I once worked with a client who I'll call Mary.

Mary grew up in an abusive home.

Her biological father was in prison for molesting her when she was little,

and her stepfather had sexually abused her for years.

And from her perspective, her mother's abuse was the worst.

Her mother was emotionally abusive, calling her names and degrading her and telling her she was a slut.

So her childhood was difficult to say the least.

In her 20s, she came to therapy to work on anxiety, self-esteem, and to process through all the old trauma.

In this video, we're going to talk about how trauma showed up in her body and some of the things we worked on to resolve it.

Trauma is very common, but despite

how common it is, trauma treatment is complicated. And complex trauma stemming from years of abuse

really impacts the brain in long-lasting ways. So I'm not going to pretend that I can just teach

you how to fix it in one short video. But we can break trauma treatment down into practical steps.

It's not that hard to learn how to release trauma in the body.

So let's talk about that.

But first, just take a few slow breaths. Now just like that, you sent a message to your body that it can turn on the

parasympathetic response. Now in my previous video, I talked about how trauma gets trapped in the body.

The fight-flight freeze response gets kicked on over and over again, and it doesn't get resolved,

and eventually it becomes habitual, essentially a muscle memory, that turns on that physiological response.

Adrenaline and cortisol flow into the body,

the pupils narrow, the muscles tense, the heart and lungs pump faster, the immune system

and digestion turn off. When it comes to trauma, our body is not only reacting to the present

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