When we’re working with clients who have experienced trauma, targeting the limbic system can make our interventions more effective.
But what is the limbic system, and why is limbic system therapy so useful in treating trauma?
In the video below, Bessel van der Kolk, MD answers these questions and explains why he uses this kind of approach with his patients.
Take a look – it’s just under 5 minutes.
Dr. van der Kolk: There’s a metaphor I like to use in that so much of trauma is in the limbic system, or what people used to call the limbic system. And that all these areas of the brain have to do with danger, safety, perception of the world get changed. Basically most of the therapies that I’m advocating here is limbic system therapy. It’s all about understanding or figuring things out, because that’s not really where the trauma sits. Trauma sits in your automatic reactions and your dispositions and how you interpret the world. In order to really rewire those automatic perceptions, you need to have deep experiences that for your survival brain contradicts how you are now disposed to think.
Dr. Buczynski: Bessel just mentioned the limbic system. Broadly speaking, it’s the emotional part of the brain. It contains both the hippocampus and the amygdala, the hippocampus is associated with memory, and the amygdala is involved in detecting threat. Now you might have noticed that he said, “what people used to call the limbic system. ” That’s because there’s some question about whether or not it’s still useful to think of all the parts of the brain that make up the limbic system as a unified system. However, what’s important to take away here is this. Trauma doesn’t necessarily live in the part of the brain that’s concerned with reason and insight. It inhabits the parts that shape our temperament, the way we understand the world, and our automatic reactions. So when we target the part of the brain that’s feeling and reacting automatically, when we create a new experience that contradicts the lesson that that part of the brain has learned from trauma, that can change the way a person with a trauma history is wired to respond. So what does it look like to have an experience like that, an experience that re-wires the brain?
Dr. van der Kolk: For example, if you grow up thinking that you’re helpless and that anybody can do anything to you unless you yell at them, that becomes your disposition. But now if you take a martial arts course and you get to deeply feel like wow, I can kick anybody in the groin at any time because I feel like it, and I can protect myself. If you have experienced this, of becoming a martial artist, then that feeling of I’m always helpless will dramatically change. You cannot do that abstractly, and so you need to have experiences that directly contradict how your body is disposed. Who understands this best is the us army, who learned it from the Dutch army, that learned it from the Roman army over 2000 years. And that if you want to take a bunch of young recruits, the best way to get them to do things is to do basic training. In basic training you march, and you climb, and you crawl through the mud, and every night you go to bed and say, “Oh my god, I’m amazing, I survived this. I thought I could never do this, but I can.” By the end of 12 weeks, these kids are transformed because they have experiences that have brought them to the max of new challenges. We should have experiences like that in every mental health center. That is limbic system therapy.
Dr. Buczynski: So to change the way a client’s body reacts after trauma, we need physical experiences that directly contradict what the body has learned. Now I’d like to hear from you. How will you use this idea in your work with your patients? Please leave a comment below and thanks for watching.
For more on how to work with the limbic system to reverse the physiological imprint of trauma, please check out the Treating Trauma Master Series.
You’ll get insights from: Bessel van der Kolk, MD; Peter Levine, PhD; Pat Ogden, PhD; and Ruth Lanius, MD, PhD.
Now we’d like to hear from you. How will you use this idea in your work? Please leave a comment below.
I was traumatized as a child ( beaten molested.)
The fact that I took ballet, skied, swam competitively ,
later jogged , yoga. tennis must have saved me cause the endorphins would make me forget ,taught me about pleasure .
Massage taught me what a relaxed body could feel like. No fear.
yes I had years of therapy , married have grandchildren etc was
fortunate.
Cranial Sacral Therapy based from Osteopathic medicine.
Great to get this piece of theory just now as I inadvertently use this with clients, my playroom has loads of ways to play physically. I love to see the children build obstacle courses, dens, create complex ball games etc. I can see they are reclaiming resiliency. With adult clients I encourage them to return to doing physical challenges. When a client does it I could see it works. I never had a theoretical context for it. Now what I need to do is find ways to encourage particularly adult clients to take small risks and come out of the what I christened their ‘trauma based safety cocoon’. Something more to think about.
