Trauma is an energetic event. Here's how to heal it.

Energy in the ecosystem of women's trauma and its treatment

woman finding wholeness after trauma

Most of us meet trauma on two fronts. There is the mind — the memories that replay, the stories we tell ourselves about what happened, the limiting beliefs that quietly take up residence. And there is the body — the nervous system that stays on alert, the pelvis that never quite relaxes, the emotions that live within organs and fascia Both matter. Talking therapies have transformed how we process our past, and somatic, nervous-system and breathwork approaches have brought incredible release to the places our conscious minds cannot fully reach.

But there is a third front. What if trauma is not only a mental and physical event — what if it is also an energetic one? This is the question at the heart of a full-spectrum understanding of trauma: we are an ecosystem of mind, body, and energy, and lasting healing means tending to all three.

The mind: rewriting the story

You experience yourself through your thoughts, your memories, and the stories that play out inside you. If trauma has been part of your life, it is an experience you need to process consciously to understand what happened, how it has shaped you, and how you can resolve your inner feelings, your relationships, and the limiting beliefs that linger. Talking therapies are invaluable here: they give you a space to metabolise the past and begin writing a new story — one in which you are empowered in relation to what happened.

The body: where emotions live

You are also your body: your organs, your nervous system, your fascia, and the memories you hold at a somatic level. The body is where your emotions reside, and it is very difficult to separate the two. Chinese Medicine has long understood this, describing how emotions flow through our organs and structures — and how disruption to that flow is the principal reason for imbalances in health.

Trauma, as we now understand, affects the nervous system and ripples outward into the emotional and physical patterns we hold. Patterns of stress, anger, fear, guilt and shame are held and metabolised inside the physical body, expressing themselves as contraction and constriction — often in the fascial system, where unconscious stress and unexpressed emotions can become locked in for years. That is why working at a somatic level — through breath, touch, and nervous-system work — can bring such profound release, shifting and rebalancing parts of you that your conscious mind may not otherwise access.

The light body: the layer we cannot see

Yet there is another layer still. A shamanic practitioner might call it your soul. Set aside, for a moment, any religious connotations of that word, and consider soul in its simplest form: light, or energy, that precisely overlaps your body and extends slightly beyond its edges. This is the vital energy that animates your body - and leaves when you die. It is the part of you that silently informs and organises what happens in your physical body and your felt emotions — impulse and consciousness held intelligently, interweaving through your organs, nervous system, fascia, blood, and every aspect of your physical self.

The image I find most useful is a crystal vessel — beautiful, translucent, luminous — holding a clear liquid inside it. The vessel is your energetic boundary. The liquid is your unique frequency of light, the sum of all the information and consciousness that makes you who you are. When that light is clear and available, your body is fed with vitality, emotional harmony, and a sense of inner fullness.

Soul at every scale

To understand how trauma affects us energetically, it helps to understand that this light body consciousness exists at different scales. Through the shamanic lens, the Earth has her own soul and identity, which can be broken down into smaller parts: an island has its soul, a mountain its own, down to the tiniest grain of sand. 

Hidden within what I call our "somatic unconscious", each organ has its own energetic boundary and unique light frequency — a discrete consciousness within the overall soul. Our brain has its own soul, our heart its own, our womb its own; and - profoundly relevant to sexual and reproductive trauma - each part of the reproductive system has its own soul, down to the uterus, cervix, ovaries and fallopian tubes.

African shaman Credo Mutwa described learning to "see" what was happening in the soul of the organs of a sick patient — seeing, in one case, that the soul of the liver was unhappy. This invites an astounding possibility: that within us, out of reach of everyday awareness, each organ is consciously living its own unique story. And if so, can trauma leave energetic wounds at the level of a specific organ's soul — wounds that intimately affect how it functions? 

Here is the central question: what if trauma does not only affect mind, body and emotions — what if it disrupts the integrity of your light body, the way dropping a vase shatters it and leaks its contents? A sexual assault, for example, generates physical injury, fear, and lasting trauma memory. What if it also affects your light body in ways you cannot see? And what if — long after the body has healed, the emotions have settled, and the memories have been processed — the light body still has not been mended?

Shamanic practitioners call this the soul wound: a lingering energetic rupture and imbalance that does not resolve on its own with time, and is not necessarily healed when the other layers are treated. It is why, weeks or decades after trauma, you might still feel "since this happened, I have never felt the same." Something — joy, trust, sexual connection — has been lost, and no amount of talking or somatic therapy seems to bring it back.

