If you've ever experienced trauma, you know firsthand how overwhelming it can be. Whether you've been exposed to a one-time traumatic event or ongoing chronic trauma, it can be tough to cope and move past it.
Trauma can cause emotional and physical responses that stick with you long after the event is over leading to symptoms like anxiety, depression, hypervigilance, and flashbacks. Furthermore, suffering a traumatic experience can make it challenging to reconnect with your body. The pain and fear can linger in your body long after the event, leading to physical symptoms like tension, aches, and pains that can become chronic conditions.
These symptoms can significantly impact your sense of bodily safety and your quality of life. Let’s dive into how trauma can be stored in the body and how trauma-informed yoga can help you heal.
How The Body Stores Trauma
When trauma happens, it's common for pain and fear to linger in the body long after the event. Your body is an incredible machine that can experience and react to various physical, emotional, and mental stimuli in many ways. Trauma – whether from a past event or an ongoing situation – is one of those stimuli that can affect you in profound ways.
When you experience trauma, your body stores the memories, emotions, and physical sensations associated with the event. This is because your nervous system is activated during a traumatic experience, triggering the fight, flight, or freeze response in your body.
This response involves a cascade of physiological changes, including an increase in heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure, as well as the release of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.
Over time, if the trauma is left unresolved, these physical changes can become chronic and lead to a range of physical symptoms, such as headaches, digestive problems, muscle tension, and chronic pain. You may also experience changes in appetite, sleep, and energy levels, all of which can impact your overall well-being.
It's essential to recognize the physical symptoms of trauma, as well as the mental ones. When you ignore the physical symptoms, it can be challenging to address the underlying trauma and find healing. Fortunately, connecting with your body can be a powerful tool for reducing the symptoms of trauma. That's where trauma-informed yoga comes in.
What is Trauma-Informed Yoga?
Trauma-informed yoga is a specialized style of yoga that recognizes and acknowledges the complex effects of trauma on the mind and body. It's designed specifically to help people dealing with trauma, with a focus on safety, empowerment, and choice. The goal is to create a safe space where you can explore, release, and process your emotions.
Studies increasingly recognize the effectiveness of trauma-informed yoga in treating PTSD and trauma survivors. After experiencing trauma, it's common to find it hard to trust your body, leading to a reluctance to engage in physical activities. Whether that be something as seemingly simple as getting in a taxi, or something more intimate and complex like sex. Trauma-informed yoga combines guided body-based interventions with mindfulness and awareness techniques, which can help you begin exploring and healing while also gaining trust in your body again.
How Trauma-Informed Yoga Can Be the Gentle Healer
The benefits of trauma-informed yoga are countless! For starters, it helps you shift your attention away from your thoughts and onto your physical sensations, allowing you to ground yourself in the present moment. This practice can help you identify and acknowledge how you feel both physically and emotionally, which can facilitate your healing process. Furthermore, you'll learn to regulate your breathing, identify your triggers, and respond to stress and anxiety healthily.
This style of yoga helps to release physical and emotional tension that can be stuck in the body after a traumatic experience. Through gentle movement and stretching, you'll be able to release stress and trauma stored in the muscles and connective tissues of the body. This can help release emotional energy that has built up and potentially even heal the fascia, the web of connective tissue that surrounds the muscles and organs.
The Importance of Doing It Right
When it comes to finding the right yoga teacher, it's essential to ensure that they are certified in trauma-informed yoga. These individuals are specially trained to guide you through poses and sequences in a safe and empowering way to support your healing journey. A qualified teacher will be knowledgeable on the impact of trauma on the body and mind, as well as how certain poses and breathwork can be triggering. Seeking the guidance of a certified professional can help minimize the risk of re-traumatization and promote an overall safe and healing experience.
A certified trauma-informed yoga teacher has undergone extensive training in understanding trauma, its impact on the body, and how to support individuals in their healing journey. Such teachers best understand the need for gentleness, empowering choices, and control of one's body, which is essential for anyone healing from trauma.
Final Thoughts
If you're dealing with trauma or PTSD, you're not alone and there is help. Trauma-informed yoga is a highly effective complementary therapy that can help you connect with your body and begin the healing process. With a compassionate teacher, you'll be able to release physical and emotional tension that has stored in your body, as well as develop practical coping skills that you can use every day.
When paired with other therapies and social support, the practice of trauma-informed yoga can be a valuable tool in your journey towards healing from traumatic experiences. At Elevate Counseling + Wellness we have warm and compassionate therapists who are trained to help you on your path to healing.
