One of the most powerful ways to help trauma victims get in touch with and follow their body’s cellular and healing wisdom comes directly out of the new brain research. It involves teaching trauma victims how to follow their body’s spontaneous energetic impulses or movements wherever they lead. Brain researchers have discovered that energetic and imaged movement is central to almost every part and function of your brain. Thus, helping trauma victims allow and follow their spontaneous movements naturally leads to almost instant access to their buried, repressed, and forgotten trauma memories, feelings, and emotions and the cognitive information that they need to help them heal their trauma as well as solve personal problems, develop more functional and successful behaviors and responses, rewire their brain with more functional neural pathways, remove chronic tension from their body, and restructure their energetic holding defenses. Learning to be in touch with, allow, and follow their inner body wisdom in the form of spontaneous movements is a vital and powerful way to help trauma victims reach their goal of living a life filled with health, well-being, and happiness.
My move to adopt a client-centered, client-directed approach to doing Energetic Trauma Healing Therapy began long before the above neuroscience findings about how our brain and body work together were discovered. In fact, it began with my first client who did not respond well to my medical model, therapist-in-charge, body-based Bioenergetic interventions. Thus, I quickly learned to allow her to direct her energetic therapy by following her own trauma healing impulses and movements which were right on target and produced effective outcome results.
Another early influence came from reading Peter A. Levine’s Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997). It had a profound impact on my practice of energetic psychotherapy as I realized that my clients’ own natural healing process of thawing and shaking out the frozen trauma in their bodies could be relied on when the right therapeutic conditions of safety, support, and encouragement were provided. Numerous case examples point to the effectiveness of tapping clients’ natural healing process of ridding their bodies of frozen trauma.
Then I read John L. Ratey’s, A Users Guide to the Brain [2001] which futher impacted on my practice of doing energetic psychotherapy. One sentence, in particular, really got my attention. It reads, “But, mounting evidence shows that movement is crucial to every other brain function, including memory, emotion, language, and learning.” I had already encouraged my clients to follow their own trauma healing impulses and movements and here was confirmation that I was on the right path. It was the birth of the Spontaneous Movement Protocol which became a mainstay in my client-directed Energetic Therapy approach.
This Innovations in Healing Trauma handbook lays out the work that I and my colleagues are doing to move the Energetic Trauma Healing Therapy approach forward. It presents numerous Innovative Trauma Healing Protocols which we have developed as well as our clinical evidence for its effectiveness in the form of case examples as well as a limited Energetic Therapy outcomes research study.
