The Paralyzing Grip of Trauma: Reclaiming the “Instinct of Purpose”
A Journey Through Neuroscience and Shamanic Wisdom
Trauma, particularly when experienced in overwhelming helplessness, doesn’t just damage the mind—it profoundly alters the body’s fundamental survival systems, leaving us feeling immobilized or paralyzed. Western neuroscience calls this “limbic system dysregulation.” Indigenous healers have long called it “soul loss”—the fragmentation of vital life force when the spirit cannot bear to remain fully present during unbearable experiences. Both languages describe the same profound truth: when we cannot fight or flee, something essential within us departs, and we lose what physiologist Ivan Pavlov termed the “Instinct of Purpose.”
A Personal Testament to Immobilization
Those who know me understand that I spent my early childhood hospitalized and bedridden. When I felt better, I could only crawl—my right leg was unusable. The years I spent without truly moving left a psychological wound I’m still actively healing.
Imagine being 2, 4, etc years old, and while all the other kids are outside playing, you’re delirious in bed with fever. These fevers brought heavy hallucinations that compromised not only my rational brain but also my sense of self-agency. A shaman might say that during those feverish states, parts of my soul—my vital essence, my power—fled to safer realms, unable to remain in a body experiencing such suffering.
For me, it was an illness. For you, it might have been specific abuse, neglect –the piercing experience of not being seen by your parents or guardians. For others still, the wounds might be primarily karmic—this lifetime wasn’t necessarily traumatic, but you’ve carried wounds from other incarnations. The shamanic worldview recognizes that trauma can fragment the soul across lifetimes, creating patterns of “stuckness” that transcend current circumstances.
You recognize this when you connect to that familiar sensation of feeling stuck—what shamans call “power loss” and neuroscientists call “learned helplessness.”
Eventually, as you work on your wounds, you make progress. You return to the idea that perhaps initially sparked your spiritual awakening and desire to help others. Then, the journey becomes increasingly tough, little by little. I do want to stop here to say that although I am referring to this process in a linear manner, it’s far from so, and sometimes we circle through the same phase to integrate something we couldn’t do before. Anyways, returning to the issue at hand – The trials grow bigger and more challenging. You start questioning your path, returning to that fundamental question: What do you really want from life?
This questioning itself is the beginning of what shamans call “soul retrieval”—the journey to reclaim the fragmented parts of yourself that fled during trauma, the restoration of your vital life force and sense of purpose.
I want to acknowledge Dr. Bessel van der Kolk and his groundbreaking work in “The Body Keeps the Score,” which has deeply informed my understanding of the neuroscience. I also honor the unnamed indigenous healers (and all my elders) across millennia who understood these truths through direct spiritual perception.
The Neurobiology of Helplessness and Soul Loss
The experience of trauma, especially when it involves being trapped or immobilized, short-circuits the brain’s natural defense mechanisms. This is more than a psychological state—it represents a profound physiological and spiritual fragmentation.
The Trauma Signature: When the Spirit Cannot Stay
When confronted with overwhelming danger, the brain’s rational processing centers—the frontal lobe—effectively shut down. This is why, when truly frightened, a person cannot articulate their thoughts and becomes incoherent, unable to access rational processing.
Simultaneously, from a shamanic perspective, the soul recognizes that remaining fully present in the body would mean experiencing unbearable pain. In an act of mercy and survival, aspects of consciousness—what indigenous traditions call soul parts or power—dissociate and flee to the spirit world, to “safer” realms. This is not pathology; this is profound wisdom. The spirit knows it cannot survive full presence during certain experiences.
Instead, the limbic system, the ancient survival brain, takes over. This system is remarkably uncreative, simply repeating the same often self-destructive coping mechanisms. It manifests in one of two ways:
Hyperarousal (Fight/Flight): An intense experience of horror, racing heart, and agitation where the person is hijacked by whatever happens inside their body. Shamanically, this is the state of “spirit intrusion”—where fear entities or trauma energies lodge in the energy body, constantly triggering threat response. This also seriously affects our Vagus Nerve, creating issues with fatigue, further chronic stress, digestive issues, and so many other issues – the list is too long, honestly.
