About
My name is Blair McNea.
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My wife and I went through severe trauma two years ago, for two separate reasons:
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The loss of our businesses and all of our economic resources and the quick death of my wife's father due to a brain tumor.
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We found ourselves caught in trauma pain and brain fog.
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We tried many things to ease our pain, and more importantly, heal us from the impacts of trauma.
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Some worked, many did not.
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So, I did what I always do. I started to read. And read, and read, and read and read.
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And in todays multiple media word, watch and watch and watch.
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I learned three things:
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1) A large portion of traditional therapists use what is known as Prolonged Exposure Therapy for treating trauma as well as anxiety and stress triggered by triggering events or long term exposure to, for lack of a better word, bad situations.
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As a trauma sufferer, nothing that I experienced indicated to me that this PET method worked or that it would be remotely beneficial.
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Furthermore, there is a growing body of evidence and research that indicates that constantly reliving a trauma event is the absolute worst thing that you can do.
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2) Trauma is in the body, not so much the mind. As I read various authors and experts, they either rang true to me based on their understanding of this fact, or rang hollow based on their dwelling on trauma, high anxiety and stress being a mental condition to treat with talk therapy or PET.
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Then, while listening to a Brene' Brown (I'm a fan!) audio book called, Rising Strong, I heard her mention a book by Bessel van der Kolk, PHD, called The Body Keeps the Score.
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I read the book and it confirmed everything I knew to be true about trauma. My experience was unequivocal that trauma and the resulting anxiety and stress is causes, is primarily (about 90%) a "body" issue primarily.
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3) Our bodies will naturally heal us. Dont confuse me with being a believer in natural only therapies. I am not.
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But as it relates to trauma, we need to recognize the evolutionary connection. Whether you believe in a biblical creation story from 250 generations ago or single cell organism evolution (helped by a Creator or not) from 25,000 generations ago, there have been enough generations to enforce the dictum of natural selection.
Trauma in this rough and tumble world has, of course, been around forever. The reaction to trauma is body preservation and self-love. Your body experiences a risk or loss. Your body spikes cortisol and adrenaline and suppress seratonion, GABA and dopamine. This makes you become hypervigilant, anxious, pumped with adrenaline, etc. You are worried and on the alert! And this "hypervigilant" state can keep you from being damaged more if there is an imminent threat.
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But!
Remaining in trauma will make you less likely to survive. You can't thrive being anxious, hiding under a bush and being startled every time the wind rustles (thinking evolution wise).
So our bodies look for signals that everything is normal and ok.
And when our body gets those signals, it lowers cortisol, lowers adrenaline, and elevates serotonin, GABA and dopamine.
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Relaxing us enough to go back about our daily lives of living, planting seeds (real and metaphorically), hunting meat (mostly metaphorically unless you live in Montana) and taking care of our children.
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So the key, is to to identify and send those signals to your bodies and then tour bodies will lower all the trauma related responses which lead to trauma related symptoms. When the body releases its trauma response and returns to a relaxed state, it allows us to put the event (or series of events) which caused the trauma into rational, non-painful context.
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That's what this website is all about.
Discussing those theories and giving you clear actions you can take to tell your body, "It's ok. I'm alright. I can relax. I can heal. There is a future and I need to be in it."
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