The Soul of the Womb

The main locus of sexual trauma is the reproductive system. So what does the light body of your womb feel like? What is the core experience happening there, and how is it paying out within your body? Consider each part of your reproductive system as a discrete consciousness — even, you might say, a unique personality with traits only it holds. Your uterus is one personality - that of a creative mother and protector, your cervix a fierce boundary guardian and each ovary has her own form of creative impulse. These personalities do not exist in isolation: they feel their place in a greater ecosystem of consciousness, communicating with one another — within the reproductive system and beyond it.

Soul Loss in the Womb

Women are vulnerable to “soul loss” in their womb and reproductive organs following any kind of sexual, relational, medical or reproductive trauma but particularly after “big T” traumas such as rape, sexual assault, miscarriage or major surgery. Losing soul pieces from the Womb is particularly egregious because it creates a wound in the foundational life force informing her identity, sexuality, creativity and fundamental sense of her personal boundaries. The Womb is such an important aspect of her light body that losing some of this energy can leave women with a sense of inner emptiness long after the trauma has impacted. 

Some authors speak of “chronic shock” after trauma - and soul loss in the Womb can freeze us into a state of permanent soul damage. This damage can show up in a myriad of ways - including sexual numbness, dissociation and armouring - all ways of coping with with and adapting to with the energetic void that has been created within. 

An ecosystem of support

The harm done to the light body has a significant, hidden impact on the workings of your emotional, physical, and mental levels of being. The nursery rhyme captures it beautifully: Humpty Dumpty had a great fall…and all the king's horses and all the king's men could not put him together again. The horses and men — the physical, active, doing aspects of life — could not do it. Which begs the question: who could?

The return of the shaman

Shamanic practitioners in every culture have known about the light body, and ancient shamanic medicine is ultimately dedicated to tending its health and integrity — because from the shamanic perspective, that integrity is the foundation of well-being, not just for the individual but for family, ancestors, tribe, and even the Earth herself.

Yet over the last six thousand years, beginning in Sumeria, a patriarchal system of control spread across the globe, eventually culminating in Western colonialism. Wherever it went, it sought not only to exploit the Earth's resources and enslave people — it also worked to eradicate shamanic medicine, our human birthright. The ancient knowledge was a threat because it relied on direct knowledge: the gifted shamanic practitioner could see the energetic realms for himself and could not be controlled by organised religion or rule. Patriarchy did not only traumatise us further; it removed, in many places, the very people who could help us heal.

Shamanic wisdom was eradicated more thoroughly in some parts of the world than others, and where it remains, those peoples and their lands continue to be threatened. But it refuses to die out — and today it is experiencing a significant resurgence. For many, core shamanism — a simple, universal way of connecting with the energetic realms, using the drum as the tool — opens the eyes to the hidden energetic body within, and offers constructive ways to heal.

Soul Retrieval

A core focus of shamanic and energetic healing is soul retrieval - or the ancient art of calling back and integrating lost soul pieces that were dislocated by trauma. Many of us walk the Earth incomplete, having lost soul pieces along the way through traumas big and small. With the help of energetic healing, we can call pieces back - perhaps that hold aspects of our self-love, creative power, identity and more - and bring them back to our bodies, in the now, to become more whole. 

Feeling wholeness gives us power - we source energy and love from within rather than constantly seeking outside ourselves - from relationships, sex, money, alcohol and other addictions - in order to “fill the hole” within. This is the ultimate healing from trauma - regaining energetic integrity and emotional wholeness - to finally embody who we were before trauma took place. 

Putting Humpty Dumpty back together

We have spent decades perfecting the king's horses and the king's men — brilliant talking therapies and body-based approaches that have helped countless people. They are essential, and on their own they may not always be enough, because they were never designed to mend the energetic vessel, or restore its precious soul contents.

The question the rhyme leaves us with has an answer: the healer who understands the light body. Trauma is an energetic event; healing, at its deepest, is energetic too. When we understand the intelligent, conscious light body as a key to our recovery — and learn to put ourselves back together, piece by luminous piece — we become able to recover the joy, trust, and aliveness that trauma took from us. And that, perhaps, is the most empowering story of all.