Trauma Based Therapies
Trauma training methods of healing, recovery and integration.
The study of trauma has an “underground” history. Like traumatized people, we have been cut off from the knowledge of our past as a society. Like the traumatized individual, we need to understand our past history in order to reclaim the present and future.
To understand trauma, we must understand history. The study of trauma has historically alternated between periods of investigation and periods of amnesia or repression of truth. In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting by using secrecy and silence. This occurs on a global scale as well with pedophilia and ritual abuse inherent in the societal power structures.
Trauma Based Therapies
Introspective/Self Exploration Therapies
Psychotherapy/Narrative Therapy
Definition
Recovering one’s personal story to assist in seeing the trauma and also one’s skills and resilience.
How it works
Traumatic memories are encoded raw and with the concomitant sounds, smells, and sensations, and when reactivated, cause re-experiencing of the trauma. Processing them permits the memories to be stored in a usual manner.
Benefits
Remembering one’s experiences is empowering. Processing the memories allows them to be re-encoded in the brain in a more faded manner, so the traumatic experience is not relived in flashbacks or nightmares but is in the past and less reactive.
Hakomi Method
Definition
Hakomi therapy combines several principles and styles, merging Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism and Taoism with other body-centric therapies and using mindfulness practices.
How it works
It uses a somatic-based approach designed to aid in psychological development. At the core of Hakomi is the belief that the body holds internalized beliefs and thought patterns that have become unconscious. Hakomi uses consensual touch to help comfort patients and to encourage them to stay with unpleasant feelings to uncover and understand these unconscious limiting beliefs.
Benefits
The use of touch can be problematic for survivors of abuse. Benefits include the ability to be in the present moment and increased bodily awareness.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy
Definition
A type of talk therapy that focuses on learning emotional regulation and effective relationship skills
How it works
Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is a type of talk therapy (psychotherapy). It’s based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), but it’s specially adapted for people who experience emotions intensely.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a type of talk therapy that helps people understand how thoughts affect emotions and behaviors.
“Dialectical” means combining opposite ideas. DBT focuses on helping people accept the reality of their lives and their behaviors, as well as helping them learn to change their lives, including their unhelpful behaviors.
Benefits
Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is especially effective for people who have difficulty managing and regulating their emotions.
DBT has proven to be effective for treating and managing a wide range of mental health conditions
Body Oriented Therapies
Somatic Experiencing
Definition
A body-oriented therapy that focuses on restoring self-regulation by addressing the nervous system.
How it works
The goal of Somatic Experiencing is to meet a person where they are in the spectrum and support them in deactivating these high states of energy at each phase in their physiology so they can live symptom-free and in balance.
Benefits
In Somatic Experiencing, this freedom from symptoms is achieved through finding the “inherent rhythm” back and forth between activation and deactivation (expansion and contraction), leading to greater health within the nervous system.
Martial Arts Therapy
Definition
A form of somatic therapy transforming trauma into triumph, increasing physical agency and confidence, becoming competent and attuned to others and multiple social contexts, improving breath, posture, attitude, and self-identification expressed through the body, and creating a clear channel from Spirit to real action in the world.
How it works
Trauma affects the body and nervous system. The inability to fight or flee causes trauma and fosters a sense of powerlessness and lack of control over one’s physiology. Training the body to fight and defend is empowering and healing.
Benefits
Enhanced self-esteem. Increased physiological health. Increased balance, improved posture, increased strength, coordination, and flexibility. Acquisition of self-confidence. Release of learned helplessness in the body. Improved cognition and control of self.
Trauma Sensitive Yoga
Definition
A form of yoga adapted to trauma to help heighten body awareness and to learn to release tension, tolerate sensation, and reduce arousal.
How it works
Intense focus on the body and slow movement increases self-awareness and comfort in one’s body.
Benefits
Trains trauma survivors on how to feel their body and gain control over complex sensations
Dance Movement Therapy (DMT)
Definition
A relatively new form of mind/body psychotherapy that uses movement to promote emotional, social, cognitive, and physical integration of the individual to improve health and well-being.
How it works
Trauma survivors tend to be dissociated from their bodies and experience a negative self-image. Dance can free the body and one’s relationship to it, increase a sense of well-being with one’s body, and can bring joy into the equation.
Benefits
Beneficial for both physical and mental health, dance therapy can be used for stress reduction, disease prevention, and mood management. In addition, DMT’s physical component offers increased muscular strength, coordination, mobility, and decreased muscular tension.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
Definition
This therapy is based on the theory that traumatic events aren’t properly processed in the brain when they happen. This is why they continue to affect us with nightmares, flashbacks, and feelings of the trauma happening again, long after the actual trauma is over. EMDR helps “reprocess” a disturbing memory to help you move past it.
How it works
It targets specific events, memories, negative beliefs, intense emotions, and muscular body sensations for desensitization. The mind and body become less disturbed and can make new, more accurate connections about the self, past events, and current stressors.
