How to Heal From Past Experiences: Trauma and Your Nervous System

I was talking to a friend recently about how to heal from past experiences and the different ways that people can recover from trauma. Through working with clients over the years, I’ve come to find that trauma is a very common thread that underlies a lot of the struggles they tend to face.

But as I’ve mentioned before, trauma doesn’t necessarily have to be a dramatic, life-altering event for it to have a big impact. It can also form through experiences that seem small on the outside but feel overwhelming on the inside. What really matters is how your nervous system handled that moment.

In other words, it’s not necessarily the content of the event that makes trauma stick. It’s the imprint that’s left behind, inside of us, and how we internalize what happened. When you understand how these imprints form, you can finally start to understand them, which helps to soften their grip, so that you can move past them.

What Trauma Really Is (nervous system imprints + meaning)

Here’s a simple way to think about it: When an overwhelming experience happens, certain things can take place inside of us that make the impact of that experience much more “sticky”. Here’s how it works:

• The initial impact: an overwhelming moment takes place that gets stored inside of us as a memory. That memory gets tightly linked to a strong feeling in our body (like fear, shame, or helplessness). That intense feeling gets imprinted onto our nervous system, and then similar situations in the future can re-trigger that same feeling.
• The meaning we add: sometimes, that memory can stop being just about what happened in the past, and instead, it turns into what we believe the experience means about us, our life, or our future. Beliefs like “I’m not safe,” “I’m not enough,” or “People can’t be trusted” can start to sit on top of the imprint, and this is very often what amplifies the intensity of it and keeps people stuck. The memory starts to be about more than just the event itself; it starts to be about what we believe instead, which is often what truly ends up limiting us.

This “meaning layer” is often what ends up determining just how much of an impact the experience will have on our day-to-day life.

For example, if in your past someone was emotionally abusive to you, and their yelling caused a high-impact emotion to be felt inside of you, if while it was happening you gave meaning to the experience by thinking things like, “I’m not good enough,” or “Speaking up isn’t safe”, that could form a deep-seated belief in your subconscious mind, causing similar experiences in the future to re-trigger those same feelings and thoughts about yourself, which could then cause you to act in ways that reinforce the negative beliefs you hold.

When we “link” meaning (how patterns generalize)

When trauma happens, it can make us hypersensitive to certain things around us that would otherwise be completely benign.

For example, when I was just out of high school, I went travelling with a friend, but one day I got a call that completely shook my world… My Dad told me that a friend of mine had been killed in a car accident. I flew back to my hometown immediately for the funeral, but without realizing it back then, that experience had changed me.

For a very long time afterward, whenever I thought about leaving my hometown, I was terrified that something “bad” was going to happen. While still living at home at the time, I remember whenever a family member would leave the house, I’d feel a sense of panic, like someone was going to die.

I’d planned to keep travelling after high school, but I was suddenly scared to do so – it halted a lot of my plans to travel and live in other locations. I just couldn’t leave.

That internal association I’d made made me feel like if I were to ever leave town, someone else would die.

When superstition sneaks in

Not only did the above happen, but even more nonsensical nuances ended up getting “linked up” inside of me. I remember, in the days after learning about my friend’s death, I would often think back and try to remember what I was doing when the accident happened. It turned out that I’d been walking through nature singing the song “Tomorrow” from the movie Annie.

After realizing that, from that point onward, whenever that song popped into my head or I heard it being played somewhere, I’d get freaked out and paranoid, and would do my best to try to avoid hearing it – I thought it was a bad omen.

Logically, I knew it probably meant nothing, but the feeling of fear it brought up inside of me dictated my actions.

These are just two examples of how one traumatic experience can limit us in multiple ways. When we create meaning and tie it to something, it can deepen the depth of what’s driving us. It becomes not only about the initial imprint (the feeling triggered in our nervous system), but about what that feeling means in our everyday life, and how we react to the world because of it.

The depth of meaning (Robert Dilts’ Logical Levels)

One of the highest levels of meaning we can give to an experience is one that’s tied to our identity, because it causes us to see ourselves in a way that limits us. For example, think of a kid who is told by someone that they’re stupid, and in that moment they feel sad, embarrassed, etc (an intense emotion). And they create a belief: this person told me I’m dumb, so I must be. 

That internalized meaning gets mapped onto experiences that are “like that”, and years later, the person might start to avoid taking classes, jobs, or being part of conversations that could expose them as “dumb,” even though, if they took the time to apply themselves, they’d see that they aren’t dumb. This is how meaning can become a lens we continue to look through, which distorts our perception of reality, causing our reality to perpetuate that same belief because we don’t ever let ourselves get past it.

Levels of meaning (from shallow to deep)

When something hard happens, we don’t just store the event; we store the meaning we gave it. That meaning can land at different “levels,” inside of us, and the deeper it lands, the more it shapes what we’ll do next.

A teacher I follow, named Robert Dilts, came up with a model called “Logical Levels” that explains the different levels of meaning/belief people can hold within themselves. Meaning can land at shallow levels (easy to change) or deep levels (harder to change). To give you an idea of how this looks in real life, here’s how the same experience, like making a mistake on a project, can sound depending on which level it lands on:

• Environment: “The deadline was unrealistic, and I didn’t have the resources I needed.”
• Behaviour: “I spent too much time on the research and not enough on the execution.”
• Capability: “I’m still learning how to manage a project of this scale.”
• Beliefs/Values: “Making a mistake is a sign that I’m not working hard enough.”
• Identity: “I’m a failure.”
• Purpose/Mission: “I’m clearly not meant to be in a leadership role if I can’t even handle this.”

As you can see above, the same experience can be internalized or “viewed” at different levels, and that changes the gravity or “meaning” a person ties to it.

As another example, say a student failed their test. Depending on the level of meaning they give to that experience, that can make it easier or harder for them to get past it in the future. Notice the difference in impact these two statements have:

• Capability-level: “I didn’t study well enough for the test.”
• Identity-level: “I’m dumb.”

Identity or Purpose-level meanings feel heavier in the body and are more likely to freeze you, because they threaten who you are or how safely you belong.

One quick rule of thumb: If your inner sentence starts with “I am…” or “They/People/The world is…,” you’ve hit the deep end, and that belief is one of the most challenging to let go of.

Where is meaning holding you back? (3-minute exercise)

Try this 3-minute exercise to see what level of meaning/belief you’ve tied to a challenging situation in your life:

• Step 1: Find a recurring challenge: Bring to mind a situation where you consistently feel limited or find yourself repeating an unwanted pattern.
• Step 2: Feel it in your body: As you think about that challenge, where do you feel it most strongly in your body? What emotion comes with it? (Sometimes feelings can take time to understand – sit with the feeling for long enough to unravel what it is).
• Step 3: Identify your personal lens: What’s the underlying belief or story you tell yourself about that situation? What does it mean about you, or about how the world works?
• Step 4: Identify the level: What level of meaning did it land on? Did it fall into a level of behaviour, or a deeper level, like identity?

When you start to notice the meaning you’ve tied to your experiences, you shift into a third-person or “meta” perspective (observing yourself, while being the observer). This shift takes you out of autopilot mode and into a state where you have conscious awareness of what you’re doing. Awareness is powerful because once you can see your pattern, you can change it.

Nikki

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Next steps and resources

• If you’re new here, check out my foundational article:
  How Your Subconscious Mind Shapes Your Everyday Life.
• And if you want to dive deeper into understanding how these imprints show up day to day…
  Check out these articles:
  • How Your Nervous System Bookmarks the Past (and How to Update It)
  • The Hidden Structure Behind Your Negative Thoughts

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