Anxiety is not a malfunction. It is a pattern your nervous system learned, usually for very good reason. This post explains what is actually happening -- and offers three things you can try right now. Read more at alexiaelliott.co.uk

Trauma is not what happened to you. Trauma is what happened inside you when it happened. That distinction matters enormously, because it changes everything about how we approach healing.

Two people can go through the same event and have entirely different responses. One is shattered. The other walks away relatively intact. This is not about strength or weakness. It is about what was already in the nervous system the previous experiences, the early attachment patterns, the resources that were or were not available when the overwhelming event occurred.

Trauma is what happens when an experience exceeds the nervous system's capacity to process it in the moment. The event cannot be metabolised and integrated in the ordinary way. Instead it gets stored — in the body, in the nervous system, in the implicit memory system that operates below conscious awareness as an unfinished experience that the system keeps trying, and failing, to complete. Why Talking Is Not Always Enough

Alexia Elliott Shamanism, Hypnotherapy, NLP, Jung Leiecster online courses avaiiable.

Power loss is as real as soul loss. Alexia Elliott, shamanic practitioner and hypnotherapist in Leicester

We live in a culture that is deeply uncomfortable with grief. We are given a week or two of compassionate leave, a few weeks of condolence cards, and then the quiet but unmistakable expectation that we will pull ourselves together and get on with things. Grief, in this framework, is something to be gotten through as quickly as possible rather than something to be genuinely met.

The problem is that grief does not work that way. When it is rushed, suppressed, or denied an outlet, it does not disappear. It goes underground. And from there, it shapes everything.

What Unprocessed Grief Looks Like

Unprocessed grief rarely announces itself as grief. It tends to show up in disguise. As chronic low mood that has no clear cause. As a flatness or numbness that sits just below the surface of ordinary life. As irritability, or anxiety, or a sense of heaviness that nothing quite lifts. As physical symptoms — tightness in the chest, exhaustion, a body that carries more than it should.

It can also show up as a relationship with the past that will not release. A person, a place, a version of life that is gone — and the inability to fully accept that it is gone. The mind keeps returning, keeps rehearsing, keeps trying to find a way the story could have ended differently.