The Body is the Portal to Psychological Health

I came to the type of therapy I now practice from having worked as a firefighter, an emergency medical technician, and then spent years in crisis and suicide-prevention work. Ultimately, these experiences enabled me to understand how the body and the brain work in tandem to entrap someone into repeating the patterns of their trauma.

I often use the analogy of someone driving a cart down the same road over and over, creating a rut into which the wheels keep slipping. Similarly, traumatic experiences can become entrenched in our neural pathways. These then, are reflected in our body, and how it responds to the memory of trauma—usually with fight or flight responses whenever something triggers the memories.

Along the way I found that so-called talk therapy is often unsuccessful in addressing such reactions. But because our body acts as a repository of our emotions, we can, however, through exploring and becoming aware of the places in the body where we hold our various traumatic emotions—fear, anger, emotional pain, and so on—and revisit these places from the safe space of the therapy room. This begins the process of reordering the mind’s neural pathways, thus eventually bypassing the ruts that trauma has created.

How this type of therapy work?

First, we need to ground ourselves in our current environment, the therapy room. We take it all in, the corners, the window, the ceiling … and the door by which, if we feel threatened or too much anxiety, we can escape (this has never happened, by the way, but knowing there is a way out eases the body and the mind). It usually only takes a minute or two to establish the feeling of being safe and not being judged.

Then we can turn our attention to the breath. Is our breathing shallow or deep? Does it become faster when we are relating a story? When we focus on the breath, consciously slowing it down, both the body and mind begins to relax. We are then more able to feel into the various parts of our body, to reintegrate them into our present awareness.

When the body becomes regulated like this, we can then turn our awareness to various parts of the body and become present with them. We may start with the feet, for instance, really noticing them. Can we feel the sock, or the foot’s weight? Then we may move to the torso—the stomach, the chest, the throat. Are there feelings of tension or anxiety there? What emotion, if any, arises with this focus? Are we able to name it? In the safe space we’ve created, it becomes easier to express what we were not able to when the trauma happened, especially if it happened when we were a child.

On occasion, I will notice that a client has difficulty in relaxing, in which case we may go through the process, for example, of making a very tight fist for a few seconds, then relaxing the hand. We may do this with other muscles, as well, bringing more awareness to where tension is residing in the body and then consciously letting it go. This sends a signal to the nervous system that we are safe.

Dealing with childhood trauma

Many clients come into therapy because of childhood trauma, physical or emotional abuse, violence in their environment, etc. We want the therapy to progress to a certain point where we are able to lower the intensity of the traumatic feeling. Then we are not fully captured by neural loop the childhood trauma has created. We have created enough distance between the long-ago traumatic feelings and can begin to witness it from our adult perspective.

What do we know now as an adult that we didn’t know back then? The client, then, as an adult may be able to re-parent that inner child, in a sense, to integrate that younger self, even to the point of asking “What do you need from me now? How can I further understand and give the support you didn’t get back then? This wasn’t your fault, and I forgive you no matter what.”

It creates the inner situation in which the child can hand over their burden to the adult self. That adult might even ask, “Is there something you wanted to do but couldn’t do as that child? Is there something we can now do to address that?” Creating such a real or symbolic event can go a long way to relieve deep-seated trauma.

How long it takes for someone in therapy to be able to be aware of how past trauma remains in their nervous system, access it and begin to heal from it depends largely on the tools they have gained as adults, their willingness to dive into this bodily archeology, and persevere beyond their discomfort.

I chose to become a therapist after seeing how unaddressed trauma affects so many, and so much of people’s lives. I believe it is an important and meaningful journey to embark upon if one wants to become free of the restraints and traumas of the past holding them back from becoming fully themselves.