Yes, working within the brain structures and Glia to support the awareness within the tissues allowing release and transform the signals coming from the cellular matrix to and from the brain/CNS.
As well as SomatoEmotional release thru therapeutic dialog with tissues holding the “memory.”
Glial work (Tad Wanveer) has brought significant ease into the brain responsoe for many clients.
Thank you.
Why isn’t movement/dance therapy mentioned? These practitioners are trained mental health professionals specializing in MOVEMENT with graduate degrees capable of assessing and treating clients, especially trauma survivors and clients who cannot verbalize their pain, etc. Again, there is no CAUTION that while yoga, qigong, etc. can be very helpful, the practitioners usually have no mental health training.
Using armytraining as a way to explain transformation Bessel clearly has missed the docu of american soldiers suffering PTSD, prohibited to show in the USA, on how that training mindprogrammed them to maim, rape and kill, to never deprogramm them when the returned to their families , breeding disaster in many families, proving this kind of PTSD is contagious. Or in Dutch Bessel slaat de plank volledig mis. These days private military firms hire the cheapest soldiers, who were former childsoldiers in f.e. Sierra Leone or Uganda, costing only 250 dollars a month. Very far removed from the people working for security firms in the war in Iraq in the beginning, who were making more than 30.000 dollars a month and of whom one said if the conflict here is solved we simply have to create a conflict elsewhere. Chris Hedges can tell a lot about Perpetual Wars and who benefits. Showing in a docu airing on dutch national tv.
I often take children into the forests and encourage them to test their limits – climbing through bushes, scaling massive stumps, traversing rocky streams & the sense of personal empowerment is palpable.
This makes so much sense. As an Educator, I’d like to see educational institutions offer more dance, sports, boxing, gyms and even activities involving animals, infact any activity involving movement, available to students, especially those who experienced trauma. They don’t benefit so much from referral to counseling services. Talking through the issue is a very Western concept. Going to a room on campus and sitting in front of a stranger meet the needs of the service more than the people it serves. Yet this is the only option students have. We must combine talk with movement. Thank you for your great insights.
I would like to see the research for this. Seems to me if a person is responding from a limbic fight, flight, freeze or feint response all will produce the same contractile hyper sympathetic responses in the body. How does replacing one sympathetic response with another sympathetic dominant response change anything? Won’t “Dominant/submission” training will still encode in the same way in the body as dominant sympathetic responses?
This short segment is on target. It hits the nail on the head about what trauma does to the body-mind. It made me think of WHY EXPOSURE THERAPY of Arthur Janov was the worst *therapy* imaginable for pre and perinatal traumas.
Instead, flooding– by Arthur Janov, is a retraumatization rather than an integration. You are only involving the hind brain (flight-fight-freeze self, in a closed loop, if the trauma or traumas started in pre and perinatal times)….and probably, in adults, the prefrontal cortex—but you’ve EXCLUDED the SOCIAL BRAIN, the limbic system, the life safety buoy of emotional connection which says *I CARE about you*. Without this piece of TLC, you re-damage the individual- erroneously assuming that re-experiencing the hurt will somehow help? It does not. The damage has been social trauma, not intellectual trauma.
I love what you say about Janov’s method. In the 70s and 80s, doing Rebirthing, I saw several of his patients. They had all been taught to do things that can have no other result than stuffing their emotions. None of them felt they could be allowed to let a breath our easily. There was no question of releasing much of anything. It was shocking. Shocking to think that such misguided cruelty could pass as a therapy.
Aaron,
I also wish that Bessel had given different examples; however, I assume what he meant was how the intense physical experiences help to re-frame and re-shape one’s belief about self as weak to one of being strong, therefore, less afraid daily. The main point was the experiences changes how one views themselves THROUGH the physical transformation.