Dissociation (Freeze/Immobilization): A state where the body goes into defensive shutdown, feeling zombie-like. In this state, brain activity significantly decreases, leaving nothing to work with except procedural memory. This is classic “soul loss”—the person is physically present but spiritually absent, going through the motions without vital life force.
Adding to this complexity, Broca’s area—the speech center of the brain—goes offline when trauma is being relived. Shamans understand this as the limitation of the “talking mind”—trauma is stored in the body and spirit, not in words. This is why traditional talk therapy often fails to reach the deepest wounds. The story cannot be told because the trauma exists beneath language, in the realm of sensation, image, and spiritual fragmentation.
In my case, I used to go between dissociation and a hidden chronic anxiety running in the background that I was unaware of for most of my life! I think we often assume that if we have an issue, we probably don’t have the other side of the coin, but in reality, what I have found personally is that we bounce back and forth between parasympathetic and sympathetic states, which makes it really hard to feel like we can be fully present in our bodies.
The Shamanic Map: Understanding Power Loss
In shamanic cosmology, every human being is born with what’s called “personal power”—a vital life force that animates us with purpose, passion, and agency. This maps directly onto Pavlov’s “Instinct of Purpose.” When trauma occurs, especially immobilization trauma, we experience power loss in several ways:
Soul Fragmentation: Parts of consciousness literally leave the body to escape unbearable experience. These soul parts wait in the spirit world to be retrieved when it’s finally safe.
Power Animal Departure: Our instinctual, animal vitality—our connection to our bodies and survival wisdom—can flee or be driven away by trauma. Without this connection, we feel disconnected from our bodies, our instincts, our purpose.
Intrusive Energies: Sometimes trauma creates openings where fear, shame, or even external negative energies can lodge in the energy body, constantly triggering suffering.
Ancestral Wounds: Unhealed trauma in our lineage can be carried in our energy field, creating patterns of immobilization that seem to have no cause in this lifetime.
Modern neuroscience is beginning to validate these ancient observations through research on epigenetics (how trauma is inherited), the default mode network (how consciousness fragments), and the vagus nerve (the body’s connection to survival instincts).
Loss of the Instinct of Purpose: When the Soul Forgets Its Mission
The profound impact of trauma on agency and motivation was observed decades ago by Pavlov, who connected immobilization directly to the loss of a key survival drive. Shamanic traditions have understood this as the loss of connection to one’s “soul mission” or “sacred purpose.”
Pavlov’s Observation
In 1934, after a devastating flood, Pavlov observed that his dogs, who had been trapped and immobilized in their cages for 24 hours, were completely dysregulated afterward. He concluded that because they were prevented from activating their natural fight-or-flight response, their survival mechanisms were fundamentally rewired.
He defined the Instinct of Purpose as “the most important instinct in the animal kingdom”—the intrinsic sense of energy and drive that motivates an organism to take action toward a goal. When an organism is immobilized, this fundamental instinct is destroyed.
From a shamanic perspective, this isn’t just behavioral conditioning—it’s power loss. The dogs lost their vital connection to their instinctual wisdom, their power animals (the spiritual representation of instinct), their life force.
The Human Toll: When the Soul Forgets Why It Came
For trauma survivors, the loss of this instinct manifests as being stuck in avoidance or escape. Shamans would say the soul has forgotten why it incarnated, what gifts it came to bring, what purpose it serves.
This isn’t just metaphorical. When you lose connection to your soul’s purpose, life literally loses color, meaning, direction. Trauma interferes with:
Motivation: The survivor slouches through life with a low sense of purpose, finding that little genuinely excites or motivates them. Shamanically, this is the absence of vital life force—the soul parts that carry passion, curiosity, and joy are still hiding in the spirit world.
New Identities: The person remains locked into the identity of a traumatized victim or is unable to transition into new roles, constantly reliving the past rather than creating a future. Without soul retrieval, we cannot access the parts of ourselves that know how to become something new.
Executive Functioning: The ability to plan, exercise self-control, and deal with new challenges—executive functioning—is impaired. From a shamanic view, this is the loss of connection to power animals, the instinctual wisdom that guides us through challenge and danger.
