
03/04/2025
A beautiful way to clear stored memories and help to reset the nervous system ♥️
When it comes to healing trauma, psychology isn’t unimportant, however, when we work with a body-up approach, we can reset the overactive triggers in our threat detection systems.
When the body is calm and we’ve quieted its protective reflexes, we can make more space to talk.
Traumatic events, as well as the stresses of our day-to-day lives, have a powerful physiological impact. Our bodies can get stuck in protective, survival gestures; we speed up to survive, we fight or we flee, we collapse, disappear or dissociate.
When these old parts of our nervous system are stuck in these survival gestures, we don’t think clearly, emote clearly, or remember clearly.
We all have an 'inner guard dog', and when our guard dog is activated it either barks all the time or cowers in the shed. It’s very hard to talk to this inner guard dog – it likes to run, jump, fight or shut down. Having a long conversation with your guard dog won’t do much good!
However, you can train your inner guard dog, stroke your guard dog, and nourish your guard dog, so that instead of barking or cowering in the shed, it can play with the kids and only bark in the middle of the night if it needs too.
When we’re in ‘guard dog’ mode, we get stuck in the quick, primitive reflexes that are underneath our cognitive abilities – we can’t think clearly.
When this happens, we need to help our physiology shift out of its stuck, protective reflexes first.
This is an amazing thing to offer to people in trauma.
Instead of talking about the trauma, the essential thing is helping our bodies to feel free in the present moment and find safety in the present moment.
It's why I love teaching TRE (Trauman and Tension Releasing Exercises). For many people, not having to talk about their trauma, being relatively anonymous in a group setting and doing something that’s purely about finding agency and strength in your body is key to working with trauma in a positive and generative way.
Find out more at trecollege.com