Holistic Healing for Medical Trauma - Part One
I was so soothed while talking with Kim Humphrey of Vibrational Body on the Medical Trauma Support Podcast. She has such a calm demeanor that is passed on when you spend time with her. It’s pretty perfect then that she offers multiple modalities to help people regulate their nervous system and heal. Kim’s business is called Vibrational Body where she offers sound healing, meditation and yoga. Kim is also a speech therapist. Kim teaches at a local wellness resort and that is what I first met her. I attended one of her yoga nidra classes and was really impressed with the depth of her compassion and knowledge as well as how calming it was to be around her. I have a trauma history and I don’t always feel safe in yoga and meditation settings but I did with her. And the class was amazing and so relaxing.
What I didn’t know when I first met Kim is that she has a history of medical trauma. Once I heard more of her story, I invited her on the podcast to share her own personal medical trauma story and how that led her to do the work she does now to help others heal. I will be sharing some of Kim’s own words from the podcast in this blog, and you will be able to tell when it is directly in her words because I will use quotation marks.
“I'm so honored to be here sharing it. It is something that has driven really my whole adult life and really just something that I have started talking about, I think because I didn't really have the words. I didn't understand how to talk about it.” When I heard her say that I just had to stop her for a minute because not having the words for medical trauma is such a big part of why this podcast exists! It is something that I also spoke to Erin of Healthcare Revolution Collective about on our podcast episode because so many people don't have the words for medical trauma. And so just having the words to describe your experience is such a crucial piece to starting to understand it in a different way.
Kim really resonated with that in her own experience, “Yeah, yeah, it's true. I think the first time I saw the words medical trauma written out, was like, it was such a light bulb moment of, that's what I'm experiencing. That's me.”
Kim had back injuries leading up to the car accident on her first day of her senior year of high school. Her treatment turned toward reducing pain and she had procedures that were ablations, radio frequency ablations of cranial nerves in her neck. She had nine procedures her senior year of high school under conscious sedation, so you can tell them when you're feeling pain. She described the experience like this, “And I was able to say that I needed more pain medication. And so I think kind of just really the trauma of staying frozen while these nerves were being burned off had built up by kind of some of those later treatments. And I kept asking for more pain medication. I kept saying, I still feel it, I still feel it. And they gave me so much that I actually flatlined and watched it happen. I watched it happen on the screen. I completely left my body, was watching them and just could hear the words over and over, we're losing her, we're losing her and they put something in my IV and all of sudden I was back. Right? And we live in this... and I was an athlete so I very much lived in this like you push through. You do the thing that has to be done with your body, you know? And so they said, are you okay to continue? And I said, yep, I'm fine. You know? Like keep going.” This was so surprising to me in one way but also not surprising because the doctors were more focused on the procedure being completed and less on the emotional impact that flatlining could have on someone. If we had integrated medical care, there would have been someone to talk with her after that experience and be with her after something so scary.
After these procedures she wasn’t able to do the athletics that she had done previously but she was told that she could do yoga but she could not stand on her head. So that’s how she started yoga in her senior year of high school. Kim talked a lot about numbness both physically but also numbness to avoid engaging with the medical trauma. I was curious about how that worked with yoga because often when we slow down and do yoga, things come up, we feel things that we may have been pushing away or down. She felt that even with yoga early on, the medical trauma was something she couldn't acknowledge, it felt too scary. And she said, it felt like, “oh gosh, you can't be with that part of yourself.” I think that is profound because that happens so often with trauma, it is so scary and overwhelming that we push it away. Often times we disconnect from our body and just hang out a lot in the mind, with the thoughts because they feel safer than the sensations that remind us that we have a body and that body was hurt.
Kim was lucky enough to find a yoga teacher who was a trauma informed therapist to start very slowly tapping into her body and then found another teacher who felt safe for her to practice with when she lived in Mexico. That was the beginning of her journey into her own healing and that led her to become a teacher to others looking to heal themselves.
While you will have to listen to the podcast to get all the details, and they are so beautiful, Kim has trained in various holistic healing modalities such as yoga, meditation and sound healing. She shows up to do this work with people who are ready to work on nervous system regulation and get back into relationship with their body. In part two of this holistic healing post, I will share more of the details of her healing journey and the modalities that helped her.