Being Mindful of Trauma: An Interview with Gabby Ortega

Trauma goes a long way. It can come in different shapes and sizes and it is more common than you may think. For some, trauma may have come as a sudden adverse event or experience, while others may have experienced it incrementally spread over time. And trauma is not necessarily delegated to the past nor does it merely pertain to the individual; during this unprecedented pandemic, we have now all experienced individual and collective trauma as well as pain, loss, and suffering. Regardless of whether we are talking about acute or chronic traumatic events, it can take a long time to deal with and recover from trauma and chronic stress.

To discuss how to deal with trauma and other vital mental health matters, I had the pleasure to talk with Gabby Ortega. Not only has she personally experienced trauma and managed to deal with it, but she is also a psychologist, healer, business and leadership coach.

But first and foremost, she considers herself a trauma survivor from complex childhood trauma. Gabby is candid about her own mental health struggles, including anxiety and depression, and that at one point in her life, she was suicidal. Yet it was at such low points of her life that she showed strength and resilience and decided to heal herself. As a result, she went to college because she wanted to gain insight into how trauma, particularly childhood trauma, affects the psyche and, moreover and more importantly, what to do about it.

The first step to take in these matters is to acknowledge trauma or at the very least to realize that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. In some cases, it may be easier to pinpoint the exact cause, moment, or event that triggered one’s unease and troubles. At other times, the information may not be readily available, and it would require some digging into the lower hidden layers of the psyche. But the bottom line is that there is almost always an underlying reason for feeling and acting the way we do.

Even for the untrained eye, it can be easy to perceive that something is wrong or amiss with a certain person or group of people. For instance, a constantly cranky, angry, or cynical person is evidently unhappy. They may try hard to hide their trauma alongside their true feelings, such as vulnerability, weakness, fear, and shame, but it is not difficult to see past their guise and mask and to spot the real emotional and mental state behind it all.

In fact, Gabby used to feel a similar way about herself as well as the direction that her life was taking. She felt lost, angry, and frustrated but she used those feelings as a catalyst and wake-up call to embark on a spiritual journey that included Buddhist meditation and would even touch upon quantum physics. Not only did she encounter higher levels of consciousness, but she realized that there was trauma stuck inside her body.

At the same, she noticed that the current mental health system is broken; not only is it often driven by monetary incentives and marked by financial drives and motivations, but it is also often ineffective. There may be two reasons for this: on one hand, the tools used would not fully address the issue at hand and would only offer superficial help and relief; on the other hand, mental health professionals can only offer guidance but essentially each and everyone needs to work out their own path of healing.

The thing with trauma is that it comes in two forms, individual but also collective trauma, and the two are often intricately linked and interconnected. We are seeing this in our current situation where the pandemic has brought collective suffering that brings into focus and highlights individual suffering, and vice versa. In many cases, the spike in mental health problems is not new and the issues and problems were already there, but the pandemic served as a catalyst for it. Moreover, trauma is cumulative, and it can build up just like the steam in a pressure cooker.

This trauma needs to be released for healing to occur. Gabby uses what is generally known as the holistic method but many people either do not know what that means and entails or their understanding of it is either flawed, limited, or plainly erroneous. Simply put, this method acknowledges and gives space to the mind/body/spirit connection within each of us and tries to find different creative and appropriate ways to align them. While traditional psychology is mainly set and focused on the mind, the holistic method looks at and takes into account the person as a whole. It is also aware of the fact that trauma is not just in the head, but it is equally manifested in the body.

This is evident when we talk about our reactions to fear and stress. It is often not the perception that we are stressed that leads to feelings of unease, but it is the other way around. The body senses unease and the mind reacts to that information that is transmitted to the brain. Once there, the information triggers the amygdala, a place of emotion, fear, and threat, and since one feels being under threat, one automatically adopts ingrained instinctive behavior patterns like fight, flight, or freeze. This is regardless of the fact that our fears may be unreasonable and unfounded, and when, in reality, there is not the anticipated tiger behind the door but merely a cute harmless kitten.

Furthermore, we cannot blindly trust and have full faith in our thoughts as they may be distorted and inaccurate. Evidently, fear and healthy levels of stress are not inherently bad, and, in fact, they work as protective measures passed on by evolution. Mistaking a tiger for a cat can be a fatal mistake. We are programmed to do our best to survive, and the fear we sense in the body merely occurs because we are trying to make sense of a given situation.

Yet there is also the ideological and intellectual concept of fear, which may have been triggered with memories of past events, i.e., trauma, and it becomes a seemingly endless record that has been playing for a very long time; more often than not, it is not in alignment nor in agreement with the realities of who and where you are at the present moment in your life.

Hence, it is important to deconstruct a lot of the stuff that has now become automatic thoughts that keep popping in your head. It means that it is high time to have an honest, intimate, and possibly overdue conversation with yourself. To stop the cycle of negativity and to wake up to your true self and your own innate potential and possibilities, you first need to get to know yourself and find out what you really like and enjoy, what you are interested in, and what you value most in your life. In other words, it is important to focus on what really matters to you personally at this stage of your life.

In this way and manner, you can realign yourself. Along the way, you would need to listen to your heart and intuition and not just be guided by the voice or inner critic in your head. You would need to track down and trace negative thinking and, at all times, be genuine and kind to yourself. Those would be the first baby steps towards healing and personal fulfillment.

And as Gabby states in our interview, a lot of healing is needed in the world. This was one of the main reasons she decided to start Om Therapy Coaching. She was using herself, her own experiences, and successes as a potential guideline and benchmark for others to follow as well.

As mentioned previously, her approach is holistic and mindful in design and nature. It is about realigning your body, mind, and spirit and about being nonjudgmentally aware of your thoughts and feelings. It is about forgoing excuses and stop pinning your hopes on a vague distant future, the illusory and vapid promise of “one day”. It is about living in the present now. It is about shedding light onto the hidden recesses of trauma to illuminate your whole being and to brighten your individual shiny path forward.

To access the full-length interview with more details and information, click here