Metaphysical Anatomy is a trauma release personal development process. I believe that trauma (this could include physical, emotional or environmental) is the ultimate cause of most human problems. What makes Metaphysical Anatomy different than other trauma therapies is that I do not require the client to talk about or re-experience trauma in order to resolve it. In fact, a person can often resolve trauma easily through identifying its hidden benefit (known as secondary gain), without discussing the actual trauma.
It is important to understand the significance of trauma and why unresolved trauma is significant and how it impacts a person’s wellbeing and emotional states.
Trauma occurs when a person feels unsafe. Examples can include physical assault, an accident, injury or other events, which involved a threat to a person’s survival. Witnessing harm to someone else (including seeing photos or videos) can also constitute trauma [Source: DSM-IV, pp. 424-28].
The significance of trauma lays in the fact that it has such a powerful role in changing lives. Your trauma can change your grandchildren’s lives. For instance, childhood trauma can drastically change a person’s life, influencing every aspect of their health, relationships, education and career. The science of epigenetics demonstrates that trauma creates biological change, which can last for many generations. That means that the trauma people experience, even just witnessing it, can create physical and emotional changes to their future grandchildren and great grandchildren. I highly recommend the documentary, ‘The Ghost in our Genes.’
Epigenetics is an important part of the science behind Metaphysical Anatomy. What matters is this: the original cause of a problem is likely to be trauma, whether in the client’s early childhood or in a pre-existing trauma in the ancestry line that may have indirectly been activated by an unrelated trauma. The great thing about MA is that in most cases, people do not always need to know what the origin of the trauma was. I also explain how someone’s state of trauma can even unconsciously serve him or her in one way or another. The trauma creates a barrier around the person and they push others away and establish boundaries with this barrier. What makes MA unique is that during this process we can acknowledge and resolve the trauma without talking about it or even knowing the who,what or how’s.
In MA and also during a MA consultation and method when teaching I cover:
- Survival instincts and they play a role in our lives (in a positive and negative way).
- Master Cell (Nucleus), understanding it’s role and how to heal with it.
- Ancestral trauma and how it affects our emotional states and patterns in live.
- Associations and how they influence our responses to others and our environment.
- Fascia and this vital part in the body plays a role in storing and holding trauma.
- The Nervous System and how it stores stress and how to resolve it.
- Soul Copies and how they affect your personality and behavioral patterns.
- Secondary Gains to negative problems where in the conscious mind it’s perceived as positive and resolve these blocks.
- Neurotransmitters and the messages they save and record for our survival and how to change it.
- Mirror Neurons and the role they play in depression
- Computation Neurons, understanding the role of Computation Neurons when doing personal development work and healing work and how it could potentially sabotage your progress if not dealt with and understood correctly.
- Breath Work, the importance of Breath Work how it opens up the gateway of different brainwaves states in order to release specific types of trauma.
- Practitioner – Being an amazing and strong practitioner for yourself and your clients!
The difference between completing trauma and surviving trauma
The philosopher Frederick Nietzsche said, “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” I personally do not agree with this statement. It depends how a person reacts to the trauma after surviving it. Trauma does not necessarily make a person stronger. It can cause a person to be less sensitive to future trauma, which unfortunately means they have successfully suppressed and bypassed their past trauma and as a result often become ill as stress and trauma cycles are completed by the body. What some people perceive as “being strong” is actually someone’s ability to dissociate, avoiding and resisting dealing with their trauma. Humans seem to lack the animal ability to complete a trauma cycle after surviving it, whether it was emotional, physical or sexual abuse.
If an antelope narrowly escapes an attack by a lion, it is probably traumatized. As soon as the antelope is safe, it goes through a process of shaking off the trauma. The shaking may resemble the physical action and movement that helped the antelope to survive the threat and pending trauma (e.g. running) as if the animal is completing the act of survival. After a few minutes, it has released the trauma and it runs away, healthy and free from trauma. It starts grazing again, as if nothing had happened. This process is called completing trauma.
According to Dr. Robert C. Scaer, this process of completing trauma is a way of “discharging retained autonomic (nervous system) energy.” According to Scaer’s research, humans lack the ability to discharge this autonomic nervous energy. The human physically survives the trauma, however never completes the trauma. The traumatic experience may be imprinted and stored in the brain. There is suppressed adrenaline in the body and the muscles are still tensed as if though the body still wants to protect itself from a possible threat. This behavior surfaces as tension and rigidity. This is why past trauma can create so many long-term symptoms in humans.
