Peter Levine, trauma therapist and author of Waking the Tiger, has suggested that we can learn about trauma from animals in the wild. When they experience a near-death encounter; they instinctively shiver the trauma out of their bodies, effectively shaking off the adrenal response. 

As humans, our trauma often gets stored in the nervous system and can affect our biological and cognitive functions. Our sympathetic and parasympathetic systems undergo a shift that impacts how we respond to events in our daily lives, long after the source of that initial trauma is gone. This is the nature of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Trauma is not just for soldiers and victims of physical abuse. If you had an adverse experience in childhood, when your nervous system was still growing, your body’s adrenal response to stress may have developed into a chronic condition known as complex trauma. 

Trauma can feel like a continuous inner trembling or like acute pangs of an inexplicable need.  It may also express itself as an overall sense of numbness, feeling that you should feel something but can’t. It may look like anxiety, irritability, excessive emotion, or hyperactivity. It can even express itself in a desperate drive to maintain harmony at all cost.

Whatever form trauma takes for you, the one common thread in all these responses is your sense that something inside is wrong and can often be misunderstood as something being wrong with you.