'TRAUMA IS A FACT OF LIFE.........BUT IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE A LIFE SENTENCE'

Peter A Levine

 

Unresolved trauma can be the underlying force that drives the elusive symptoms such as panic, depression, migrains, irritable bowel, ME, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and chronic pain, which when left in the body's tissue become our ailments and our illnesses.

 

The Physiology of Trauma and Emotional Release

 "Trauma is the most avoided, ignored, denied, misunderstood, and untreated cause of human suffering. When I use the word trauma, I am talking about the often debilitating symptoms that many people suffer from the aftermath of perceived life-threatening or over-whelming experiences, incidents or accidents. Recently, trauma has been used as a buzzword to replace everyday stress. However this use is completely misleading. While it is true that all traumatic events are stressful, all stressful events are not traumatic." Peter A Levine phd.

 

Trauma response is a specific defensive bodily 'reaction' that people initially mobilise in order to protect themselves against feeling the totality of the horror, pain or helplessness felt within the situation, accident or incident (Peter A. Levine phd). However, if this bodily 'defense' response is not fully completed, often due to surpression, medication or fear at the time of the incident,it gets literally 'frozen'  into the body's neurofascial system. Emotions of defeat, humiliation, shame and a host of physical symptoms associated with the 'reaction' to the original event replays itself over and over again deep in the body's tissue, detached from history but experienced in the present as sensations and symptoms. This state of unresolved trauma can be the underlying force that drives the elusive symptoms such as panic, depression, migrains, irritable bowel, ME, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and chronic pain. which - when left in the body's tissue - become our ailments and our illnesses.

 

Karin Locher has spent many years working with  the 'incompleted' trauma response that gets trapped in the body's tissue. Through the Work of The Reconnection and The Integral Body; through a re-connection, re- negotiation and re-communication of the neuromyofascial web, the 'trapped' trauma response and the built up 'belief system' around it that is now stored in the body's fascial fabric can be released and restored to a resumed state of equilibrium. As the body's tissue is 'stired', the immobilised 'state', the stored trauma response can start to 'defrost'; it can be safely 'invited' and consiously encouraged to complete body's natural trauma responses until it is 'done'; like a vibration that still resounding in the body which needs to stilled.   When completed (sometimes within in minutes, sometimes there is fear-induced resistence and often there are layers, like an onion), the body resumes a calm, a 'stilled' state and can finally resume a state of equilibrium, often 50 years later.

 

Through this Integral Body programme which Karin has developed from her years of working with the body's movement, her question and observations have been to that which 'moves' us with ease and to that which prohibits our natural 'given' birth right for balanced movement; the movement which develops long before the brain. 

If we look at the behaviour of wild prey animals, who are under daily life threatening fight or flight trauma, we as humans are capable and programmed to execute the same responses as they do:  heart rate changes, immobilisation state,  shaking, trembling, shivering, temperature changes, breathing changes and more. The animals go through all these physiological processes and therefore come out of the ordeal scott free (if they are not caught!), and trot off to get back to their grazing or lie out in the sun. If we could learn to understand and 'be with' these fight/flight/immobilisation trauma responses, learning to 'manage' this natural reactive process safely, so allowing it to complete fully,  seeing it as the key to both a stress free and a full recovery, we too could 'trot' off to get on with our lives 'scott free'......all but a little wiser.