Connection to Sacred Purpose: Perhaps most devastatingly, trauma survivors lose access to what shamans call the “soul’s blueprint”—the pre-incarnational knowing of why we are here, what we came to do, what gifts we came to bring. The instinct of purpose is not just about daily motivation; it’s about remembering your soul’s deepest mission.
The consequence of immobilization is that life passes by. The person cannot be fully engaged in the present, living instead in a constant state of fear and automatic response, watching their own life from a distance. The soul remains partially absent, still waiting for safety to return.
The Path to Reclaiming Agency: Integrating Ancient and Modern Healing
Trauma treatment, whether approached through Western psychology or shamanic practice, must focus on the same goal: helping individuals regain their sense of agency in their bodies and restore their instinct of purpose. This requires methods that bypass the logical, offline verbal brain and speak directly to the emotional brain’s need for safety, movement, and proper timing—or, in shamanic terms, methods that work in the realm of spirit, energy, and soul.
What’s remarkable is how modern neuroscience is validating what shamans have always known: healing happens in the body, in ritual, in altered states, in direct spiritual experience—not primarily in talking about trauma.
- Activating the Body’s Survival Response and Retrieving Power
The initial step involves moving the body and creating a safe space for the action that couldn’t be taken during the trauma. This is both neurological rewiring AND energetic restoration.
Action and Agency – Reclaiming Your Power Animal:
People cannot truly heal until they reclaim their sense of action and take control of their lives. This isn’t metaphorical—it’s physiological and spiritual.
In shamanic terms, this is the work of power animal retrieval. Power animals represent our instinctual wisdom, our connection to our bodies, our survival intelligence. When we experience immobilization trauma, our power animals often flee or are driven away. Reconnecting with power animals—whether through shamanic journey, martial arts, dance, or any embodied practice—literally restores our connection to instinct.
The neuroscience bears this out: movement-based practices activate the motor cortex and cerebellum, regions that were offline during freeze states. By moving with intention, we signal to the nervous system, “I am no longer immobilized. I can act.”
The Power of Movement – The Body as Sacred Instrument:
Methods like yoga, martial arts, boxing, or movement therapy, such as dancing tango or other forms of dance, train the brain circuits responsible for inhibition, self-control, and planning. These activities directly rewire the brain circuits that were damaged by trauma.
But these practices are also ancient shamanic technologies. Yoga comes from the Sanskrit root “yuj,” meaning “to yoke” or “to unite”—the union of body and spirit. Martial arts originated in spiritual monasteries as a form of moving meditation and energy cultivation. Boxing and wrestling are found in indigenous cultures worldwide as rites of passage, serving as ways to reclaim power.
These aren’t just exercises—they’re rituals of reclamation. Every punch thrown is a “no” that couldn’t be said during abuse. Every warrior pose is a stance of power that couldn’t be taken during helplessness. Every controlled breath is sovereignty over a body that once felt hijacked by terror.
Embodiment and New Memories – Creating Corrective Spiritual Experiences:
Techniques like psychodrama allow for the creation of “corrective emotional experiences.” By having you play the roles of ideal caregivers or empowered versions of yourself, you as the survivor can create new, visceral memories that stand side-by-side with the old traumatic ones, offering your nervous system new reference points.
This is remarkably similar to shamanic soul retrieval journeys, where the practitioner travels to the spirit world to find the lost soul parts, brings them back, and integrates them through ceremony. Both psychodrama and soul retrieval work create new experiences of safety, empowerment, and wholeness that the nervous system can reference.
In my own healing journey, I’ve experienced both therapeutic roleplay and formal soul retrieval ceremonies. The neurological and spiritual effects are indistinguishable—both create profound shifts in how the body holds itself, how the mind interprets safety, how the soul experiences wholeness.
- Restoring Self-Regulation and Interoception – Learning the Language of the Body
Healing is fundamentally about learning how to manage the body’s internal state so that it no longer interprets the world as a perpetually terrifying place. This is what Western psychology calls “self-regulation” and what shamanic traditions call “energy mastery” or “spiritual sovereignty.”
Limbic System Therapy – Clearing Intrusive Energies:
Because trauma is rooted in the survival brain, recovery requires addressing the limbic system directly. Tools that speak to the procedural, visceral level—such as Tapping (EFT), Qigong, or somatic experiencing—can help restore the feeling of safety and bring the person into their “window of tolerance.”
