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Medical trauma including anesthesia
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Physical injuries, including sports injuries
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Relational injury (and attachment trauma)
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Emotional abuse, including narcissistic abuse
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Physical abuse
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Sexual abuse
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PTSD
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CPTSD (early developmental trauma – hidden trauma from childhood)
- Auto accidents
“Startle” and “Protect” physiological patterns
When someone has experienced a traumatic event, or ongoing relational events as in childhood, a person’s physiology can stay in a “startle” pattern which includes bracing throughout the system or a “protect” pattern which includes contractions throughout the system.
A person might be aware that they, for example, clench their teeth or hands, or hold their breath. Or they might round their shoulders forwards and they may feel constriction in their throat or chest and tightness in their belly. Sometimes they have chronic digestive issues—either constipation or extremely loose bowels. Or they have back, neck or shoulder pain. These muscular habits of hypervigilance show up throughout their entire physiology— but they may just feel it as “normal” for them. But all of this can be part of the same nervous system pattern.
Seemingly normal habits like nail biting or constant foot swinging or tapping is the nervous system’s attempt to self soothe and self regulate. Usually there is deeper physical “holding” on the musculoskeletal level throughout the person’s system.
This method works with people who experience musculoskeletal patterns of anxiety and hypervigilance, or bracing and contracting.
Being with the Body to Release Trauma
If someone has had an auto accident, they likely hold muscle tension patterns from the experience. In such an experience we often have powerful energy build up. Our nervous system naturally gathers all it’s power and looks for ways to flee or engage in fighting against impact. That powerful energy surge is thwarted and becomes stuck in the joints or muscles. This is a common cause for neck pain or things like frozen shoulder, on top of any physical injury that occurred.
In SE® we begin a slow process to revisit the experience from within the sensations of the physical body — beginning with resourcing each person until it’s clear they have the capacity to touch into the different pieces of the event. We work with nervous system regulation techniques so that they aren’t re-traumatized as we approach significant moments that make up the event.
The nervous system processes at a very…very… slow… pace. We go at a pace that the sensory part of the brain can accommodate, and so that the brain can re-experience small pieces of the event. And this time, re-experiencing it in resourced, manageable way, the body is successful in finally moving that stuck, thwarted energy, either through physical movement or doing something differently and in a more resourced conscious way in the imagination.
Because our brain doesn’t know the difference between what actually happened in the past and our imagination in the present, it can reprocess this information sensorily and muscles can finally relax and let go permanently.
Discharge of Energy
Often clients will have the discharge that their body’s didn’t get the chance to have the first time around. Discharge can include crying for no apparent reason, shaking, shivering, trembling, yawning, or deep sighs. This discharge is what animals are able to experience naturally in the wild after a big chase. They move this powerful fight-flight energy through their bodies vs storing it as anxiety. You rarely hear about a stressed out tiger!
