Trauma is an experience so upsetting that the mind cannot make sense of it. Examples include torture, fighting in a war, rape, and physical and sexual abuse. A person can be traumatized by something that happened to them or by something they saw, like a family member being beaten up. Ongoing abuse, especially by a caregiver, is especially traumatizing.

When you are reminded of a past trauma—by a smell, a sound, a remark, or anything else—it affects more than just your thoughts and emotions. Your body also responds. Physically, you can feel like you’re still in danger, even though you’re not. You might find yourself in what is called a “fight-or-flight” response—your heart races, your breathing speeds up, you sweat, your legs may tremble. One theory to explain all these powerful physical responses is that because you were not able to stop the original trauma from happening, your body is stuck in fight-or-flight response.

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Or, if you learned to “dissociate” (which means to mentally flee from the traumatic experience), you might feel like you are floating away when you’re reminded of the trauma and sense those strong feelings coming on. “Fight-or-flight” and dissociation both prevent the brain from doing one of its most important jobs, which is to put the story of trauma in the past, where it no longer interferes with your present life.

Rosemary Masters, Director of the Trauma Studies Center of the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy in New York, explains that “When an extreme stress overwhelms the brain, it makes three mistakes.” First, your brain mistakenly thinks that the trauma from the past is still going on. Second, it believes that the danger is still there too. And third, the way in which the brain explains the original trauma or tries to “make meaning” of it is distorted.

For all these reasons, overcoming trauma can be difficult. Getting professional help can make a huge difference, but there are many different ideas about what kind of therapy is best. What works for one person may not work for another. Some people heal from their trauma through cognitive behavioral therapy, in which the therapist helps the client replace the mistaken fears and other inappropriate reactions with more realistic, positive words. A related technique is exposure therapy, in which clients talk about the experience in small doses until it no longer bothers them. Antidepressants that also address anxiety, like Prozac and Paxil, may also help people get over trauma.

Why Body-Based Therapies?

Some traumatized patients have more success with therapies that focus more on the body than the mind. Neuorimaging, or X-ray-type pictures of the brain, suggest that memories of trauma are stored in the parts of the brain that are not logical or verbal—that’s why “fight-or-flight” shows up as sweating or heart racing instead of as logical thoughts. Somebody who is in this panicked mode may not be ready to calmly discuss the trauma, but they may respond to newer therapies that use the body to help the traumatized brain heal. To find out about these techniques, we talked to Rosemary Masters and to Mary Myers, a holistic therapist who uses body-based approaches to address trauma.

Below, we describe three techniques known as Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, and EFT tapping. Each of them puts more focus on the client’s physical experience right there in the therapist’s office than on talking about the specific past trauma. The trauma often comes up in the session, but it’s “looser” than more mind-based therapy. “The client is invited to let their thoughts go where they will,” says Masters.

Masters says that in the safety of the therapist’s office the client can “activate the memory with all the bits and pieces of that experience: What you saw, what you heard, what you felt in your body, including the trembling and the activated heart.” Only then can the mind digest the experience and move from irrational responses (“It’s my fault I got hit; I don’t deserve good treatment; no person is safe”) to reality (“That was the past; I’m safe enough now; I’m a good enough person”).

Nobody is quite sure exactly how these treatments work, but they have helped many clients who’ve suffered trauma. Below, the therapists describe how they use them in their practices.

image by YC-Art Dept

By Mary Myers

The theory behind Somatic Experiencing is that it helps to regulate the nervous system so that it can process unhealed trauma.

Clients and I start by “developing resources” to help them feel more calm and present. We decide beforehand that if their feelings get too intense, we will focus on the sensation of their feet touching the ground or back resting in the chair, or looking at a certain plant or a painting in the office. Those are the resources, the safe places to come back to.

I’ll ask questions like “Where do you feel the sadness/rage/fear in your body?” This keeps us focused on how feelings are arising in this moment. If their feelings seem overwhelming, I’ll ask, “Can you still feel your feet on the ground?” or “How’s your breathing?”

This focus on their body can remind them that their rage or sadness or fear is not their whole experience. I’ll ask them to stay connected with the resource (the plant or the painting or leaning on the chair) as they observe the feeling and notice if it changes. And the feeling always changes. And so the client learns that strong feelings won’t last forever, that she can bear them. In this process, the client often arrives at a sense of calm and clarity and of the feelings shrinking to a manageable size. Feelings associated with abuse and trauma feel bigger than us, and sitting still with them while connecting with our larger experience shows us that we are bigger than the feelings.