I agree that Bessel went astray. I did Basic Training and the rest. It went well for me. Sure, I felt more confidence and strength and I could agree that it was mildly therapeutic. The things that bothered me then, the deeper stuff, remained untouched for years. There was little help available in the 60s. Three years of psychoanalysis. Meh. I’ve read Bessel’s book and I know that he knows that EFT and EMDR and similar rewiring methods are useful in trauma-informed hands. I would add Rebirthing, with same proviso, as one of the great trauma tools of our age. Rolfing, too, releases body-mind patterns. I’d guess Bessel is trying, awkwardly, to direct our minds away from excess of words in therapy.
In the attempt to help the clients to build new experiences that contradict the previous ones, I find the connection to a bodily level very useful. As a dance and movement psychotherapist my aim is, together with the client, be able of on one hand holding the new experience of connecting safely with another person and on the other hand releasing the grief of the past trauma.
When this connection is achieved to a bodily level it journeys up through the nervous system much quicker and deeper.
Too bad his example has been related to the Army bootcamp, a war machine transforming vigorous young people into killers. Also, the martial arts reference about kicking someone in the groin.
I see merit in the use of bodily experiences in changing the “limbic system” response. Couldn’t we talk about a positive physical experience rather than a violent one?!
This information is relevant and useful … many thanks, ka
I find it valuable to work with the body for resoöving trauma but how Bessel put it this video, i cannot make sense of. The army cannot in my opinion resolve trauma by working with the body if a person had an experience of seeing his friends being blown up by a bomb in war making the person feel helpless, which yoi are when such things happen. Unpredictable, oncontrollable like.bombs are there must be ways of working with experiences of helplessness and shock as well.
I have heard of TRE (Dr David Berceli), trauma release exercises for this matter, which is a kind of body work, where direct body experience and sensory integration seems to help veterans with PTSD. I know Bessel also have experimented with neurofeedback (as also Seborn Fisher), to help the amygdala calm down and its as well a limbic system way, combined with a bit of regular coregulation talk post processing theraphy when needed.
Im needing to hear more first to be able to grasp what Bessel intended with the advise of the army which perplex me for the moment.
I think Bessel was talking simply (and only) about the 12-week experience of basic training.
I do not think he was talking about war experience (which, to the best of my understanding, can be deeply traumatic).
we need to learn body movements that make us feel competent and capable in’ here and now’ not the maladaptive old ways that came to protect us and kept us in survival mode when we were helplessly Stuck.The new experiences need repetition multiple times in short spurts to rewire the neuroplastic brain. It needs practice .
Very concerned about lambic system. Attempted to Review it s this evening. Tho could not. Will appreciate therapists in Southwest Florida if you will.
Gratefully
Marty
Hi
Is what you describe here not associated (in very general terms) with exposure therapy? I have a client who has experienced extreme bullying as a child, and is of a disposition (neuroticism) the has the client experience extreme social anxiety. So we have created a progressive plan that will challenge my client to pursue situations that induce these feelings.
I have some experience with EMDR Basic Training, and what is being described in the video sounds/feels similar in that memory/emotion are targeted for reprocessing. But this is not a physical act. Would it be a consideration then, to combine these two modalities depending on the usual fundamental consideration Hx etc?
Great post, it aligns very closely with my training and experience as a Psychotherapist and Neurologic Music Therapist (NMT). I have often engaged trauma patients in visceral, improvised music experiences, that have been quiet transformative. Hopefully there is a strong emotional reaction to the music experience. If it is a positive emotion then there is a dopamine release and other cognitive functions improve allowing for discussion that leads to greater insight. If it is a negative emotion, then it can be worked through and often resolved in the context of the safety of the therapeutic relationship and the music therapy context.
This is much closer to the kind of positive physical experience I would consider to be useful — and not re-traumatizing!
Recently I had a session with a woman who had severe trauma as a child, an adolescent and an adult. She clearly fits the picture of developmental trauma disorder. I have done a lot of work with this client, I know her story and there is a high degree of trust. In the past week, an old trauma had been activated and was closed in and helpless in the case of it. Seeking her her permission to move closer, I took out a large cushion I have in my room and moved my chair in front of her, placing this big, dense cushion on my lap. I asked her to put her hands on it, and then to push gently against it, which she did. I then I asked her to do it again, a bit more. and again, and again. Each time, she pushed harder. When she stopped, she said: ‘I didn’t know I could do that’. And she breathed. We then talked about what she had done, what she felt, and how she understood it. She had not been aware that this small incident that had so disturbed her in the past week had anything to do with this vey significant past abuse, but she did now. We were then able to talk a little about how this would help her with the current ‘abuser’ who she is unable to avoid. The intervention, although quite gentle, was very, very effective.