From a shamanic perspective, these practices are forms of extraction healing—removing intrusive energies or spiritual “debris” that lodge in the energy body during trauma. The tapping points in EFT correspond to acupuncture meridians, the energy channels recognized in Traditional Chinese Medicine and Qigong. When we tap, we’re clearing stuck energy, removing blockages, allowing life force (chi/prana/axé) to flow again.
Somatic Experiencing, developed by Peter Levine after studying how animals shake off trauma, is essentially a Western rediscovery of shamanic shaking and tremoring practices used in indigenous healing worldwide. The body knows how to release trauma—we just need to create safe containers for it to do so.
Neurofeedback – Training the Brain as Energy Practice:
Neurofeedback technology helps restore the brain’s capacity for focus and calm by allowing people to interact with their own brainwaves through gameplay. Neurofeedback is one of the few techniques shown to successfully normalize the brain’s ability to filter stimuli and integrate emotional control.
While this seems purely technological, it’s essentially biofeedback-assisted meditation—training the brain to enter and sustain beneficial states of consciousness. Advanced meditation practitioners and shamans can do this without technology through years of practice. Neurofeedback accelerates the process by providing immediate feedback.
Shamanic journeying also trains the brain to shift between beta (normal waking), alpha (relaxed), theta (deep meditation/trance), and delta (deep sleep/transcendent) states. The shamanic drum, beating at 4-7 beats per second, entrains the brain to theta waves—the same frequency neurofeedback often targets for trauma healing.
Mindfulness and Interoception – Developing Your Inner Shaman:
The development of the medial prefrontal cortex (the “mohawk of the brain”) is essential, as it’s the only part of the conscious brain with a direct pathway to the emotional limbic system. Learning to pay attention to and name internal sensations—interoception—through practices like yoga and meditation literally grows this critical brain area and is foundational for self-leadership and emotional regulation.
In shamanic terms, this is developing your inner shaman—the part of you that can journey between the ordinary and non-ordinary realms, that can witness your experience without being overwhelmed, that can communicate with your body’s wisdom, your emotions’ messages, your soul’s knowing.
Interoception is the bridge between the talking mind and the body’s truth. It’s the language the soul speaks through. When you can feel the tightness in your chest and recognize it as grief, when you can sense the fire in your belly and know it as power returning, when you can notice the lightness in your heart and identify it as a retrieved soul part—you are developing spiritual literacy.
This isn’t just psychological skill—it’s shamanic mastery. The shaman is one who can navigate inner realms, interpret symbolic language, work with energy directly. Mindfulness practices train exactly these capacities.
- Soul Retrieval and Spiritual Integration – The Heart of Shamanic Healing
While Western psychology offers powerful tools for trauma recovery, shamanic traditions add a crucial dimension: the explicit work of retrieving lost soul parts and restoring spiritual wholeness.
The Journey to Retrieve What Was Lost:
In soul retrieval, a trained shamanic practitioner enters an altered state (usually induced by drumming) and journeys to the spirit world to find the soul parts that fled during trauma. These parts are often encountered as younger versions of the client, or as symbols representing lost qualities (joy, innocence, power, trust).
The practitioner negotiates with these parts, explaining that it’s now safe to return, that the person has grown strong enough to protect them, that they’re needed for the person’s wholeness and purpose. When the soul parts agree to return, the practitioner brings them back and “blows” them into the client’s energy body through the crown and heart.
What happens next is where shamanic wisdom and neuroscience converge beautifully:
Immediate somatic shifts: Clients often report feeling warmer, more present in their bodies, more “here.” This corresponds to increased interoception and ventral vagal activation (the body’s “safe and social” nervous system state).
Memory integration: Clients may suddenly remember forgotten experiences or see old memories with new understanding. This reflects the default mode network reorganizing, integrating fragmented neural networks.
Behavioral changes: Clients find themselves spontaneously able to do things they couldn’t before—set boundaries, feel joy, pursue goals. This is the restoration of executive functioning and the instinct of purpose.
Personality expansion: Clients feel “more themselves” or “complete” in ways hard to articulate. This is both soul integration and increased neural integration across brain hemispheres.
