Trauma and the Body

the body is the visible mind, the mind is the invisible body

A “body” is also a repository of information and experiences, eg. we refer to someone’s “body of work.”

The Body Keeps the Score is the name of a seminal book 2014 which also regards how our body of experiences - notably those traumatic ones are stored in the physical body. This followed the 2001 release The Body Bears the Burden authored by the traumatologist Robert Scaer, an influence of mine, The Body Never Lies from Alice Miller in 2005, and Gabor Mate’s book When The Body Says No (2003).

Clearly there is an increasing awareness that trauma is not just a buzz word that influencers are educating the youth to look out for in punchy Instagram reels. It is not just a subjective psychological process, but a physiological one, with objective characteristics, and actual lasting effects on the body as well as the mind.

Lasting, documented effects of trauma can include hypervigilance, avoidance behaviours, difficulties in emotional regulation, dissociative disorders, increased susceptibility to disease, changes in digestion and sleep patterns, increased levels of anxiety and depression, substance abuse issues, relationship difficulties, and I guess just about every other dysfunction you can think of…

But what the hell is trauma?

It would help to have a working definition of these things, wouldn’t it? That would help bring clarity to the often vague concept that if something bad happens to you, it might affect you over the long term and you might not be over it…

Taking after Robert Scaer, I like to define trauma as any incident in which a person experiences a real or perceived threat to their life in a state of helplessness.

The real or perceived part is important, because people will not necessarily react to the same circumstances in the same way. Someone may get in a very severe car crash and walk away untraumatized, whereas another person might get a little bump and have physical or psychological issues following that seem disproportionate to the degree of actual harm done. One child, left to wait after sports, might happily tap away at their phone, while another might experience a sense of abandonment. The circumstances themselves go through a subjective screening – giving some people the impression that it’s “all in the head” and people should “just snap out of it” – but in fact. the effects can be very, very objective and measurable – and hard to shake off. This has been demonstrated in lab rats who were given mini strokes. With in a day the animals had regrown the blood vessel, but perhaps they couldn’t see or move their front claws – not because there was any physical damage to those organs, but just because they were traumatized.

The state of helplessness part is important because what happens when faced with a real or perceived life-threatening situation is that the organism goes into fight-or-flight mode but it can’t fight and it can’t fly. It’s left with no option but to freeze up… “play dead” … This is, for example, why it is important to never hold down a child and strike them in the name of “discipline” … you would be literally creating the circumstances where you are stimulating the fight or flight mechanism in a context where they can’t run away or fight it out. So they are likely to freeze. What are you going to do to unfreeze them?

A very helpful way to look at it is to say: What happens when we suffer a trauma is that “the brain reacts, but doesn’t unreact.” This makes a lot of sense and is easy to understand. Why do people get less social? Why do they get depressed or trust issues and worry that people are going to harm them? It’s because they reacted to some past trauma and now they’re stuck in. It’s still hanging around for them.

Most of us are partially still frozen up from past traumas. This can lead to listlessness, depression, anxiety, lack of motivation, procrastination, feeling like everything is pointless or too hard to handle, feeling like you have limited capacity to deal with every day life, having a difficulty speaking up or standing up for yourself, or any other number of symptoms you could relate to being “frozen up.”

Isn’t this illuminating?

In nature after suffering a trauma, animals will tend to start shaking. This is in the attempt to discharge the trauma from the body and you can see a polar bear doing it on YouTube. You will see this in humans too. After an accident or seeing someone harmed violently, they will start to tremor. Then caring attendants, in their ignorance, will tell them to calm down and stop shaking – that is biologically wrong. You are pushing the trauma deeper into the system.

This was also demonstrated with lab mice who were “almost drowned.” One group was allowed to shake after simulated drowning. Another group were prodded with the eraser on the end of a pencil to interrupt the trauma discharge. What was found was the group that was allowed to “shake it off” actually performed better than a third control group once drowning was simulated a second time, whereas the group that was interrupted just gave up and didn’t even try to survive when “almost drowned” a second time. We call this learned helplessness. This experiment suggests that if you suffer a trauma and actually get over it it may make you more resilient… whereas so long as you still store the trauma in your body, you will be less so.

This understanding of the “shake it off” response led a lineage of psychologists beginning with Wilhelm Reich (a student of Freud) through his student Alexander Lowen (who invented “bioenergetics” - a body-based, trauma-release therapy) to David Berceli who developed Trauma Release Exercises which are a set of physical movements you can practice at home to prompt the body to start shaking. This is something I’ve practiced for years and informed my own clients of.

In my last article I talked about how this time last year I had repetitive strain injury in my wrists, so bad I could barely pick up my phone some days. I also explained how I was “cured” by a form of bodywork that removes chronic tension from the muscles.

I have come to see from my ongoing studies that chronic muscle tension that creates susceptibility to conditions like repetitive strain injury, carpel tunnel, back pain, joint issues that necessitate replacement surgery, arthritis, and so many other conditions…

But why did the chronic muscle tension get there in the first place?

Well, partly, it was the mechanical wear and tear of life, and why some people who have very physical jobs get a lot more if it, that is true…

…But not everyone who does these things gets the same level of symptoms… some people hardly move their bodies, and they get stiff too… or maybe they hardly move their bodies because they are stiff, and that makes it uncomfortable for them…

…I think the missing piece of the puzzle in chronic tension is trauma. Trauma causes the body, as well as the mind, to freeze up. What people have is the accumulation of lots of little undischarged “freeze” responses. The muscles have tighten up in response to life situations that are stressful, and each time the body goes to sleep a little, it plays dead … then we go about forgetting we have even tightened up at all, we don’t “loosen up” again, we just feel slightly more anxious in the background, or maybe we don’t feel like going out a much, or stop swimming, or tear a ligament at the gym and have to slow it down… …the nervous system loses the link between the brain and the muscle, and forgets that its even tense… You forget how to relax the muscles. Just try and do it with your back or shoulder pain! Relax the muscle… You’ll likely find that you can’t without help…

Based on my experience as a therapist and my own healing journey, I’ve come to see that part of what we are doing with this modality of bodywork is discharging the freeze response trauma from the muscles. The pieces fit. It re-establishes the neurological link from the brain to the muscles so they can discharge chronic tension and relax. This confers psychological benefits as well as physical.

Psychotherapy, Counselling, and Coaching for Freedom-lovers: www.beyourselfandloveit.com

I want bodywork Antony! (email: antony@beyourselfandloveit.com)