Dissociation is a sign that the feelings are too intense, and some people who have experienced trauma dissociate really quickly. They might come in not knowing they do this, so I help them connect to their experience by asking, “How present do you feel now, where 0 is completely zoned out or gone and 10 is really present, clear, and alert?”

In time, the client learns what tends to trigger dissociation, and that by using his resources and staying present to his larger experience, slowly he can increase his capacity to tolerate those feelings.

Just being in the same room with a calm person (therapist) can help an upset person (client) calm down. It’s somewhat like the soothing that a mother does with a baby, teaching the other person’s nervous system how to regulate itself. Part of it is unconscious; it’s not about learning to control anything.

Somatic Experiencing is especially good for childhood trauma, where most of the bad experience is stored in body memory, not in words. Children’s capacity for logic, for understanding cause and effect, doesn’t develop until around age 10. So trauma experienced earlier than that needs to be accessed at a physical and emotional level, not an intellectual level.

image by YC-Art Dept

By Rosemary Masters

EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing and is a type of therapy specifically developed for people who’ve suffered trauma.

I’ll ask the client to recall the original traumatic experience and call up the worst visual image and tell it to me. It’s a snapshot of the worst of the experience, say seeing your dad beat up your mother. Then I ask “And when you see that picture, what is your negative belief about yourself?”

At first the client might say, “I’m afraid my mother’s going to get killed” and I keep re-directing them to themselves, so they might eventually say, “It’s my fault my father’s mad” or “I can’t trust men.” Then I ask the client what emotion she’s feeling and where she feels it in her body. She might say, “I feel afraid and my legs are trembling.”

Then I do something called bilateral stimulation: I ask the person to follow my moving finger back and forth with her eyes or listen to alternating ear tones in headphones. While I’m doing that, I ask the person to keep focusing on the trauma at the same time they’re watching my finger or listening to the tones. Then I ask, “What are you feeling now?”

As we do this, the client’s brain becomes calmer, less upset—they’ve measured this. It may take several sessions, but when it goes well, the person’s body reactions become calmer and ultimately they will report a different idea about themselves: “It wasn’t my fault”; “I deserve good treatment.”

Nobody knows why the bilateral (side-to-side) stimulation helps exactly. It may be that the dual attention—focusing on the ear tones or finger movement along with the trauma, the person gets just activated enough so that the brain can do what the brain wants to do—to make appropriate, realistic meaning of the present.

It works to replace the negative thoughts that the person made out of the experience—“I’m no good; I should’ve protected my mother”; “I’m never safe around men”—with more realistic and positive thoughts.

image by YC-Art Dept

EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) Tapping

By Mary Myers

EFT is a simple technique of tapping on the head and body while repeating statements about what we are feeling.

We start an EFT session by observing what the client is feeling physiologically and emotionally right now. That’s very important to emphasize, because often people will say, “I’ve felt terrible all week,” but they mean a memory of how they’ve been feeling, not a current felt experience. When we have clarified that, they might say something like, “I feel really exhausted and hopeless, and my head is really foggy.”

I will work to bring attention to one aspect of their experience at a time and ask them how strong the feeling is, saying, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how foggy does your head feel, where 0 is completely foggy and 10 is completely clear?” Then we practice tapping. There’s a very specific and simple pattern of using your fingertips to tap on certain points on the body; for a demonstration of EFT tapping, go to mindfulnessforhealing.com.

The therapist and the client each tap themselves gently while saying a phrase that reflects what the client is feeling. An example might be “Even though I feel hopeless…” Then they follow that with “I love and accept myself.” The therapist says it and the client repeats it as they both tap. The whole process takes a minute or two. When we are done, I check back in to see whether and how much the feelings have changed. Once he’s learned how, the client can do the tapping and the statements himself whenever he needs to. You can tap many times every day.

Nobody really knows how this works. It’s possible that tapping plus the positive words creates new neural pathways in the brain; and that the tapping stimulates the “feel-good” chemicals serotonin and endorphins, helping us feel calmer and more present.

Considering Therapy?

Keep in mind that therapy is not like waving a wand to feel better. You have to be an active participant! Assess your reactions. Pay attention to how you feel after therapy or taking medication. If it’s not working, tell your therapist how it’s not working. Be willing to stick with a program for a while, even if it makes you uncomfortable. But also be willing to try something new if the therapy really isn’t helping you feel better about yourself and achieve your goals.