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My trauma-body awakened in February 1993. Ice poured down as if from the heavens. The season had already been brutally cold. It was February 1993. My husband’s and my small, cinderblock rental cottage stood on a 3000-acre horse farm in Albemarle County, 15 miles south of Charlottesville, Virginia, at least a mile from any major road. By the time the storm passed 2 days later, we could not open the front door. There was an unnerving stillness in the air and the sky remained dun grey. The power had gone out and we were trapped.
I looked out a blurry window at a landscape locked under more than a foot of ice as far as the eye could see. Suddenly, a feeling of intense panic rose from my chest up into my throat. There was a strange pressure in my head. I gasped for air. I was being engulfed by a dense, suffocating, unexplained terror.
I shook my head in hopes that, like a dog shaking water off its coat, the sensations and feelings would leave. Nothing. The pressure and dread persisted all day. I tried to read but could not concentrate. As the sun set, it worsened as if the impending night would be filled with greater horror—even death.
I watched television on the sofa with my husband and went to bed early with nothing else to do. I hoped I would wake up in the morning and all would be banished. I couldn’t sleep. When I finally opened my eyes as the sun’s early rays cast light into the bedroom, there was this invisible hangman sitting on my chest as if waiting to take me to the gallows.
I had no idea what was happening except to label it in psychological terms as “anxiety.” But this felt different. I had lived with that feeling on and off throughout my life. This was, in contrast, thoroughly frightening. As the days wore on and the temperature didn’t rise enough to melt the ice, I felt no joy, no desire for life. I walked around like a zombie, going through the motions, and tried willing myself into a happier frame of mind. I didn’t tell my husband. I didn’t know what to say. How could I describe something so intangibly bound up in my inner world that I wasn’t even sure it is real? I also was always afraid of revealing my pain and vulnerability—a pattern deeply ingrained from childhood.
We stayed captives in the house for 10 days before the temperatures warmed up enough to start a slow melt. The farm manager finally got his plow to our house, and we were free.
But I was not. Dread followed me into the outside world. Then, a month later came intense pain in my shoulders, neck and back. Even as the ice had temporarily locked us in, suddenly, my body froze up. Normally a fit and energetic 32-year-old, in the mornings, I hobbled out of bed, stooped over like an old woman, muscles creaking and tendons twanging. I went to the doctor. They could not diagnose it and gave me anti-inflammatories and prescribed physical therapy. Neither worked to ease the pain.
At the time, I was in the center of two battles: at work and with my mother, Marti. Upon getting married to a native Virginian living in Charlottesville, I had secured a job running a language lab at a state university an hour away. There, though I had a PhD, I was nevertheless expected to be seen and not heard by a boss who isolated, screamed at and terrorized me. Ultimately, I filed a harassment case against him—an act that, in those times, rarely brought anything but stress, professional death and grief. On top of this, my mother, Marti, as of yet unbeknownst to me suffering from mental illness, was living in Charlottesville and making my life miserable with her unreasonable demands, criticism and escalating use of opioids and doctor-hopping.
The ice storm triggered a long journey into healing symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I didn’t have the diagnosis, nor did I know the terminology at that point. Discovering and understanding trauma was part of the process that would lead me to becoming a shamanic energy healer in 2007 at the age of 46 after 13 years of seeking help through various modalities, including Jungian psychotherapy, trauma-informed mindfulness therapy, hypnotherapy, cranial sacral therapy, psychodrama, and somatic-emotional release. It was discovering shamanic energy medicine in 2006 that was the game-changer.
