A Mind-Body Approach to Care
Traumatic events can leave you feeling broken or disconnected.
In order to survive, we often disconnect from painful emotions and bodily sensations. Our brain plays a key role in this process. When you feel disconnected from yourself, it is often because the thinking, feeling, sensing, and action-oriented parts of your brain are not able to effectively communicate with one another.
As a result, these areas of your brain begin to function independently of each other. For example, there may be times when your thinking brain is overactivated, leading you to feel “stuck in your head,” emotionally cut off, and numb. Other times, your sensing brain might be reacting to the look on someone’s face, a loud noise, or a particular smell, which can lead you to feel emotionally flooded; however, if your thinking brain is not online, you might not understand your reaction.
For many decades, scientific research has studied the impact of trauma on the brain. One area that is particularly vulnerable to traumatic stress is the corpus callosum, which sits in between the left and right hemispheres of your brain. Memories, sensations, and emotions connected to traumatic events tend to be held within the right side of your brain. The left side of your brain is specialized for language functions and gives you a greater ability to focus on the resources that are available to you here and now. When the left and right sides of your brain do not communicate effectively, you might notice a tendency to tell a story about what happened to you with no emotions at all, or you feel as if you are reliving the past but are not able to put your experience into words.
This post introduces you to several key practices that support Brain and Body Integration for Trauma Recovery. Read on to explore how trauma is held in the brain and body and learn key practices to support you to find a felt sense of wholeness.
Trauma and the Divided Brain
When the brain is able to communicate between the left and right hemispheres, you are better able to recognize your emotions and communicate them to others. Integration between the two sides of your brain helps you pay attention to the big picture of your life while also being able to focus on what is right in front of you (McGhilcrist 2009). Put simply, when the two sides of your brain are working together, you feel integrated and whole.
The corpus callosum, the area of the brain that facilitates communications between the left and right hemispheres of your brain, is particularly vulnerable to traumatic stress. Janina Fisher describes the corpus callosum as a metaphorical fault line in the brain, which separates in response to the earthquakes of traumatic events. This is especially true when trauma happens during childhood, because this critical area is still growing through adolescence.
One of the ways we facilitate healing from trauma is through bilateral stimulation, which enhances the communications between left and right sides of the brain. For example, EMDR therapy uses eye movements or bilateral tapping to support this process. Likewise, the yogic practice of alternate nostril breathing is another tool to support the integration of left and right hemispheres of your brain.
When healing from trauma, it is beneficial to engage in psychosensory practices. This means that we integrate psychological resources—such as identifying a positive belief or visualizing a peaceful place—while adding in sensory experiences such as self-applied touch, yoga, therapeutic tapping, or bilateral movements. For example, Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) guides you to tap on specific acupressure points that correspond to those identified in Traditional Chinese Medicine while simultaneously engaging in statements that help you heal your past. EFT tapping helps improve connectivity within the brain and creates improved heart rate variability, improved vagal tone, and reduced inflammation.
You can learn more about my Tapping for Trauma Recovery series Here on The Tapping Solutions website.
Reflex Integration and Trauma Recovery
Another way to achieve Brain and Body Integration for Trauma Recovery is to optimize the connection between the upper and lower areas of your brain. Within the brain, the process of building these connections requires that the prefrontal lobes of your brain communicate with a specialized region called the insula that is located deep within the cerebral cortex. The insula is the part of the brain that receives input about your bodily sensations, and the prefrontal cortex allows you to consciously reflect on your experiences.
When these upper and lower areas of the brain are communicating well, you are able to integrate sensations, feelings, and thoughts, so that you can make meaning about your life experiences. Together, these help you feel an overall sense of self.
One of the ways that you can enhance sensory integration and build communication between your brain and body is to explore movements that engage the primitive reflexes. Reflexes are preprogrammed movements that are hardwired between the brain stem, spinal cord, and muscular systems. For example, these primitive movements allow you to turn your head toward or contract your body away from a frightening sound. They also support you in reaching with curiosity toward novel experiences when you feel safe. When we have experiences of stress and trauma, our reflex responses can become activated, repetitive, or stuck.
More specifically, several early reflexes can get activated by trauma. Two of them are the fear paralysis reflex and the Moro reflex, which work together to facilitate our startle response—our limbs expand away from center with a sharp inhale, followed by a contraction to center. When unresolved, these reflexes can exacerbate symptoms of anxiety, insomnia, fatigue, lack of trust, depression, vulnerability to emotional overwhelm, freezing, dissociation from one’s body, and vulnerability to asthma or digestive issues.
A third key reflex that can interfere with your well-being is the orienting response, which in response to trauma can lead you to feel frozen when there is a loud sound or bright light. Like a deer in the headlights, your body tenses, and you feel vigilantly aware of your external environment. Ideally, your orienting response supports the curiosity and exploration that helps you gather knowledge about the world around you. However, when you assess that your environment is threatening, a defensive orienting response will lead you to withdraw, constrict your energy, or engage the cascade of autonomic stress responses (Berger 2019).
