In the words of pioneering psychiatrist, researcher and educator Bessel van der Kolk, when it comes to trauma, it is the body that keeps the score of what we have lived through, more so than the thinking mind. Trauma arises and lives on embedded into the tissues of the brain, nervous system and physiology. And while the mind may repress or forget memories, the body keeps a faithful record.
Even when the conscious personality has chosen to minimize difficult aspects of our past, our personal history is legible in posture, breath, muscle tension, levels of nervous system arousal, and habits of movement, orientation and attention.
According to van der Kolk and other luminaries in the field of trauma recovery, like Dr. Peter Levine and Dr. Pat Ogden, trauma healing needs to begin with the physical body itself. Through working therapeutically with the body, in its own native language of sensation, breath, movement, and impulse, a true repair of traumatic experiences can be achieved.
Enter the field of somatic therapy, realm of body-based trauma healing. Somatic therapies, of which there are several, restore health and sanity through working with nervous system regulation, muscular tension release, progressing interrupted survival movements, and other body-based psychotherapeutic interventions. The premise of somatic therapy is that since it is the body that is the bedrock of experience, shifting at the level of body consciousness has powerful knock-on effects upwards into emotion and personality layers.
How Somatic Therapy Helps Women Heal Trauma Stored in the Body
Somatic therapies are considered a “bottom up” approach, which means that practitioners start with the body, and work “upward” to developmentally later aspects of self, like personality, cognition and emotion. Somatic therapy fills a void left by talk therapy, which shines in the arena of helping a person develop self-awareness, but can also fail in cases where a dysregulated neurobiology is influencing experience heavily.
Symptoms like anxiety, depression, attention troubles, sleep disorders, psychosomatic illnesses, and dissociation, for example, can in some instances be caused not so much by disease, or even inner conflicts and psychological complexes, so much as unresolved traumatic experiences lying deep in the body’s unconscious memories. Sane decision-making and higher executive functioning are sometimes unavailable, or only intermittently available, when a person hasn’t yet worked out how to feel safe being alive in a body.
While in reality the interactions of consciousness are enormously complex, the model of “bottom up” (body first) versus “top down” (mental understanding first) approaches to healing can be helpful for understanding the order and priority of treatment for people with trauma. It might not make sense to fix the roof of a building, if there’s work to be done at the foundation. The body is the foundation of human experience.
The conception of bottom up approaches comes also from the observation that in brain imaging studies, it appears that the brainstem and midbrain, located towards the bottom of the brain as compared with the cortex, have important roles in perception and the assignment of meaning to sensory signals. The cortex, by contrast, which is the upper and outermost part of the brain, is generally accepted to be the area of the brain responsible for “higher” thought, like abstract concepts, planning, and learning.
In order to be able to use our capacities for higher thought in a sane and grounded way, the responsibilities of the cortex need to be integrated with the other parts of the brain, the ones that handle signal processing, sensation, basic safety, emotional attunement, and relationships. One reason that some of us have a harder time with impulse control and foresight may be that we have unresolved material relating to our basic physiological and relational safety. We may have trauma that needs to be healed, before we can operate our executive levels of the brain in a more helpful and coherent way.
A significant portion of women who seek out treatment for substance abuse have a history of trauma, often sexual trauma or sexual abuse. Others have a heavy burden of traumatization from adverse childhood environments that contained physical or psychological abuse and/or neglect. For any woman with trauma, with or without addition substance or mental health diagnoses, somatic therapies are going to be an incredible assist.
Most women with trauma histories did not have the experience of being fully safe – both nurtured and protected from harm – in their physical bodies. This missing element of basic safety has to be corrected before any woman will be able to flourish in other domains of her life. Better said, perhaps – although women can and do survive and thrive against incredible odds all the time, healing can be much, much easier with a bodily foundation of sufficient safety.
Understanding Trauma’s Physical Manifestations
Trauma leaves a significant impact on every aspect of experience. Thought disturbances like dissociation, memory problems, attention disorders, impulse control problems, and even psychosis can be caused by unhealed trauma in the body. Likewise, in the realm of emotion and relationships, traumatized women endure a range of painful subjective experiences, including terror of abandonment, fear of engulfment, enmeshment, codependence, and even intimate partner abuse, in part due to deep unresolved material relating to safety and survival.
It’s also important to see that many physical symptoms may be coming from, or influenced by, our trauma history. Trauma is one possible source of chronic pain, unexplained aches, and other “mystery” conditions. How the body works with pain is intimately connected to the other body systems which are responsible for processing and releasing trauma.
Similarly, digestive issues, including irritable bowel syndrome, gut problems, inflammation, and stomach pain, may have an origin in traumatization. The stomach is very sensitive to any form of stress, including post-traumatic stress.
Another trauma symptom many women will recognize is fatigue. Due to its connection with the nervous system and states of arousal, trauma is responsible for taxing and depleting our existing energy levels. Being tired all the time can also be a sign that the body is using a kind of “dorsal collapse” technique for blunting the edges of extreme overarousal, or mobilization of the fight and flight system.
Finally, muscle tension, headaches, and jaw clenching can also be signs that the body is holding trauma. Somatic therapies are one way that the body can be gently coaxed to let go of the burdens associated with trauma. Through physical release of tensions and energies of thwarted survival impulses that arose and got trapped in our physiology long ago, we have a chance at restoring not only physical but also mental and emotional health.
Heal your Trauma at Villa Kali Ma
Villa Kali Ma is a licensed provider of integrative mental health services, trauma treatment, and addiction recovery. In all of our programs for women, we use a combination of clinical and holistic approaches to help heal from the following burdens:
- Traumatization. Acute & chronic PTSD, complex trauma
- Substance abuse and dependence. Addiction to alcohol, street drugs, cannabis, pharmaceuticals, and poly-substance addiction
- Mental health symptoms. Anxiety, depression, ADHD, obsessions and compulsions, and behavioral disorders
The core of our clinical program features evidence-based practices and other gold standard treatments widely recognized within the trauma field to work best with women facing severe challenges. These effective clinical modalities include Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Therapy (MSC), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFST), Ecotherapy, Expressive Arts Therapy (EXA), and Somatic Experiencing (SE).
Complementary to our clinical program, we provide an array of holistic interventions, scheduled around core treatment programming hours. Our holistic package includes yoga, breath work, acupuncture, nutritional medicine, mindfulness, and many additional alternative healing modalities. Our purpose is empowering women to recover lives of heartfelt relating, meaning, beauty and purpose.
Women with trauma who don’t qualify for substance abuse or mental health disorders, may also be interested to know about the Retreat, our state of the art licensed trauma-healing facility. Whoever you are, and whatever your burdens, you are welcome here with us!