Working With Trauma
Trauma can shape how we experience our bodies, other people, and the world around us.
It may show up as tension or bracing, difficulty settling, feeling constantly alert, becoming overwhelmed easily, disconnecting from sensation, or finding that certain kinds of touch, movement, closeness, or attention bring up more than expected.
None of these experiences tells us exactly what happened to someone or what they need. Trauma is personal, and people adapt in many different ways.
My work begins with the person who is here now, rather than with an idea of how a traumatized body is supposed to behave.
Trauma involves the body. That doesn’t mean it is stored in a muscle.
Our experiences affect us physically. How could they not? We perceive, respond, protect ourselves, move, breathe, orient, and relate through bodies.
Difficult experiences can influence how someone responds to sensation, uncertainty, closeness, movement, effort, pain, and other people. These patterns can become deeply familiar, sometimes happening before we have consciously recognized them.
I don’t find it particularly useful to assume that a painful shoulder contains an emotion, that fascia is holding a memory, or that pressing the right place will release trauma from the body.
What interests me is how your experience is organized now—and whether, through attention, movement, relationship, and sometimes touch, there might be room for something different.
The body isn’t evidence.
I can’t look at posture, tension, breathing, or movement and know someone’s history.
Similar physical patterns can arise for many different reasons. Part of working carefully with trauma is resisting the temptation to create a story about someone simply because their body looks or responds a particular way.
Safety isn’t something I can declare for another person.
Safety, agency & choice
Trauma-informed work often talks about creating safety. I think the intention is important, and I am cautious about assuming that I know what another person’s nervous system should experience as safe.
Something that seems gentle to one person may feel intrusive to another. Stillness can be settling for someone and deeply uncomfortable for someone else. Being asked to close your eyes, breathe slowly, relax, or pay close attention to internal sensation isn’t automatically helpful.
So rather than requiring a particular response, I try to make room for choice. We can change position. Move. Stop. Talk. Use touch or not use touch. Pay attention inwardly or orient toward the room. You can tell me something isn’t working, including something I suggested.
Agency isn’t demonstrated by doing what I ask comfortably. Being able to disagree, change course, or say no matters too.
Touch is one possibility.
I am a bodyworker, and much of my work involves touch. Working with me doesn’t require being touched.
For some people, careful touch becomes an important part of the work. It can offer another way of experiencing contact, support, boundaries, weight, movement, or simply being accompanied in physical experience.
For others, touch may not feel useful at first—or at all. We can work through movement, attention, conversation, orientation, changes in support and position, or other forms of exploration.
Consent is also ongoing. Agreeing to touch at the beginning of a session doesn’t mean you have agreed to everything that follows.
The question isn’t whether you can tolerate the work. The work can change in response to you.
When understanding only takes us so far
Many people I work with already understand themselves very well. They may have spent years in therapy, meditation, recovery work, contemplative practice, or other forms of self-exploration.
They may know why they respond a certain way. They may recognize a pattern while it is happening. They may have language for experiences that once made no sense at all.
All of that can matter enormously. And sometimes someone reaches a place where being able to understand or observe a pattern doesn’t seem to change how it is lived.
Another way of encountering what you already know
Embodied work can give us another place from which to become curious.
What happens in your breathing when something becomes difficult? Where does effort appear? What happens to movement, orientation, contact, distance, or your ability to make a choice?
Sometimes what matters isn’t discovering a new explanation. It is experiencing another possibility.
Alongside therapy and other forms of support
Somatic and body-based work can sit alongside psychotherapy, medical care, physical therapy, medication, meditation, and other forms of support. They don’t all need to do the same job.
Sometimes people come to me because therapy has helped them understand their history and relationships, while they remain curious about how some of those experiences are showing up physically. Sometimes a therapist encourages a client to explore more embodied work. And sometimes someone simply wants a different way of approaching an experience they have already spent considerable time talking about.
When appropriate and with your permission, I am also happy to communicate with other practitioners involved in your care.
The aim isn’t to replace the work you’re already doing. Sometimes another perspective gives that work somewhere else to go.
I didn’t set out to specialize in trauma. I more or less fell into the work.
How I came to this work
While living and working overseas, I found myself working with people whose lives had included experiences very different from my own. Some had lived through war and bombings. Others had experienced physical and sexual assault, violence, displacement, or other events that had profoundly affected their lives.
I had already studied trauma to some extent, but working directly with people began to raise different questions for me. Despite very different histories and circumstances, I started noticing similarities in some of the ways people responded—how they related to their bodies, to touch, to other people, to uncertainty, and to what was happening around them.
I became increasingly interested in a fairly basic question: What is trauma, and how do human beings respond to experiences that overwhelm us?
That question led me much further into the field. Over the years I’ve studied with leading teachers in trauma and somatic work and pursued training across a number of approaches to trauma, the nervous system, movement, mindfulness, pain, and embodied experience. My formal study has also included the Trauma Research Foundation’s certificate program.
At the same time, I’ve continued working directly with people living with the effects of trauma, PTSD and complex trauma, dissociation, anxiety, chronic pain, and other experiences that rarely fit neatly into one category.
And the more I’ve studied, the more I’ve become interested in what our models leave out.
Trauma can be understood through physiology, psychology, attachment, learning, memory, perception, movement, culture, relationship, and many other lenses. Each can tell us something useful. And a person is still more than the mechanisms through which we explain them.
That has become increasingly important to how I work. I want to understand the nervous system, the body, and the ways human beings adapt to difficult experiences. I also don’t want those explanations to obscure the larger question of what it is like to be this particular person, living this particular life, in this particular body.
What might a session involve?
There isn’t a separate trauma protocol that I apply to everyone with a trauma history.
A session may look very much like bodywork. We may spend more time with movement or awareness. We may talk about what you’re noticing. There may be periods of quiet. Sometimes we work very slowly. Sometimes movement, humor, conversation, or simply changing what we’re doing is more useful than trying to become still.
You also don’t need to tell me the details of what happened to you in order for us to work together.
Touch
When wanted and useful, with ongoing communication and the possibility of changing course.
Movement
Exploring support, effort, orientation, boundaries, and different possibilities for action.
Attention
Noticing what is available without requiring you to stay focused internally or remain with something overwhelming.
Conversation
Enough language to help us understand what is happening without requiring the session to become an account of your history.
We don’t have to know in advance what your body needs.
One of the risks in any therapeutic work is that the practitioner becomes so confident in their model that the person in front of them disappears behind it.
Trauma theories can be useful. Nervous-system models can be useful. Understanding physiology, attachment, pain, movement, and development can all help us notice things we might otherwise miss.
None of those models knows you.
I would rather use what I’ve learned to ask better questions than to decide ahead of time what your experience means.
The question is what might be skillful here, with this person, in this moment.
You don’t have to arrive ready to work on your trauma.
You can come because your neck hurts, because you’ve been feeling disconnected from your body, because your therapist suggested bodywork, or because you’re curious whether another way of working might be useful. We can begin with what is actually here.