Trauma/PTSD

Unresolved trauma and PTSD can be caused by sexual assaults, car accidents, childhood trauma with parents, abusive relationships, physical assaults, medical operations, or falls and injuries. Regardless of the cause,

Trauma or PTSD will leave you with some of the following symptoms:

Feeling stuck and unable to move forward with your life

Insomnia and/or nightmares related to the trauma

shame, guilt, or feeling like you should have prevented it or that you deserved it

Either intrusive disturbing memories, or memory loss of the event(s)

Anxiety

Feeling unsafe and hypervigilant

Disempowerment, loss of boundaries, and difficulty asserting yourself

Avoidance of associated people, places, and things (eg – driving is dangerous, men are dangerous)

Trauma Healing Blueprint

Trauma is held in our bodies, nervous system, and our emotions – and thus therapy needs to be able to work directly with these. Somatic Therapy excels in this because it works directly with your body, your emotions, and the stuck fight-flight-freeze-response.

What is Trauma?

Trauma is an overwhelming and often unexpected event that leaves us feeling disempowered, helpless, unable to cope, and our boundaries violated. When we experience a traumatic or potentially threatening situation, our nervous systems make a split-second unconscious decision to go into fight, flight, or a freeze response. These three biological responses are hard-wired into us by evolution in order to help us survive.

For example, imagine walking in a forest and all of a sudden a tiger comes running towards you looking like it is going to attack you. Without thinking or planning, your nervous system instantly switches into a survival response that has you turning away and running faster than you could ever imagine in the other direction. Once you had successfully escaped, your nervous system would soon settle down into a relaxed parasympathetic state.

However, if in the above example your running away (flight response) was unsuccessful, without thinking about it your nervous system might switch into fighting back (fight response) against the threat.

When our nervous systems perceive that neither fight or flight are options, they instead go into a freeze response as a last resort for survival. The freeze response is biologically programmed into us, just as a mouse instinctually plays dead when a cat catches it. A freeze response is common in childhood trauma, car accidents, quick and unexpected events, when the perpetrator is significantly bigger or stronger, or when a fight or flight response would potentially provoke the perpetrator into making it worse. However the freeze response is susceptible to remaining unprocessed
and thereby leaving us vulnerable to unresolved trauma or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Talk therapy is limited in what it can do to help change this. In order to fully heal from post-traumatic stress, we need to directly work with your nervous system and your fight, flight, and freeze responses. In order to do this, you need a skilled therapist who is trained in helping the body and nervous system heal from traumatic events.

With Somatic Therapy we can restore your body and nervous system back to healthy functioning. Step by step we can bring you out of chronic anxiety and frozen disempowerment, and back into health, empowerment, and balance. And most importantly, the trauma will go where it belongs – into a memory of a past event that you are now free from.

Blog Posts

MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy

by Adam | Oct 7, 2020

A very powerful form of therapy is being developed for PTSD. It combines intensive somatic therapy with a medicine called MDMA.

Contact Us