Blushing, Trauma & Healing

I wanted to share how I overcame blushing and its connection with early trauma in my life in the hope that maybe it can help someone who’s suffering in silence with their blushing.

Trauma and the link with Chronic Blushing:

You see, I believe that in many (maybe all?) cases, chronic blushing or erythrophobia is linked to a trauma of some kind. Having worked with 49 people to begin to heal their chronic blushing, anxiety and shame over the last year, I’ve come to understand that trauma is a very personal experience.

For Mary, trauma meant a controlling and tough mother who didn’t allow her to express emotion. For John, it meant a controlling and sometimes violent father. For Harry, it was his brother’s tragic road accident and for me, it was my mother’s suicide. 

Trauma means different things to different people and many times, we don’t even consider we’ve experienced trauma. Until my trauma training, I thought trauma had to be something like sexual abuse, neglect or war… It’s only now that I understand that trauma is not what's experienced -the but how the body experiences the experience.

So, what’s all this got to do with chronic blushing?

Well, trauma is part-physical, part-mental – just like blushing. I believe that a trauma earlier on in your blushing journey laid the foundation for the blush response, which is basically as stress response, that then became dis-regulated so that anytime you became the focus of attention, your body’s traumatic self-protection kicks in to do everything it can to get you out of that situation. Trouble is, you can’t escape even though you want to because you’re in the middle of a meeting, or your boss is talking to you, or you’ve bumped into a friend in the super-market and you can’t just run away!

I started blushing or knowing that I had a problem with blushing at around 7 years old. My mum had just taken her own life and as a result I was very isolated. We were isolated in our little country village in England, and suicide at that time was very taboo. It was a sin. It meant you’d never go to heaven, and you couldn’t be buried in the church grave yard. (Thank God, the attitudes of the church have changed on that one).

Anyone who’s experienced or been closed to someone who’s experienced suicide in the family knows how terribly violent and horrific it is – and how isolating. So I went even more into my shy and introverted shell, blushing more and more every time someone noticed me.

And I didn’t have any friends because I was too insecure and shy, and had this aura of awe around me because of my family saga. I remember crying myself to sleep and praying to have a best friend. Thankfully, I started getting friends in my teens and made a small group of great friends who I honestly believe I owe my life to. When I was with them, I felt loved. I felt bold. I even felt confident! But when I was alone, the old insecurities were always there and they never knew about my struggle with blushing or its impact on my life.

I flunked school! I didn’t believe in myself or my ability to succeed. And there was just too much attention on people who did well! So I did a secretarial course and became a “temp”. That worked really well, because all my contracts were short-term and I never stayed anywhere long enough for blushing to become a real problem.

That’s until the turning point: I had a lovely job and a lovely boss: a real family man who was understanding and I felt safe with. I loved that job and stayed longer than any job I’d had until then. Until I heard rumours that actually he wasn’t that much of a family man after all and was cheating on his wife with someone in the office. My perception of him changed immediately and from that moment on, whenever I saw him, I blushed to high heaven!

Something around the sexual connotation of that fact. That he wasn’t ‘safe’ or maybe that he was ‘on the market’ triggered my blush response. That was usually my personal blushing trigger – anything to do with authority figures – especially men and if they happened to be attractive: forget it! I’d be blushing till the cows came home!

I wanted to end this blushing. I wanted to stop running away. But more than anything I wanted confidence and a meaningful life. I wanted friends I could be my true self with. I wanted to make a difference in the world. I wanted to find a job that I loved and was good at. And I wanted to find love. I didn’t have any of those things.

At that point, after quitting that job, I realised I couldn’t carry on living like this. I had to do something radical. So I used my savings to put myself back through school to get the results I needed to be eligible to study medicine. And that’s what I did! I learned all about how the body works, and how everything fits together and combines in a holistic way. You can’t separate the nervous system from the endocrine system… you can’t separate the body from the brain… it all works together and that’s why surgical, medical and psychological approaches to treating blushing don’t really work: you have to combine methods and understand how everything fits together. Even most doctors don’t understand this - apart from the functional medicine community which is beginning to grow these days.

I got so many insights that I thought I’d cracked it! I realised I had a phobia called erythrophobia (fear of red or going red) and I knew how to treat phobic patients with Exposure Therapy and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (by the way, combining both of these approaches works better for long-term blushing cure than either of them individually) [insert reference]. I knew what to do, I knew how to treat it. I had a plan!

I got far and did well at work (I didn’t practice medicine in the end, but went to work in industry), leading teams and leading meetings. But the thing is, as I carried on and made progress, the anxiety and blushing would sometimes come out of the blue and take over – especially with attractive men or authority figures. And now I was a leader! People were counting on me. I couldn’t just go red in meetings! No-one would take me seriously…

So, I had to go back to the drawing board and go deeper than exposure therapy and start looking into healing trauma and combining it with neurophysiology and other methods. And I go there in the end.

And now, I’ve boiled all that down into the “The 10 Principles to Banish Blushing Forever” which I share in my Blush2Bloom 6-week group coaching program and my one-to-one coaching work.

It’s a simple process, but it’s a step-by-step approach.

I share this story in the hope that something in it will resonate with you. If you’re still reading, then maybe it does! Please know that you can heal your blushing. You can heal your trauma. You can cultivate the confidence to live life on your terms and do the things you want to do – and even become the person you’re destined to be.

I started out flunking school and jumping from job to job every few months. Now, I’m living the life I’d never even dared to dream of. If  I can do it… you can do it too.