Benefits
EMDR takes active traumatic memories and re-encodes them into the brain as regular memories. This therapy uses eye movements (or sometimes rhythmic tapping) to change the way a memory is stored in the brain, allowing you to process it.
Brainspotting
Definition
Brain-based therapy guides awareness of distressing physical sensations in the body, emotions, or thoughts.
How it works
Psychotherapy is based on the observation that the body activation experienced when describing a traumatic event has a resonating spot in the visual field. Holding the attention of that brain spot allows the processing of the traumatic event to flow until the body activation has cleared.
Benefits
Brainspotting locates points in your visual field that helps to access unprocessed trauma in the subcortical part of your brain, helping to heal the root of the trauma. The position of your eyes and where your gaze is directed can unlock deeper insights that have not yet been recognized when thinking from your prefrontal cortex.
Neuro-Emotional Technique
Definition
Psycho-emotional therapy based on the physiological foundations of stress-related responses.
How it works
Addresses subconscious material stored in the nervous system. A subconscious belief is brought to consciousness, and a new belief is stated to replace it while tapping on the spine to integrate the new belief.
Benefits
Addresses the subconscious, which drives our behavior without our awareness.
Neurological/Brain Based Therapies
Cognitive Behavioral Therapies
Trauma focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Definition
CBT is a structured short-term treatment model that includes affecting modulation, relaxation, exposure, and cognitive coping.
How it works
CBT addresses the internal belief systems by exposing what we think and offering replacement thoughts that are more empowering.
Benefits
CBT is a short-term therapy technique that can help people find new ways to behave by changing their thought patterns.
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)
Definition
Combines elements of exposure, cognitive therapy, and somatic pressure points.
How it works
EFT works by tapping on acupressure meridians to release blockages. When these blockages are released, the problem feeling can be released and move through the body. The process starts with a beginning statement of what the problem feeling is and includes a complete acceptance and acknowledgment of the problem.
Benefits
The underlying principle of EFT is that all emotions and thoughts are forms of energy. This energy, whether positive or negative, has very real physical manifestations that affect all functions of the body. People who experience benefits from practicing tapping techniques find that they help clear their minds, focus their attention on the present moment (much like mediation does), and improve their attitude.
Prolonged Exposure Therapy
Definition
Address the cognitive and behavioral avoidance of trauma-related stimuli through gradual in vivo exposure.
How it works
PE teaches you to gradually approach trauma-related memories, feelings, and situations that you have been avoiding since your trauma. By confronting these challenges, you can decrease your PTSD symptoms.
Benefits
The goal of exposure therapy is to help reduce a person’s fear and anxiety, with the ultimate goal of eliminating avoidance behavior and increasing quality of life. This is done by actively confronting the things that a person fears. By confronting feared situations, thoughts, and emotions, a person can learn that anxiety and fear will lessen on their own.
Consciousness Expanding Therapies
Holotropic Breathwork
Definition
Holotropic Breathwork is a healing modality that combines rhythmic fast breathing, attention to the body and sensation, and evocative music to elicit transformation. People have used this form of healing for a variety of purposes.
How it works
One of the core beliefs about healing in Breathwork is that breath is life force energy and that changes in our breathing, whether sharp and restricted or slow and full, bring about different somatic and emotional states. Using the breath in spiritual practice or for healing is not a new concept.
Benefits
Holotropic Breathwork can be supportive for trauma survivors in that it helps to bypass the conscious mind to evoke deeper layers of the psyche, is an embodied practice, and put awareness to our breath pattern that can support moving from fight/flight/freeze/appease and into more safety in the body.
Psychedelic Therapy
Definition
The use of plant-based and chemically formulated substances to enhance consciousness. Large does facilitate breakthroughs in consciousness, and microdosing has proven benefits in healing stuck patterns and rewiring the brain.
How it works
There is research proving the therapeutic effects of psychedelic assisted therapies, especially effective in treating PTSD, addictions and OCD. Moving beyond the restrictions on consciousness that trauma engenders helps facilitate healing.
Benefits
Enhances and expands connection with inner consciousness as well as connection with higher consciousness and have been used for centuries by tribal peoples to connect spiritually.
Trauma Training Video Resources
Recommended Books & Articles for Healing Trauma
Books
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- The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk
- Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman
- Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma by Peter Levine
- Healing Developmental Trauma by Lawrence Heller and Aline La Pierre
- Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control by Alison Miller
- The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation by Deborah Dana
- Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Peter Walker
- Energy Healing & Trauma Recovery
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Articles
Trauma Training Series
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- A comprehensive course designed for mental health providers, healthcare workers, teachers and anyone working with traumatized individuals, both children and adults. The series will cover the psychological, neurological, emotional and spiritual sequalae of trauma and provide methods of healing, recovery and integration. Coming Soon
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