The Science Behind Soul Retrieval:
While we can’t measure “soul parts” directly, we can measure the neurological effects of shamanic practice:
Research on shamanic journeying shows it produces theta brainwave states associated with deep healing and memory reconsolidation—the process by which traumatic memories are updated and lose their emotional charge.
Studies on ritual and ceremony show they activate the autonomic nervous system’s safety response, release oxytocin (the bonding hormone), and create coherence between heart rate and brain waves.
Anthropological research consistently shows that cultures with strong shamanic traditions have effective trauma healing—people don’t develop PTSD at the rates seen in Western cultures, despite often living with more objective danger.
Perhaps soul retrieval works not because it’s literally retrieving metaphysical soul fragments, but because it provides exactly what the traumatized nervous system needs: a narrative of reclamation, a ritual of homecoming, a somatic experience of wholeness, and a community witnessing your restoration.
Or perhaps both the shamanic and neuroscientific explanations are true—different languages describing the same profound healing mystery.
When to Seek Soul Retrieval:
Soul retrieval may be particularly helpful if you:
- Feel like “something is missing” or you’re not fully present
- Have gaps in childhood memory
- Feel like you “left” during trauma and never fully returned
- Lack vitality, passion, or sense of purpose despite therapy
- Feel younger than your chronological age (age regression)
- Have repetitive dreams of being lost, searching, or abandoned
- Experience persistent dissociation that doesn’t respond to grounding techniques
Soul retrieval works best when combined with modern trauma therapy—the soul parts return, but you need nervous system regulation and safe relationships to keep them integrated.
My Journey: Integrating Both Paths
I share this integrated perspective because it reflects my own healing journey. I’ve spent years bedridden as a child, years doing deep healing work as an adult, and years in spiritual practice and ceremony.
What I’ve learned is that healing is not either/or—it’s both/and. The most profound transformations in my life have come when I honored the healing work from multiple dimensions: the clinical perspective that understands neurobiology, neuroscience, and evidence-based treatment, the transpersonal perspective that recognizes consciousness beyond the individual ego, the interpersonal perspective that acknowledges we heal in relationship and community, and the ancestral/shamanic perspective that sees trauma as spiritual fragmentation requiring soul-level intervention. I’ve learned to treat my body as both a biological organism governed by neurochemistry and nervous system states, and as a sacred vessel carrying ancestral wisdom and spiritual essence. I’ve come to see my trauma simultaneously as neural dysregulation requiring somatic and psychological treatment, and as soul wounding requiring retrieval, restoration, and spiritual integration. Each perspective reveals different facets of the same truth, and each offers unique pathways toward wholeness that the others cannot provide alone.
When I received soul retrieval for the parts of me that fled during those feverish, delirious childhood years, I felt them return with gifts: the creative imagination that soared during hallucinations, the spiritual vision that opened during altered states, the empathy for suffering that can only come from intimate knowledge of pain; and most importantly the brilliancy of my child parts for doing what it could to survive.
The neuroscience helped me understand what was happening in my brain. The shamanic wisdom helped me understand what was happening in my soul. Both were necessary and true.
Reclaiming Your Wholeness
The work of recovery is complex and often laborious, frequently taking years of dedicated practice. However, by addressing the physiological reality of immobilization AND the spiritual reality of soul loss, by restoring both the body’s natural capacity for agency and the soul’s connection to purpose, individuals can escape the timeless grip of trauma and reclaim their wholeness.
This isn’t just about feeling better—it’s about fundamentally rewiring how your nervous system experiences the world and reuniting with the parts of yourself that fled when staying fully present was unbearable. It’s about transforming from a state of perpetual threat into one where you can pursue what genuinely matters to you. It’s about remembering why your soul chose to incarnate, what gifts you came to bring, what sacred purpose animates your life.
The instinct of purpose isn’t something you must create; it’s something you must uncover and liberate from beneath the weight of immobilization and soul loss.
Your body remembers how to move forward. Your soul remembers why it came here. Your task is to create the conditions where both feel safe enough to fully return, to fully embody, to fully live.
Whether you approach this through therapy, through ceremony, through movement, through medicine, through community, or through all of these—what matters is that you approach it.
The journey home to wholeness has already begun.