What is Trauma?

Thoughts are real things with real energy. When they attempt to deny reality, they create negative energy patterns that impact your life and your health by causing your energy to stagnate. From the view of Traditional Chinese Medicine, a blockage of energy creates disease. If you think of the blockage as a boulder in your body's life flow, you can easily imagine that the life energy that would naturally be flowing along certain streams is going to be diverted. On the upstream side of the boulder, there will be dammed up energy, on the downstream side you will find a lack of energy. This creates emotional, mental and physical disharmony which is known as a yin-yang imbalance. On one side is too much, on the other is not enough. The goal of Traditional Chinese Medicine is to achieve balance.

A trauma occurs when life becomes unbearable and you tell it "No." Variations on this theme include: "Hold it right there;" "This is too much for me;" "If this happens, I won't survive." This is not necessarily a conscious choice, but it is a natural one at that moment, and it sets up patterns of mental, emotional, and physical behavior. Traumatic stress is the stress to your system of continually trying to hold off the experience of a trauma. The event really did happen.

Traumatic stress ends when the trauma is no longer resisted. Traditional Chinese Medicine is based on the ancient concepts of Taoism. One of the primary concepts that will help you understand how TAT works is yin and yang. These represent any two opposites. Yang symbolizes light, yin darkness. Yang is active, yin is solid or static. In the case of trauma, one side is you, the other is your trauma. If you are in a situation of holding the trauma away from yourself, you have stagnation in the flow of life. Yin and yang are meant to alternate in a dynamic flow of natural movement and change.

If you consider yourself as the "victim" of a trauma and the other(s) involved in the trauma as "perpetrator,” and that this is an absolute, then no movement can occur. Within yin, there is a bit of yang. Within yang, there is a bit of yin. Yin and yang together symbolize the moving, dynamic whole. You are both yin and yang, not just one or the other. When you deny the existence of any part of your Self, then life comes to a standstill. You become cut off from life and from yourself. Your only company is your trauma.

How Does TAT Help?

You have the power to change your relationship with a trauma by directly engaging it through TAT. TAT is a way of saying to your whole body-mind: "Have another look at this." It is an opportunity to change, based on taking a new look rather than continuing to look away. By taking another look, within the context of TAT's direction of the body's energy flow, the energetic charge that is still being held is removed from the past event and the event can be integrated into your whole system.

There are many ways to describe the results of TAT. Integration, harmony, peace, unity, connectedness, relatedness, oneness and wholeness are a few of the terms people have used to express how they feel after doing TAT. I would say that TAT reunites a person with parts of himself or herself that have been locked away or frozen in time. In the following section on cellular memory, we will look at that concept in greater depth.

TAT gives you the opportunity to connect with the great flow of life once again. The experience you have doing TAT is of wholeness. This means that you and the trauma, or the victim and the perpetrator, are both experienced as a whole. There is a sense of oneness rather than separation. When you are no longer in a condition of isolation, your traumatic stress ends and there is peace. This can also be called the harmonization of yin and yang, which in Taoism is represented by the T'ai Chi symbol.

Applying TAT to Cellular Memory

A trauma happens, and a person's response is, "That's too much for me," the implication of that inner statement is, "I'll get to it later, file it away, and face it when I can, when it isn't life-threatening." But we seem to put off forever something that we don't want to deal with now, and the trauma that we put off stays with us. We can put time and distance between us and the event, but the experience is still on hold. The illusion is created in our minds that it is in the "past" and that we are now in control of our lives.

However, the more we keep a trauma locked in the so-called past, the more strongly we are connected to it, and the more traumas we hold off like this, the more narrow and limited our lives become. TAT dissolves the separation between "that" and "me." The energy that holds it off dissolves and you are left with the memory, but no distortion or "boulder" in your energy field. When I work with people, I have a quiet conversation with the cells of their bodies and the memories that are stored there.

As I mentioned earlier, a body does not suddenly come into being out of pure nothing. It has parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, and back and back and back for millions of years. If the chain had ever been broken, that body would not be here today. These conversations happen as the results of my willingness to simply hear the history of the body in front of me. In my work as an acupuncturist, I see the body as an energy field that can become cluttered with pockets of stagnant energy or be open and allow its own and other energies to flow freely through it.

The cells in which old traumas are stored operate in a survival pattern that is based on something that is no longer real or current for anyone but the person maintaining the pattern. When an unresolved trauma impedes the flow of energy in the body, that energy usually becomes stored or stuck in a particular part of the body, often the organ that is most directly associated with the trauma. It might be the lungs' memory of coal dust, the heart's memory of a deep betrayal, the stomach's memory of poisoned food, the back of the head's memory of a crushing blow, and so forth.

When TAT is applied to a cellular memory, it does not erase the memory, it removes the traumatic stress and allows the person to deal with life as it is now. For instance, the lungs of a person with environmental illness may be remembering a time when breathing the dust of dry fields or coal mines made the ancestor's body very ill. When the old traumatic stress is gone, the cells of the lungs may find they are perfectly capable of dealing with current stresses.