The Second Wound is Comfort Seeking.

This need to control stress, symptoms, pain and inner turmoil can become a full-time job. 

When an animal survives a life-or-death encounter, they shake, pant, yawn, and then take a nap. Comfort Seeking is an instinct.

We all need to shake off a bad day or in some cases a car accident or a divorce. I mean shake it off literally.

All animals have to release trauma through nervous system expression. 

Your nervous system has evolved to store intense survival experiences for later and then release the nervous system distress from the First Wound. When you are safe and have the support you need, you will naturally release the embodied memory of the trauma through some form of self-expression.

Laughing, Crying, Dancing, Shaking, Venting, Hugging, and Making Love has helped for countless millennia. 

Often, when I am giving someone an Acupuncture treatment, they begin to shake and then have a huge emotional release. Often, they have no memory of why their body needed to do that and sometimes I have the honour of witnessing a person coming to terms with deeply buried Somato-Emotional memories of trauma.

It is almost always the next day when many of their symptoms begin to improve.

Life is beautiful that way.

Coming to terms with trauma requires a consistent way to feel and move through intensely emotional and painful experiences. It also requires the ability to shift your state and drop into complete relaxation or generate a sense of solace and/or mild euphoria.

If you cannot find a way to release the ‘energy’ from the trauma, your present sense of danger will be more intense. Over time, your sense of instinctual adaptability will diminish. At a certain point, most people do what they can to control their symptoms.

The second wound, the need to control stress and pain, can consume some people’s lives with addiction.