Trauma-Conscious Embodied Healing Therapy
What is Trauma-Conscious Embodied Healing Therapy?
Embodied healing is about cultivating a sense of safety and security in your mind and body. With a sensitivity to trauma experiences and how it impacts your mind and body, this form of therapy focuses on developing inner trust with your body and its responses. There is a focus on acknowledging your bodily experiences of emotion.
When was the last moment you felt truly connected to the sensations of your body and fully aware of being in the present moment?
In life, it is easy to get disconnected from our body, and its inner world of experiences. We are trained to ignore internal sensations and bodily knowledge as a way of dealing with the external demands and stressors of life.
In working towards healing we strive to create harmony between mental, emotional, and physical worlds within ourselves. Embodiment practices offer a unique pathway to connection, wholeness, and integrative healing in mind, body, heart, and soul.
What Are Embodiment Practices and Somatic Therapies?
Embodiment practices use the body as a tool for healing through self-awareness, mindfulness, connection, self-regulation, finding balance, and creating self-acceptance. Embodiment explores the relationship between our physical being and our energy. It involves the interaction of our body, thoughts, and actions.
Embodiment is part of somatic or body-focused therapies.
What is Somatic Therapy?
The word somatic is derived from the Greek word “soma” which means “living body.”
Somatic awareness is gained through developing and integrating a more complete connection with your body and its experiences. Through embodiment practices and techniques, the “Felt” awareness of physical sensations that is attached to emotions is cultivated and explored.
Through this exploration, you may begin to unblock stored traumatic experiences in your body that prevent you from being fully present. Somatic Therapies focus on bringing harmony to the nervous system so that you can be empowered in trust and control in your body’s ability to assess danger, and its responses to feel better overall wellbeing in a calm, safe, and secure inner self.
These somatic techniques can look like:
Mindfulness
Naming physical & emotional sensations
Breath-work
Guided meditations
Trauma-Conscious Yoga
Progressive muscle relaxation
Through these embodied healing practices you can help reclaim your sense of safety and comfort within your body, release traumatic energies, and learn to recognize and respond to nervous system stressors to lessen anxiety and fear
Somatic Therapy is founded on the beliefs that :
Our lived experiences impact our physical, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual being as a whole.
All experiences are processed through our sensory systems.
The body has Embodied Cognition, which is the belief that the body has its own form of cognition, its own way of understanding, knowing, and experiencing. This means the body has its own thoughts along with the mind.
Embodiment practices often use dance or movement therapy, visualization, sensory awareness, breathwork, and progressive muscle relaxation. Using embodiment practices in the therapeutic process might involve you identifying sensations in the body as experiences are discussed to expand upon and deepen the healing process.
How Embodiment Practices Help
In cultivating body awareness which involves respecting our senses, sensations, and our breath, we can begin to recognize the important feedback and information the body gives. We work to dialogue with our Embodied Cognition.
Throughout the therapeutic process and creativity, our bodies give input in how this arouses emotion, memories, sensations, and actions within the body. We use this information to recognize patterns, feelings, and actions that we take in response to our environment, and lived experience.
In acknowledging that we are informed by the body in these ways, we then can give our bodies the time and space to express themselves. We work to tune into this feedback through our five senses, our heart space, and breathwork to cultivate communication between mind, body, heart, and soul.
We cultivate respect for our bodies' needs, such as relaxation, movement, ease, or hunger by turning inwards and developing skills to respond and meet the body's needs.
How is Trauma Processed in the Body?
Trauma and grief share interconnected traumatic responses experience through the body as intense feelings of detachment from the physical self. Our nervous systems are directly tied to our emotions, stress levels, and breathing. The automatic sympathetic nervous system houses our “fight or flight” responses as well as our “rest and digest” calming sensations. When faced with real or perceived danger or threats to safety, our sympathetic nervous system (SNS) automatically reacts with a trauma stress response of “fight or flight”.
The activated SNS responses serves an important purpose for our survival from threats through a physiological response. Our stress hormones rise, heart rate increases, and at times can overwhelm your boyd into action. However this can leave you feeling stuck in a persistent cycle of anxiety, panic, or fear.
Research has shown that traumatic experiences get stored within the physical body and stuck energies. Over time, our flight-or-flight response becomes like an overly helpful friend, misfiring when there may not be a real threat. Although the body is attempting to protect you, it can feel as though it is working against you through anxiety, irritability, intrusive thoughts, disassociation, and physical pain sensations.
Overtime, this consistent overactive nervous system response can wreak havoc on not only our physical health, but our mental health as well. In working to calm down your parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) through embodiment practices we can bring the body back into a feeling and belief of safety, and promote relaxation. When the PNS is engaged, the heart rate decreases, breathing eases and anxiety melts away.
What is Embodied Healing?
Our bodies are the main way we experience and interact with the world. Through all five senses, our bodies become the containers and medium for all our feelings, sensations, and experiences.
When working on healing from traumatic experiences it is important to cultivate and learn how to feel a sense of internal security within your own body.
Trauma-conscious embodied healing is an integrative mind-body approach using somatic therapy techniques that takes into account the profound impact trauma has on the body.
Because trauma and emotions lives in the body, mindful movement, meditation, and somatic tools combined with intentional breathing techniques can amplify your awareness of and connection to the parts of your body that feel stuck, anxious, or tense. These areas can be an indication of where the trauma lives, and are the exact areas where healing needs to occur. In cultivating dialoguing with the body, you can move through these feelings and sensations with more ease creating a greater sense of internal safety. Embodied healing techniques will teach you how to intentionally use the parasympathetic nervous system to calm your body and mind, and therefore bring yourself out of the fight-of-flight trauma response more quickly.
By deepening awareness of the connection between physiological, cognitive, and emotional experiences that show up in the body in the present moment, you learn how to accept your emotions as communication for the body trying to use sensations to describe what words cannot. This will create more trust in yourself as you work to develop a healthy relationship between mind and body, helping dismantle negative self-beliefs, painful experiences, and sensations.