I do this kind of work and much of it is intuitive. What I have found helpful about the series you have provided is that you have given the brain science behind it, which has been succinct and not too technical. I also do some teaching so it is helpful in the wider arena.
I have so enjoyed these sessions and I wanted to say thank you for the clarity of your presentations – they have been very helpful in filling some gaps in my knowledge and affirming the work I do.
I am an a social worker with a strong interest in Expressive Therapy particularly Sand and Symbol work. The outcomes for many clients who may be suicidal or just very frightened are often extraordinary. Many thanks for the video. Kind Regards Anne Puckey
I use the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) aka Tapping. It is mentioned in Dr. Van Der Kof’s book and I saw him use it with a car accident case when I attended a workshop with him. I understand that in memory reconsolidation, that once the memory is reactivated, by using EFT to totally relax the reaction, the memory including all the senses, goes back into “storage,” changed. It is a wonderful mind-body technique. Comments welcome on the mentioned theory. Thanks.
I have used yoga and meditation to help me deal with PTSD and it has been life changing and very successful
That was great Ruth. I agree – there has to be some kind of physical component to treating the limbic system.
It’s very interesting how we can empower ourselves with activating our body .
As a yoga teacher I see changes in people that at the beginning is weak with their legs and arms , with time and practice and practice and practice they feel more sure of doing asanas they thought never could do. Thank you very much for this information . ?? namaste
Limbic System Therapy works well, the challenge is how to implement it. Another therapy that can change our self predisposion through experiencing the self in a different way is Sandplay therapy. It is surprisingly simple and produces quick positive results.
How can I change my sense of helplessness to heal trauma when I have a chronic illness that prevents me from doing exercise. Is there another way to change this in my brain? There are many of us who suffer with chronic illness as a direct result of trauma.
I use the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) aka Tapping. It is mentioned in Dr. Van Der Kof’s book and I saw him use it with a car accident case when I attended a workshop with him. I understand that in memory reconsolidation, that once the memory is reactivated, by using EFT to totally relax the reaction, the memory including all the senses, goes back into “storage,” changed. It is a wonderful mind-body technique. Comments welcome on the mentioned theory. Thanks.
I have encountered several trauma clients who have engaged in martial arts training, and view themselves as being very competent. Yet they are still hypervigilant, fearful, and believe themselves to be in danger. Their amygdala appears to be responding as it always has.
Would love to hear your thoughts on Rewind Therapy.
Many of my clients over the years have revealed to me traumatic events that they have experienced in their lives and they quickly reassure me that they have dealt with it or skim over the top of their trauma explaining only the bare bones detail because,I believe,they fear they will not survive experiencing those feelings of helplessness, terror, shame, etc. s they are running from the buried feelings in their everyday life. It is a challenge to get them to see that the trauma they are so convinced is over or that they must quickly move past whenever it rears its ugly head is running their lives in the form of anxiety or worse panic attacks. feeling shutdown, making poor choices based on their victim consciousness or guilty consciences. The challenge is to invite my clients to slow down, take deep breaths, and feel- which some of them do for the first time in many years- and begin to process the feelings which have been buried since the traumatic event/s. For many it is a terrifying process and I take it slow, but some of my clients begin to see that they can become stronger emotionally much like the soldiers who successfully complete basic training.
So the treatment for PTSD is 12 weeks of basic training….
This is exactly how energy therapies help clients change the lived experience in their bodies. When they receive an energy session (it can be any of the energy therapies – Integrative Energy Healing, Reiki, Therapeutic Touch , Healing Touch, EFT), the client experiences a new state of being in their own bodies. A calm nervous system can open a window of possibility of how life without trauma triggers might be for them.
