Get the Most Out of Your Trauma Therapy: Practice Yoga
If you have experienced trauma, your mind and body have survived distressing experiences that taught you that the world is not safe—that you are not safe.
Do you frequently feel a buzz of anxiety humming under your skin? Does it feel like at any moment you could burst into tears, anxiety, or rage? Are you a light sleeper and wake up to the slightest noise? These experiences happen because your body is ready to defend you—at any moment. The key is learning how to teach your mind and body that the danger is gone. You are safe now. You don’t have to fight any longer.
This is the starting point for healing trauma: teaching your body and mind that you are safe now. Sometimes, despite all of the regulation tools and grounding skills, your mind and body may still feel on guard and protect you by over-intellectualizing in therapy, dissociating, and using other strategies to unintentionally keep you at a safe distance from your trauma.
Healing trauma involves healing the mind AND the body.
Trauma impacts you holistically—it impacts your body chemistry, your brain activity, your perception of reality, and your relationship with your body, and your relationship with others. It creates a disconnect between your mind and body, resulting in chronically disturbed biorhythms such as chronic muscle tension or disturbed sleep. You may hold your breath without knowing it—another element of having disrupted biorhythms.
If you are a trauma survivor, your daily life probably involves bracing yourself against the unwanted sensations you experience because of your trauma. You may experience an “emotional whiplash” where each trigger throws you into a new storm of emotions and bodily sensations.
This is because trauma stores itself not only in your memories, but in your physical body.
Heart rate variability (HRV) reveals the severe impact trauma has on the body. If you have PTSD, chances are, you have low HRV and can become dysregulated quickly. What this means, is that your body is in a constant state of stress, reliant on the parts of your brain responsible for your fight, flight, or freeze responses, and less reliant on the parts of your brain responsible for emotional regulation, memory, and cognitive functioning.
Your body needs to know that you are safe now.
If you are living in a constant state of stress, chances are your brain and body do not feel safe enough to process your traumatic memories, feel your emotions, regulate your mind and body, and make meaning of your experience—all of which are necessary for healing.
If you are a trauma survivor wanting to get the most out of therapy, making space in your life to restore your nervous system and calm the arousal issues in your body will be critical.
Yoga can help you get the most out of your therapy.
Obviously, as a therapist, I am a huge fan of talk therapy, however, when I work with my clients struggling with trauma, I almost always invite the body into the process. Our bodily sensations that arise as we process trauma is a critical part of the healing process—a part that should not be ignored.
For clients who have not yet done the sensory work that healing involves, they may find themselves in talk therapy over-intellectualizing a situation unintentionally in order to avoid the sensory component of the trauma that may be inaccessible verbally. These methods of avoidance are the body’s way of shutting off the painful emotions and thoughts, which must be accessed to heal.
If you struggle with feeling dysregulated in your body and fear inviting the body into your healing process, yoga can help you learn how to feel safe and connect with your body again instead of dissociating. Yoga fosters mindfulness that can counteract avoidance symptoms such as dissociation and overintellectualizing. Yoga helps reconnect a person to their body, and in doing so, anchors them in the safety of the present moment to work through their distressing, traumatic memories.
If you want to get the most out of your trauma therapy, find a trauma informed yoga class or spend 15 minutes every morning practicing yoga from home. You will find that over time, your PTSD symptoms such as hypervigillance, constant anxiety and stress, and negative thought patterns will start to decrease and make space for the healing work in therapy to take place. Your nervous system will begin to learn that you are safe— that it is ok to stop fighting and start living.
Sources
Baker, F. A., Metcalf, O., Varker, T., O’Donnell, M. (2018). A systematic review of the efficacy of creative arts therapies in treatment of adults with PTSD. Psychological trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 10(6), 643-651.
Bernstein, B., (1995). Dancing beyond trauma: Women survivors of sexual abuse. In F. Levy (Ed.),Dance and other expressive art therapies: When words are not enough(1st ed., pp. 41-58). New York, NY: Routledge.
Cook-Cottone, C., LaVigne, M. Guyker, W., Travers, L., Lemish, E. & Elenson, P., (2017). Trauma-informed yoga: An embodied, cognitive-relational framework. International Journal of Complementary & Alternative Medicine, 9(1), 1-10.
Cristobal, K. A. (2018). Power of touch: working with survivors of sexual abuse within dance/movement therapy.American Journal of Dance Therapy, 40, 68-86.
Emerson, D., & Hopper, E. (2011). Overcoming trauma through yoga: reclaiming your body. Berkley, CA: Justice Resource Institute.
Gothe, N. P., Khan, I., Hayes, J., Erlenbach, E., & Damoiseaux, J. S. (2019). Yoga Effects on Brain Health: A Systematic Review of the Current Literature. Brain Plasticity, 5(1), 105–122.
Mills, L. J., & Daniluk, J. C. (2002). Her body speaks: the experience of dance therapy for women survivors of child sexual abuse. Journal of Counseling & Development, 80(1), 77-85.
Mitchell, K.S., Dick, A.M., DiMartino, D. M., Smith, B. N., Niles, B., Koenen, K. C., & Street, A., (2014). A pilot study of a randomized controlled trial of yoga as an intervention for PTSD symptoms in women.Journal of Traumatic Stress. 27, 121-128.
Silverberg, R. (2019). Trauma center trauma-sensitive yoga (TC-TSY) peer support groups: An adjunct modality in a feminist approach to trauma treatment for survivors of sexual violence (Order No. 22585073). Available from ProQuest One Academic. (2366585926).
Van der Kolk, B. (2015). The body keeps the score: mind, brain and body in the transformation of trauma. London: Penguin Books.
