Many trauma clients use the Spontaneous Movement Protocol along with the Energetic Grounding Protocols, and other Energetic Support Protocols to direct their Energetic Trauma Healing Therapy to achieve successful outcomes. Other clients use the Spontaneous Movement Protocol and other Energetic Protocols to make good progress in healing their trauma but need to go further by restructuring their Energetic Holding Defense/s in order to achieve successful outcomes. Often their efforts to restructure their Energetic Holding Defenses move ahead quite naturally and without the need to use formal process such as the Start-Up Protocol which I present below. For example, in one case my clients kept dissociating during her trauma healing work due to her Holding Out Defense triggering her emotional brain alarm signaling danger thus making her leave her body. I suggested that she do Energetic Grounding to bring herself back into her body followed by doing an intensive program of Energetic Grounding which is the main way to help clients restructure a Holding Out Defense. In another case, I showed a client how to use a pressure roller to relieve his back pain. He liked the roller so much that he began using it on a regular basis. This, in effect, helped him begin to restructure his Holding Back Defense which features a stiff, tense back as a defining characteristic.
However, other clients make good progress using the Spontaneous Movement Protocol and so on to direct their Energetic Trauma Healing work, especially in the beginning of their therapy, until at some critical point their progress slow sor stalls due to a largely unconscious fear of moving forward with their trauma healing work. At this point it is the time that they must begin to restructure their Energetic Holding Defense/s if they wish to achieve a success outcome for their therapy. The Start-up Protocol then become the star of the show is the go to tool to self-diagnosis and work on removing this final obstacle to their trauma healing work.
Here I am not speaking of their resistance coming online because their therapist’s behavior threatens them in some way. (The therapist will need to check this out and make sure that this is not the case.) Nor, am I referring to their therapy progress slowing or stalling because they are are working with a low energetic charge in their body. (This too needs to be checked out by the client and therapist and remedied if such is the case.)
Here I am speaking about an internal, mostly unconscious fear which triggers their emotional brain alarm, signaling that danger lies ahead if they proceed further with their trauma healing work. The reason for this depends upon when the victims’ trauma occurred. If it happened when the trauma victims were physically or sexually abused as children or their natural child development stages were interfered by their childhood caretakers, they automatically adopt an energetic holding defenses which protects them from feeling the pain of the trauma as well as experiencing similar trauma in the future. Thus, when clients’ energetic healing work reaches the core of their trauma, their emotional brain sounds an alarm; this alarm signals that further Energetic Therapy work is to be resisted since to continue is to risk bringing up their most painful and frightening feelings. For example, as the trauma in the core of their body begins to release, clients may start to tremble and shake which is their body’s natural healing process of thawing out and discharging their frozen trauma; consequently they may judge this trembling and shaking as a sign of unacceptable weakness and resist doing so. Or, as the core trauma releases, clients may begin to feel sad and want to cry about all the loss that they have suffered but resist doing so because the feeling associated with crying is one of unacceptable helplessness. Or, as the core trauma releases, clients may feel anger about having been exploited by their childhood caretakers but resist expressing it for fear that doing so might lead to an unacceptable murderous rage.
If the victims’ trauma occurred during their adult years, then they tend to repress the trauma memory and create an energetic holding defense to keep the trauma pain partially or fully hidden from consciousness so that they can go on living without the painful memory of the trauma being present even though it will mean living in a debilitated state.
I want to note here that when I refer to energetic holding defenses I am not referring psychological defenses but rather to energetic body defenses—that is to say, physical and emotional holding in the body’s musculature. Thus, I am not referring to pure psychological defense mechanisms such as repression, rationalization, regression, and sublimation, for example. Psychological defense mechanisms are behaviors people use to separate themselves from past unpleasant events, actions, or thoughts as well as unwanted feelings of shame and guilt. Energetic holding defenses are physical-emotional muscle tensions and contractions that trauma victims automatically adopt either as adults to deal with the sexual-physical abuse trauma that they suffer, or as children in order to deal with the trauma caused by their childhood caregivers interfering with their natural growth and stage development. I refer to these muscular based defenses as energetic holding defenses rather than as character disturbances, disorders, neuroses, or as character structures as many body centered therapists call them. Calling them energetic holding defenses puts the focus on the positive energetic function of these muscular based defenses. It places the focus on why children, in particular, automatically adopted the energetic holding defenses when their caretakers interfered with the natural stage development at the critical age of onset, how the trauma that this created limited them, and how to heal the trauma by restructuring the energetic holding defenses that were carried on into adulthood. I also think of these energetic holding defenses, not as fixed, but rather as amenable to change.
When trauma clients’ Energetic Therapy stalls due to their holding defense-triggered brain alarm coming online to protect them, they either become discouraged and ignore my suggestion and urging to begin restructuring their energetic holding defenses thus causing them to often terminate their Energetic Therapy with me, or they pick up on my suggestion to begin the hard work of restructuring their energetic holding defense/s which facilitates their further trauma healing progress. I’ve been fortunate to have many of my clients do the latter. It is from them that I have learned so much about how to use this Start-up Protocol presented here.
