How would you bring the body into therapy with people who have experienced trauma? Noticing and raising awareness of the phenomenological reactions in the body can change behaviour. It’s the difference between “I am broke, and I have a diagnosis” and “How do my trauma symptoms affect my body and how can I bring back choice into my life?” People who come to therapy want change. Both the client and therapist notice what is happening in their bodies. This supports the client to make the unconscious, conscious. The body is another tool therapists can use to help someone experiencing emotional distress, just as we use journaling, using sand trays or creative writing. How can working with the body in therapy help someone to process trauma? This is a state, where you can tolerate emotions and integrate information, often associated with being engaged when you are with others. They need tools to help them regulate and access their ‘window of tolerance’. People who are traumatised are frequently highly anxious or ‘hyperaroused’. And the insula is responsible for our ability to control our emotional responses and immune system. The amygdala is responsible for the fight, flight or freeze response that can get stuck when people experience trauma. Neuroscience shows us that practices such as yoga, breath and movement impact the amygdala and insula in the brain and calm our nervous system. Now, more and more people in popular culture are talking openly about trauma. His research found that the vagus nerve plays an important role in regulating the body and that trauma can keep our defences constantly engaged. In 2011, Steven Porges developed “ polyvagal theory”. But other body psychotherapists, including Babette Rothchild, Gabor Mate, Nick Totton, Dan Siegel, Pat Ogden and Peter Levine, have built momentum for ideas around how trauma manifests in our body. The catalyst moment for this way of understanding trauma came with the publication of Bessel Van Der Kolk’s bestselling book The Body Keeps the Score in 2015. What about more recent thinking on trauma and the body? But by noticing and bringing awareness of the body into the present moment in therapy, we begin to dissolve this character armour. This was picked up in the work of psychotherapist Laura Perls and gestalt therapy which believes we are cut off from our bodies. When someone “develops a blocking against his emotional excitations, resulting in rigidity of the body, lack of emotional contact, and deadness”. In 1945, Wilhelm Reich spoke about “character armour”. But even Freud talked about the existence of a body energy. There’s been a split between body and mind in psychotherapy for years. How have therapists come to understand that trauma is stored in the body? I believe that our whole body is our unconscious and a reflection of our past, present and perceived future. Now, I integrate the body into all of my work with therapy clients. To understand more about the clinical benefits, I began training to be a psychotherapist and became really interested in neuroscience and movement. I became a yoga teacher to find out why it helped. I was working in the stressful entertainment industry which was making me unwell. How did you become interested in trauma and the body?
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