Healing Trauma Through the Body with Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk

Did you know that trauma and stress don’t just affect your emotions but can also be stored in your body—especially in your spine? How can we release this tension and improve our overall well-being? In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Lauren Stefanik, a chiropractor at Wellness Rhythms, to explore the powerful connection between stored trauma and physical health. Drawing inspiration from The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Stefanik explains how everyday stressors and past trauma manifest physically, leading to discomfort and emotional imbalances. We dive into Network Spinal chiropractic, a gentle technique that helps release tension in the spinal cord, promoting higher energy states and better health. Dr. Stefanik also shares her journey into this integrative healing approach and emphasizes the importance of self-compassion, body awareness, and open communication for overall well-being. If you're looking for ways to release stored tension, enhance your health, and embrace a holistic approach to healing, this conversation is one you won’t want to miss! --- Listen to the podcast here: Healing Trauma Through the Body with Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Recently, I read a book called The Body Keeps Score, which talks a lot about the idea of all of our traumas, everything happening in our past, regardless of what it is, kind of being stored in our body, this is oftentimes things that we sometimes tend to forget about, forget about how it’s continuing to impact our lives, such as continued patterns in our childhood that we kind of lived through or even other kind of more acute lived experiences that could be one car accident when you’re 16 and now you’re 35 so it doesn’t really become something you think about in a lot of your minds. Now, there’s been some study about how some of these subconscious patterns continue to emerge through some subconscious programming, but here today, I’m here to talk to you a little bit more about how the body itself keeps score, how certain parts of the body kind of retain the memories of these traumas and how it can still be impacting what we’re doing today and how we’re showing up in everything around. And to facilitate this conversation, I’d like to invite on my guest, Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk with Wellness Rhythms. She is a doctor of chiropractic services. --- Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk, welcome to the program. Hi, Stephen. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really grateful that you have this awesome podcast and that you’ve given me the opportunity to be on it. And, yeah, I do network spinal as a doctor of chiropractor. We’re talking about how the body keeps score, and your focus specifically is on how the spine has kind of kept score of some of these traumas or other items from our past. Yeah. So, what we like to say is that what goes to the back of the mind tends to go to the spine and so what Network Spinal is specifically helping people realize is that there’s events that happen in our life, whether you call them stressors or traumas or just stressful events, your body actually doesn’t really know the difference between a massive stressor like something that we usually, quote-unquote, call “trauma,” or the small kind of everyday stressors, where we’re stressing to get to work on time or we have a deadline or our dog is barking at us and we don’t know why. Your nervous system actually doesn’t know the difference between a massive stressor and a small stressor. It really responds in the exact same way and, sometimes, that is responding by going into fight or flight. So, when we go into fight or flight, there’s a lot of things that people realize happens. So, your eyes, your pupils are going to dilate, your breath becomes a little bit more shallow and more rapid, your heart rate becomes more rapid, your muscles tense, all of those things people recognize, but a lot of people don’t realize that your nervous system actually contracts when you’re in fight or flight. So, literally, your spinal cord is going to elongate because it’s contracted and tight within the canal about two to three inches, which is a lot. So explain to me the mechanism by which this nervous system contracts. So, is this what you mean when you said what goes to the back of the mind probably goes to the spine? What exactly happens if –– let’s say it’s a chronic stress, let’s just say, every day, you’re unnaturally worried about, I don’t know, another member of your family just blowing up on you and slamming doors and picking things. Yeah, so great question. So, it’s pretty much that fight or flight response. If you are having that stressor every day where you are worried about that family member blowing up at you, your nervous system is really smart and if there was an event where that family member did actually blow up at you and you survived that moment, obviously, because you’re still living today, that was in the past, your nervous system learned, oh, man, this was –– most of the time, you’ll see it in people’s postures, their body goes into defense and it goes into fight or flight, where, literally, your body goes into that defensive posture, that crouched, poor posture that almost everybody has nowadays, where their shoulders are rolled far forward, almost everybody has this. That is that physical manifestation. Pretty much all of your connective tissue, everything is tightening up, especially the connective tissue surrounding the spinal cord, so that’s how that happens. And your nervous system is super smart and it’s like, “Oh my god, I survived in that moment and that was the coping mechanism that I did, I went into fight or flight but I survived,” and so when you even think about that stressful thing happening again, your nervous system has that memory of that’s how I survived in that moment so it’s going to want to do that same coping mechanism and so, unfortunately, maybe your whole body doesn’t go into fight or flight but parts of your nervous system that had that traumatic event, that memory that you talked about with the body keeps the score, the part that kept that memory and your body is super smart, it was like, “I survived so I’m gonna do that again,” and we keep doing the same types of coping mechanisms over and over again in our body, unless it is taught how to do something else. So that’s my whole job is to get your brain actually connect with your body again, realize, “Oh, man, I’ve actually been holding something here for 20 years and I had no idea,” or you did have an idea but you’re actually probably having pain. Getting your brain to connect with your body again, realize that you actually have all of that stress and tension and trauma stored in your body and want to release it by itself so that your nervous system is creating a new coping mechanism for the stress that you actually have instead of what happened in the past and the coping mechanisms that it gained from that experience. So that coping mechanism, that tightening of your muscles, each time you do it, it has a small impact on your spine that adds up over time/ Exactly. Yeah, so it’s the accumulative stressors that we have in our life. What we’ve talked about, that was an emotional stressor. They’re really the most prevalent type of stress that we have in our lives. And it’s the big things that people you know usually, quote-unquote, call “trauma,” like divorce and moving and losses of loved ones and abuse and all those awful things, but there’s also the smaller emotional traumas, like getting to work on time and the text messages, the deadlines, the boss calling, the cat constantly being everywhere and you don’t know what they want. Those are some of the smaller emotional stressors, like getting to work on time, sitting in traffic. Those things are definitely very prevalent that might lead your nervous system to actually still be holding on to any of the stress from something remotely similar to it in the past, if it hasn’t actually let that go. So there’s the emotional stress. There’s also the physical stressors and the chemical stressors that we have in our lives. So the physical stressors, you’re talking about things like accidents, right? Exactly. So those are the some of the bigger ones, just like most people assume so like an accident, a car accident or a skiing accident or jumping off a trampoline and landing weird. There’s also the smaller physical stressors, like if you have a job where you have to sit all day long or a job where you have to stand all day long, you’re talking on the phone, if you’re leaning over typing over a computer, those are some physical stressors. So the physical stressors could be just the manner in which our day to day lives in the modern world don’t exactly line up with what humans were evolved to live, we never mentioned, I have this I have this acronym, I just think of AIS for Alone Indoors and Seated for what we spend too much time generally doing, so spending too much time alone indoors and seated as opposed to the natural human condition, that type of stuff, and it probably takes on a different form with, say, more of an assembly line manual labor worker who may spend too much time in like one specific position because that’s where their station has their body moving. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you’ve got it. We were taught in school sitting is the no smoking. It’s as bad for you as smoking if you’re sitting for eight hours a day at a job so that’s why I love what I do because it actually teaches you to listen to the small messages that your body wants to tell you, like, “Hey, I’ve been sitting for two hours. Can I stand up and stretch for a little bit?” or go and get some more water or step outside for 30 seconds and get some sunlight on your body,...