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!
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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.
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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 liv