We practice Equine Assisted Experiential Learning at The Next Step in Lyme, CT. Our unique curriculum combines learning about your body, brain and nervous system (didactic portion) and then practicing and playing with our well trained and safe horses (experimental portion).
Teens with an overload of emotions are the most fascinating beings. As you can see the tides changing, it’s powerful to give him as much power and control you can…this will challenge the automatic responses he’s developed. I like to call it talent spotting—-how do we capitalize off his strengths!?
I like to reframe the negative feeling anxiety sends to be a positive cue. Our body’s internal fire alarm (I use my analogy of school fire drills to reinforce this process.) to signal us to take action; to be proactive, not reactive. Empaths embody this sensational ability to be connected to the world beyond their person. As a teen, this is an outstanding conviction! One to be nurtured and trained the way it best suits us!!
Cheers and enjoy everyone evolving into a getter good because that’s what transpires in relationships; the collective whole working to form a well-oiled machine!
i’m not a therapist. i’m a mom with a struggling teenager. he’s a wonderful person who has always tried to please everyone so, obviously, he has much anxiety. we often would tell him to recreate his history because he made decisions that affected all aspects of his life negatively…easier said than done. your presentation has come at a time when he is experiencing another “episode” as a result of the brain wiring and how it’s been triggered. he is actually the one who has us realizing that we need to almost relive the way we handle things as a family to change his insecurities!!! he is presenting his history of pain and insecurity and now that we are more aware and skilled we can respond in ways that make him better. trust and non judgement seem to be the emotions he needs to feel and even though he is filled with anxiety and confusion, he’s forging ahead. he is releasing himself through this, we are getting a chance to recover, all of us are growing. it’s amazing, scary, exhausting…we are hoping he gets into physical activity soon (at least a gym). his job has helped and in some ways probably triggered his episode as we call it. any suggestions? thanks for listening.
Hi! As a mom of two teens, I found Dan Siegel’s work really helpful… Brainspotting… and his insights into teen brain development helped me take some space around all the worry and complex emotions that our family experiences during all of our individuating together… by that I mean, we were all growing up in different ways, not just our teens… for me it involves separating my personal projection (from my own teen experiences) from my teens current real situation that he was reacting to.. and to try to meet him where he was at and ask why the behavior felt like a good choice at the time, separate from the outcome… the outcome was then a bit easier to deal with, as they felt less judged (and in case I sound like I did this perfectly- to be clear – it took forever for me to learn how to calm my worries and show up and I still mess up and go charging in). Hope this helps a bit, I know how hard it is to love and worry and try to communicate that…
-Maeve
Google “havening”. Also see the numerous comments below regarding Feldenkrais, a form of somatic healing/education. Sounds True will be offering a program on Self-Compassion beginning November 15. And finally, I bless the day I discovered quantum healing methods – homeopathy, LIFE biofeedback, sound healing etc. (a brief explanation offered below.)
I’m an ordained minister and counselor to other ministers. This teaching and understanding is very helpful to effectively and efficiently treat my client’s own distress and make them better healers to their adherants.
This explains to me why, in the 1990’s when I worked with juvenile sex offenders in residential treatment I felt it was necessary for me to take Karate and learn weight lifting, even though we were more than adequately staffed and I consciously felt safe.
The Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Re-education includes many lessons that involve oppositional movement – that is moving 2 parts of the body that normally move together, (such as head and eyes) in opposite directions. This requires intense focus because the Nervous System has to create a new neurological pathway to perform the unusual function. Performing such challenging movements during a panic attack or hyper-aroused state can rapidly reduce the stressful sensations. So much brain “topography” is required to perform the oppositional movement that electrical activity is reduced in other parts of the brain. Additionally, these novel movements reduce habitual muscle-tension holding patterns in the body. Trauma patients will have muscle-tension holding patterns associated with the trauma. By identifying where a trauma patient holds tension and “prescribing” Feldenkrais lessons to address that holding pattern, the patient can learn to ‘re-wire’ the neurological response.