When a defensive reflex response is activated, you can build brain and body integration for trauma recovery through exercises that enhance proprioceptive feedback. Proprioception helps your brain sense where your body begins and ends in space. This sensory system utilizes feedback from your vestibular system, which is located in your inner ear and within the joints of your body. Vestibular practices typically involve rocking, swaying, bouncing, and balancing movements which help your nervous system register your body’s relationship to gravity.
Simple practices to support Brain and Body Integration for Trauma Recovery:
- Hold your head: Place one hand on the base of your skull and the other over your forehead as you breathe into the space between your two hands.
- Hold your feet and lower legs: Lovingly hold both of your feet and gently massage your toes, arches, ankles and lower legs.
- Rhythmic rocking: Find a supportive space to gently rock your body forward and back or side to side. Sitting in a rocking chair, swing, or hammock can be a lovely way to support this practice.
- Bounce and rebound: Find rocking movements either by sitting on a physio ball or simply standing with bend knees as you rhythmically bounce. You can explore the rebound effect on a mini-trampoline as well.
Whole Brain Living
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroscientist, stroke survivor, and author with amazing perspectives on Brain and Body Integration for Trauma recovery by exploring how we can access the different parts of the brain to achieve what whole brain living. In her book, Whole Brain Living, she suggests that our brains can be thought of as having “Four Characters” or quadrants:
- Left Thinking: Logical, Analytical, Fact Based, Quantitative. Helps us “get things done.”
- Left Feeling: Memories of the past, carries our fears, losses, abandonment, rejection. Can be fearful, jealous, egocentric, critical, carries guilt and shame.
- Right Feeling: Sensory experience of the present moment, the home of empathy, curiosity, playfulness, creativity, relationships, and embodiment.
- Right Thinking: Holistic thinking, sees the big picture, holds compassion, the experience of the collective WE, a connection to something larger, boundless, acceptance, love.
Bolte-Tayor suggests creating brain and body integration through the “Brain Huddle”
- Breathe: Focus on your breath. This enables you to hit the pause button, interrupt your emotional reactivity, and bring your mind to the present moment with a focus on yourself.
- Recognize: Ask yourself, which of the Four Characters’ circuitry is running in the present moment.
- Appreciate: Extend appreciation for the character you are currently expressing, acknowledge that you have all Four Characters available to you at any moment.”
- Inquire: Invite all Four Characters into the huddle so they can collectively and consciously strategize your next move.
- Navigate: Take action and make new choices with all Four Characters bringing their best game.
Brain and Body Integration for Trauma Recovery
You do not need to wait for something to be wrong in order to engage with these practices. In fact, it is more beneficial to engage in these practices on a daily basis. Doing so helps build your resilience to stress by enhancing your capacity to recover quickly from distress into states of ease. You can practice with Dr. Arielle Schwartz in her:
References:
- Bach, D., Groesbeck, G., Stapleton, P., Sims, R., Blickheuser, K., & Church, D. (2019). Clinical EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) improves multiple physiological markers of health. Journal of evidence-based integrative medicine, 24, 2515690X18823691.
- Berger, D. 2019. “Primitive Reflexes and Righting Reactions.”
- Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation. New York: Routledge.
- Masgutova, S. 2016. “Post-Trauma Recovery in Children of Newtown, CT Using MNRI Reflex Integration.” Journal of Traumatic Stress Disorders and Treatment 5: 1000163.
- McGilchrist, I. 2009. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
- Taylor, J. B. (2021). Whole brain living: The anatomy of choice and the four characters that drive our life. Hay House, Inc.
About Dr. Arielle Schwartz
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, is a psychologist, internationally sought-out teacher, yoga instructor, and leading voice in the healing of PTSD and complex trauma. She is the author of seven books, including The Complex PTSD Workbook, EMDR Therapy and Somatic Psychology, and The Post Traumatic Growth Guidebook.
Dr. Schwartz is an accomplished teacher who guides therapists in the application of EMDR, somatic psychology, parts work therapy, and mindfulness-based interventions for the treatment of trauma and complex PTSD. She guides you through a personal journey of healing in her Sounds True audio program, Trauma Recovery.
She has a depth of understanding, passion, kindness, compassion, joy, and a succinct way of speaking about very complex topics. She is the founder of the Center for Resilience Informed Therapy in Boulder, Colorado where she maintains a private practice providing psychotherapy, supervision, and consultation. Dr. Schwartz believes that that the journey of trauma recovery is an awakening of the spiritual heart.
Support for your Healing Journey
Looking for resources to support your healing journey? If the embodied self-compassion practices resonated with you, subscribe to my vagus nerve yoga classes on my YouTube Channel and learn more about this approach to healing in my books.
