Trauma and the Body:
Somatisation & Dissociation
Trauma doesn’t just affect the mind and the emotions. It profoundly affects the brain and the body too. Often ‘the body remembers’ what the mind cannot.
Why is it that so many trauma survivors not only suffer from ‘psychological’ disorders such as Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) but also from a whole raft of physical issues — chronic pain; frequent or recurrent infections; auto-immune disorders such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (aka ME), fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis; and difficulty in both connecting with the body and living healthily? The body is both the medium through which often the original trauma was enacted, and the source of ongoing suffering and self-hatred.
This workshop will explore why, to the best of current scientific knowledge, this happens, and most importantly, what can be done about it. We’ll be looking at the impact of trauma on the body, and how it seems that the body can also be a key to unlocking the psychological issues of trauma.
Physical issues have deeply impacted Carolyn Spring for most of her life. She had her first bout of ME (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) at the age of 15, which left her in a wheelchair and she subsequently missed a large chunk of her later schooling. Despite recovering sufficiently to go to University, physical illness continued to plague her for the next 20 years. At times suffering pain so intense it would cause her to pass out, and having frequent infections, seemingly random symptoms and endless insomnia, it often felt that Carolyn’s biggest battle was with her body. But with intensive psychotherapy since 2006, many of the symptoms that medical science failed to ameliorate have improved dramatically. On this day she will tell the story of her ongoing journey of discovery about the role of the body in recovery from trauma and dissociative disorders in particular.