I completely agree with this information. I was a victim of abuse for many years and this is exactly how I experience life. I’m looking forward to trying this in my own life. I am currently learning and studying so I can use this information with my clients in the future
I began using this idea in the 1980s with physical “rescript” scenarios for assault survivors. Powerful trauma healing
Thank you for the explanation. I am a dance movement therapist, we can move and or talk with patients following their lead. Yes. Solliciting the limbic system is a basic underpinning of this therapeutic approach. Ex. With a panic attack patient, we can breath with and ‘play’ with the body and breath. I can mirror or attune we can breath into the space and develop a breath dance together. When the patient is ready he/she creates that dance then modulates it in front of the negative stimulus.
Thank you for that information explaining how limbic system therapy is helpful as trauma treatment intervention. I will use this philosophy of treatment while working with my client who struggles with PNES seizures when in high times of anxiety. Her body has become accustomed to reacting this way when anxious. We we will work together to retrain her reactions towards anxety by counteracting the seizure response with other physical behaviors (yoga/walking/cardio/running) on a daily basis while using audio recordings of positive affirmations and empowering statements to listen to during physical workouts
I have a client that filthy was traumatized in Afghanistan and after working with him for a period of time which was relatively short I realized it leads back to his childhood and was manifested larger overseas in the military. He is interested in heavy weight lifting and competition and there’s I am using at present to build a bridge to his innermost self and create and experience that he can lean on just as a good doctor talked about time will tell but everything so far is pointing in that direction
EMDR often provides that experiential and emotional rewiring of past trauma whether big T or little t. It worked for me with my PTSD and now I see it work for clients.
You can also use EFT and NLP Fast Phobia techniques
Thanks. This is a great explanation
I use a mix of EFT NLP clinical hypnosis
I do explain about the limbic brain and how emotional healing comes from there rather than the human brain but you have made it a lot clearer. So thanks again
I think this raises some really good points, and it fits with last week’s window of tolerance lecture in that it is important that a person’s window of tolerance widens and that some experiences need to be at the top end of that window of tolerance in order for a person to overcome them and change their view of self/retrain the amygdala. It reminds me of dynamic assessment.
As a patient, I just wanted to say that there was one occasion where my therapist got me to push him away as part of this, but I immediately felt very overwhelmed and panicked as this was a person I had built up a lot of trust with and suddenly it felt like he had become the opposite. Fortunately we recognised this immediately and stopped but it’s Just a word of warning how this can have the opposite or unintended effect if not timed correctly or even just not being the right patient. I could see how this could have worked if it was within my window of tolerance at the time.
I have lately experienced emotionally stressful event after event in a very short space of time. Having come through these, despite being very difficult at the time has made me feel stronger and have more confidence in my ability to cope in the future – it has been a real-life exercise and training in distress tolerance and despite not being ‘physical’ like the martial arts example, I feel it has had a similar result.
This is so helpful, thank you. In Play therapy with children they try out different roles including more powerful ones and often get to cast the therapist in different roles allowing them to witness another managing the situation and the feelings that arise.
I absolutely agreed with the idea of a traumatized person needed a physical experience that contradicting with one’s negative memory. To put it in practice means we have to acknowledge their feeling and listen to one’s feeling attentively, and seriously walk-through the experience with one to re-learn to recognise/differentiate the real danger and the reaction to negative memory. To totally ignore the reality of one’s experience and take it as it all reaction to negative memory is not only not helpful but to further traumatize him/her.
Some people view themselves as ‘non-violent’ individuals and so do not feel inclined to do any Marshall Arts course because they interpret it as being ‘violent’. Yes, it’s understood that trauma does not sit in that part of the brain that involves reason or insight, however, to change the way a person’s body reacts to trauma, is it absolutely necessary to have a direct PHYSICAL experience that directly contradicts what the body learnt or can such an experience be mental and emotional, in cases where individuals do not like Marshall Arts?
Suzette Misrachi
CaN-ACOPSMI specialist
Well, it doesn’t need to be martial arts. It can definitely be not directly physical, Suzette. Involving some part of the body as one imagines something, say someone has been assaulted or raped–and, for example, putting up a hand and saying “stop” while either doing or imagining a pushing movement still affects and changes the brain. I do Somatic Experiencing and Feldenkrais work with people, both of which effectively demonstrate this. In a Feldenkrais class, we may do a whole lesson with actual movement on one side and then imagine the movements being done on the other side (even at greater speed), and it is amazing how much effect that has. Sometimes the imagined side improves in it’s movement more than the side that was actually moved.