Since then, I have worked with more than 2000 clients, most of whom have suffered in one way or another with the effects of trauma: childhood abuse, neglect and/or physical or emotional abandonment; war; mass shootings; incest; racism and prejudice; kidnapping; car accidents; sexual violence; surgery; childbirth; cancer and other debilitating or life-threatening illnesses. The list goes on. Not all of them developed full blown symptoms of PTSD. Indeed, I would argue anecdotally that the effects of trauma can manifest not just in depression, anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, and suicidality—among the most prevalent symptoms of PTSD—but can also lead to subtle or overt blocks in the ability to have positive relationships, find love, achieve financial prosperity, have fulfilling careers, and manifest creative projects. Many of my clients reach out to me for these reasons. When I journey into the Lower World—a shamanic term for the subconscious—there almost always is at its root a traumatic experience whether personal, ancestral, or from another lifetime.
The World Health Organization notes that about 70% of the world’s population will experience a traumatic event in their lifetime. Six percent will develop PTSD with 40% recovering within a year. The rest will develop long term, chronic symptoms. Further, women are more susceptible than men (9.7% of versus 3.6%). Those numbers may be attributable to the fact that men are less likely to report symptoms and seek help. Both the WHO and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs have advocated for more resources and research to be done on trauma, PTSD and therapeutic modalities, citing the high cost to society in human and financial resources.
There is another interesting statistic in the treatment of trauma that matched my experience. Although mainstream western psychotherapeutic modalities dominate trauma treatment, around 30% of people will find that even after years of therapy, they are still experiencing mild to severe symptoms and are still encountering trauma-related blocks in central areas of their lives. This is why many of my clients seek me out. Often they say that although they have gotten some benefit from therapy, it feels like it has not been able to get to a deeper level. Or they have concluded that there is a spiritual dimension in their healing that must be addressed in order to really recover. Or they tell me that they have hit the limit of talk therapy and are desperate—desperate enough to go to a shaman.
It was desperation that led me to my first energy healer a year after my trauma body was triggered. That day was lifechanging: after a 90-minute session fully clothed on a massage table, I rose up and was free of physical and mental-emotional pain. This blissful state lasted about 4 weeks. But I was not discouraged, nor did I feel it meant it didn’t work. Back then, after all the therapy I had gone through, I knew that healing trauma could be a layered and timely process.
This truth mirrors the nature of the interconnection between the physical and energy bodies, psyche and soul. Western psychology and psychiatry are only in the past decade or so beginning to be open to Carl Jung’s assertion in the early 20th century that there is a spiritual dimension to our human experience which will ultimately come to the fore at a certain point in the process of psychotherapeutic work. As I myself learned in my early 30s when began to study with Native American teachers and their students, indigenous societies have long known about the multidimensional, holographic nature of reality and that mental-emotional, physical and spiritual imbalances and disease can be effectively addressed through working with the energy—or Light Body.
All impacts, both positive and negative, on the body-mind-soul complex are recorded or stored in the Light Body. Once a traumatic stressor has made its imprint and hasn’t been relatively quickly addressed and removed, it sets up a pattern that filters down from the luminous garment into the mental-emotional and physical bodies. This then continues to draw in experiences similar to the initial trauma, relationships with individuals whose own imprints mirror either the same kind of events or the perpetrator, and thus creates a vulnerability leading to triggers into trauma trance states.
Shamanic energy healing can actually remove the crystallized imprint of the originating trauma from the Light Body and the psyche and thus jumpstart at times what may seem like a radical form of repair. This was my experience in my first energy healing session in 1994. Then, when I started to work with a shamanic healer in my early 40s, I found that the method of wound extraction was even more transformative. There was a sense of freedom I had never achieved with any other modality. Whereas with talk therapy, I developed insight and awareness that occasionally led to inner and outer shifts, with shamanic energy medicine, I truly felt a deep healing that led to dramatic differences in my whole experience of self, others and life.
There is more to be learned about the interconnection between the Light Body, mind-emotions, soul and spirit and the complex dynamics and impact of trauma. The scientific research establishment is finally taking it seriously and undertaking studies of the efficacy of shamanic methods for treating PTSD. Hopefully there will be more and more as our understanding of the holistic nature of our physical and Light bodies, mind-emotions, soul and spirit are embraced as real.
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