When a human survives trauma, there is no release of this nervous energy and the person keeps carrying that trauma for the rest of their life. According to epigenetic research, this trauma can be passed on to future generations. Trauma is a significant cause of disease, which humans have trouble healing. Any successful healing tool must enable a client to complete their trauma.
Unfortunately, in many modalities, the client is guided to relive the trauma. MA allows a person to not only complete trauma but to resolve specific traumas without talking about it or reliving it in any way.
In a moment of trauma, you will find a way to be and feel safe. This may include reaching out to someone for safety or taking comfort in the numbness or freeze instinct. Every time you experience a similar trauma, you may revert back to the state of mind and gut instinct that kept you safe initially. This can have a long-term effect of allowing you to disassociate from many areas in your life. Becoming numb or feeling paralyzed once served you in a positive way however, the positive survival tactic has negative consequences. The numbness will influence every aspect of your life.
Finding your survival instinct within the moment of trauma may cause you to associate your trauma with survival. You may find yourself afraid of letting go of the trauma because it may mean letting go of the survival instinct you’ve adopted. You must learn how to cope outside of the trauma.
You will also see this in the animal kingdom. The springbok (small antelope) in South Africa is a wonderful example. When a lion chases the springbok it sometimes makes a miraculous escape and gets away unharmed. The buck will go to a safe spot and start shaking and trembling for a few seconds. After that, he will just physically shake off the incident, complete the trauma and shock and continue grazing as if nothing had happened. The springbok has completed the trauma cycle in his body and can continue his usual routine. The buck still knows that a lion is dangerous. However, the buck is not stuck in a state of trauma anymore. Humans have a different way of completing trauma. The problem starts when a person holds on to the trauma. They think that it might protect them in the future against similar incidents.
People use their trauma to establish boundaries with others. By letting go of a trauma, you fear it might cause feelings of vulnerability and weakness as holding onto it kept you safe in one way or another whether conscious or unconsciously. In addition, you might fear letting it go, as you are so familiar with the abusive or challenging circumstances.
Any change in the circumstances, may cause you to feel unsafe and stressed. Familiarity often overpowers common logic, as you do not know how to survive in a new set of circumstances. This is where we underestimate how intelligent our body and coping skills are. Once old patterns and coping skills are released, new ones are created automatically. Whether these new coping skills are good or bad depends on how well the old trauma and patterns were resolved.
In many cases, the original trauma that has affected a person may have occurred before their birth. It may relate to their time in the womb, or at conception. People may even be expressing unresolved biological trauma from their grandparents and ancestors. The critical question is, “Do people need to know the origin of the trauma?” The short answer is “no.” It is important however to acknowledge and understand that there is a trauma that created and triggered the original instincts.
In order to complete the trauma using MA, I acknowledge that there was a trauma or a family history of trauma. People open themselves up to the possibility that a survival instinct is holding a trauma in place. Awareness is a powerful place to start a healing process!
Dissociating from Trauma instead of healing and resolving it
In healing and personal development, dissociating is a way around an obstacle, usually a trauma which is triggered by our environment and circumstances. Almost all psychology, psychiatry, healing and personal development is based on this idea of dissociating.
For example, in psychiatry, medications such as anti-depressants are often used to enable the person to move on from a significant problem or trauma. No one pretends that this is dealing with the underlying issue. Rather, it is giving the client some ability to move on and build their strength in order (hopefully, when they are ready) to deal with the real issue.
In psychology and in many personal development techniques, the client is given tools to smooth over certain traumas, reducing the stress. Often, the client will be taught to anchor in new abilities or resources to deal with anxiety or stressful situations.
A common personal development or healing technique is to change a person’s beliefs or feelings. This can make the person think or feel differently about a subject. This is an excellent example of a bypassing trauma and dissociating from it – it is generally a fast way to make the person think that they have healed or developed themselves. Nevertheless, all they have done is changed a thought or feeling.
Imagine thoughts or feelings as a “neural highway” in the brain. Changing beliefs or feelings is exactly like building a side road on the highway – you have cleared a path around the obstacle, but you have not cleared the obstacle itself. Therefore, it is possible to try to heal trauma by working on beliefs or feelings, but you can never heal the actual trauma. It’s physically impossible because it’s the wrong tool for the job, like building a house from paint instead of wood or bricks. This is why people who have changed a belief or feeling can feel improvement, but the original symptoms always return. It may take years but it will happen the next time something happens to trigger or activate the underlying unresolved trauma.