Of note is that Christopher Reeves imagined that he could move his fingers for quite some time before he died. Physically that was “impossible” with his completely severed spinal cord. However, he would sit and imagine his fingers moving, and before he died, he actually _did_ move his fingers and really surprised his doctors. So it is amazing what the brain can do.
There is a good video on YouTube of Peter Levine working with a man named Ray who was a vet that is a good demo of the Somatic Experiencing and him doing movement, but much smaller and more slowly than originally.
The important thing though is that the body _is_ actually involved. The person can imagine something or actually move something, but the key is that it involves the body. It’s not just the narrative of what they _would_ do, something they would be in their head about. It’s not just angrily expressing emotions. It is retraining the experience in the brain by involving the body.
I think at a very basic level, any movement even if seemingly miniscule reassures the brain that you CAN move rather than being trapped, physically or emotionally, thus beginning the pathway to greater movement and freedom to come.
If a client is not comfortable with martial arts or even tai chi, qi gong is a gentle, centering alternative that also helps you get in touch with the power that comes from within. What you might call the far eastern movement arts all put an emphasis on the ability to control one’s mind, or as Shifu put it in the Kung Fu Panda series, “Before the battle of the fist comes the battle of the mind!”
Derick and Jan, I agree. In my work with people traumatised as a result of being raised by psychoemotionally unavailable parents I often give them exericses that in their mind might seem a bit “radical”. I base my work on my research at an Australian university entitled: “Lives unseen: unacknowledged trauma of non-disordered, competent Adult Children Of Parents with a Severe Mental Illness”. It’s free to download along with a resource website and some short articles I’ve been invited to write for an e-publication that keeps mental health practitioners up to date with psychiatric and psychological research and opinion from around the world. In case you and colleagues are interested, just google my name: Suzette Misrachi and my research, articles and resource website should come up.
Suzette, I had a severe motorbike accident when I was 17 that left me in a coma for 7-months. My physiotherapist had to re-teach me everything again after I regained consciousness. I now have 4 Uni degrees in the Humanities. The clearest reason I found for my recovery was offered by Dr (x55) Viktor Frankl – who survived Auschwitz during WW2′ alongside my late-father – was that he could give meaning to his experience.
I hear you Derick! Well done you for surviving and achieving all that you did. I’m doing a masters in the Humanities on an Existential theme and it’s all about finding purpose and meaning in the face of trauma.
Finally! Someone has hit the nail on the head! Yes, there are those of us who were raised by mentally ill parents or step-parents, as in my case, who were grossly traumatised as young children. Our “normal” is not what other people called normal. I was homeless for 2 years as a teenager leaving home at age 15 due to my parent’s inability to parent appropriately. I was fortunate in the fact that I was able to develope resilence and survival instincts. Now, in my 50’s, I am an undergraduate social worker student gaining knowledge to go with a lifetime of experience so I can help others.
In Trama Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY), we facilitate clients making choice for their body, with their bodies, based on sensation felt in their bodies. It is both subtle and powerful, empowering. The transformation is happening internally and over time, shows up externally as they move through life. Please note that not all yoga that is advertised as being trauma sensitive or for anxiety and depression is evidence based (TCTSY is an evidence based practice). The yoga industry is unregulated so always ask the teacher for credentials and qualifications for anything trauma or mental health related. Thank-you
I suggested to my trauma client that she go online and watch the Three Yoga Warrior Poses and practice each of them,, Imagining that she is wearing her favorite female superhero’s Cape and Boots. The Warrior poses are Also connected to the 3rd Energy Chakra (Solar Plexus)/the seat of our emotions.
In working with kids. I use a big gymnastic ball throw it towards the child and the child defends itself and pushes the ball back to me. Children love to jump on a matras and shout while defending and pushing. This is a lot of fun.
I’m an psych NP student and wanting to learn more to apply it to my own practice. Thanks.