historical events)
- Racial trauma (collective historical oppression)
As I describe in Living with ghosts – confronting generational trauma, my trauma ejection cycle began in 2010 when I ordered a copy of my paternal grandmother’s death certificate—and found myself lying on the floor experiencing my father’s grief from her death in 1926 when he was 4 years old.
Over time, other buried traumas surfaced. At first, I saw them as random events. Only later did it become clear that a systematic process was at work
While psychic homeostasis works by reducing our capacity to feel, the ejection cycle works on the opposite principle—we must feel everything that could not be felt at the time the traumas, our own or inherited, happened.
The following three principles apply:
- We release traumas from the least to the most impactful
- The frequency of releases accelerates over time
- Our capacity to handle the releases increases over time
Because each trauma layer affects us more as we get closer to it, it can appear that we’re standing still and permanently mired in trauma release. Yet over time deep shifts, both in our inner and outer worlds, leave indelible evidence of progress.
Eventually, we reach a point where our nervous system literally throws off any last vestiges of trauma—just like an ejector seat spits a pilot from a plane. The last stage of the journey, closure of the ejection cycle, comes with a gradual emergence into a new world: the world of vibrational coherence.
I hope to write about it soon.
Next steps
For further resources on generational trauma, both free and paid, please click on this image.
Image: United States Air Force 040130-F-0000C-002 (public domain)
