When we have experienced trauma, our bodies often become an unsafe place to be. Traumatic memories are stored in the body as well as the mind, in our nervous systems, muscles, and organs.
This leads many trauma survivors to detach and disconnect from their bodies, avoiding the pain and distress that are stored from past traumas. When trauma survivors do connect with their bodies, they may feel pain or constriction.
In medical research around trauma, women who have experienced trauma have described their bodies as “constricted”, “unsafe”, and “in pain”. A study found that young adults who had experienced complex trauma tended to lack trust in their own bodies.
When we feel unsafe in our bodies, it becomes difficult to be aware of and regulate painful emotions and sensations. We may use other, harmful ways to cope with our inner experience, including disordered eating behaviours, self-harm, and suicidal behaviours.
Finding safety in our bodies is an essential part of recovery from these experiences. It facilitates mindfulness and staying present, enabling emotional regulation, groundedness, and connections with others. It encourages self-care, a positive self-concept, and an integrated experience.
What Happens When We Feel Unsafe in Our Bodies?
When we don’t feel safe in our bodies, we are prevented from being in the present moment and aware of the different sensations we are experiencing physically and emotionally. We can stop noticing bodily sensations like hunger, fear, or pain. We may not notice when we are injured or when we need to eat or drink. We often ignore feelings of tiredness or fatigue.
When we detach from our inner experiences, we lose the ability to identify, understand, and regulate our emotions.
This means we can turn to other, harmful ways to cope with the discomfort or pain that’s within us. This might mean using disordered eating behaviours or self-harm to try to manage our emotions. Sometimes, the inability to cope with distress can lead to suicidal behaviours.
Distrust in the body also prevents us from building close relationships with others. We may fear intimacy or find it hard to set boundaries. Disconnected from our body’s present experience, we may be thrown between defensive survival states that are triggered by past memories, obstructed from the peace embodiment required to build connections with others.
Without close and trusted relationships, we often lack the resources to cope with our feelings and build a positive self-concept. This can contribute to and maintain mental health symptoms.
What Is Interoception?
Interoception is a concept that relates to how we perceive feelings from our body, such as pain, hunger, and emotional sensations. When we have interoceptive awareness, we can identify and understand the different feelings coming from our body. Without interoceptive awareness, we may not notice these feelings or be unable to distinguish and identify them.
When trauma survivors regain interoceptive awareness, it can be an initially distressing experience. They may have somatic flashbacks, where they re-live the physical memory and bodily sensations of a trauma. Or they may be overwhelmed by the discomfort and pain that they feel.
But exposure to these feelings, although painful, can also offer opportunities for healing.
How Is Finding Safety in the Body Embedded in Trauma Recovery?
Finding safety in the body is a core element of trauma recovery. It’s also an essential first step in recovery from mental health symptoms that have developed from traumas, including BPD, self-harm, and anorexia.
When we reconnect with and feel safe in our bodies, it helps us to remain in the present moment, regulate our emotions, care for ourselves, and form meaningful connections with others. These are all core aspects of recovery.
Groundedness and Staying in the Present Moment
Many people who have experienced trauma struggle to stay in the present moment. Triggers of traumatic memories activate our survival reactions, throwing us into a mental and physical state that’s connected to past events, rather than the present surroundings.
Learning to stay present and connected to reality can help people cope with triggers, so they can encounter social and environmental cues that remind them of the past without reliving their past experiences. One key part of staying present is feeling grounded physically. If we feel physically stable and connected to the ground, emotional stability can follow.
There are different techniques that can help us develop grounding skills. Most simply, paying attention to our bodies and bringing awareness down to the feet can establish a deep sense of connectedness to the ground. With mindfulness techniques, we can establish a sense of stability, support, and balance.
Intimacy, Trust, and Social Engagement
Finding safety in the body can enable us to form more intimate relationships with others, both physically and emotionally. For trauma survivors, being close to others can be a challenge, and we may feel threatened by intimacy, even by those we trust.
When we feel safer in our bodies and minds, we can also feel more comfortable in our relationships with others. We can develop a greater capacity for physical and emotional intimacy, which are often linked.
The Polyvagal Theory of Social Engagement
The polyvagal theory describes three subsystems within our nervous system’s response to safety or threat: immobilisation, mobilisation, and social engagement. Immobilisation and mobilisation are both more primitive networks and forms of defence, activated in response to a threat. Immobilisation involves freezing or shutting down, while mobilisation involves fighting back or fleeing.
Social engagement, on the other hand, is our nervous system’s response to safety. When we feel safe, we are able to feel calm and connect to others.
This means that trauma survivors need to feel safe in their bodies before they can meaningfully listen and express themselves, through facial expressions, body language, or words. That’s why bodily safety is so important in trauma recovery.
Building Our Capacities for Self-Care
When we begin to listen to the needs of our bodies and respond to them, we can learn to focus on ourselves in a compassionate way. This perspective can expand to other areas of life, nurturing feelings of deservingness and worthiness. We begin to believe that we deserve self-care and are capable of recovery.
Self-care can manifest in different ways. It may involve greater attention and responsiveness to bodily feelings, such as eating when hungry or resting when tired. It can also relate to interpersonal relationships: greater agency over and compassion for the mind and body can make it easier to set clear boundaries and advocate for one’s own needs.
How Can We Build Safety in Our Bodies?
There are many different approaches that can help build safety in our bodies. They may use various forms of somatic experience, including movement, mindful observation, and changing poses. Trauma-focused approaches involve guided somatic experiencing connected to the physical and emotional memories of trauma.
Treatment approaches may include:
- Trauma-informed yoga
- Dance movement therapy
- Somatic experiencing therapeutic model
- Sensorimotor psychotherapy
- Mindfulness-based therapies
- Basic body awareness therapy
Trauma-Informed Yoga
Trauma-informed yoga promotes healing through building interoceptive awareness, providing opportunities for empowering experiences while helping people cope with and tolerate distress in their bodies.
In yoga sessions, trauma survivors can make modifications to poses that make the pain and discomfort more tolerable, managing their somatic experiences rather than avoiding them. With continued practice, these distressing feelings can become less intense. They can remain in the present moment, with more agency over their minds and bodies.
Yoga resembles psychotherapy in many aspects, facilitating self-awareness and introspection. It supports trauma survivors in finding ways to tolerate distress or become desensitised to certain triggers through being present in the moment. In this process, people can build cognitive and behavioural skills and develop a more positive self-concept. This can impact different areas of life, from self-care to interpersonal relationships.
A qualitative study analysing the experiences of yoga among women with complex trauma found that women experienced:
- a sense of peaceful embodiment
- deeper connections with and a sense of agency over their bodies, thoughts, and emotions
- a greater sense of well-being, calmness, and wholeness in their minds and bodies
Integrating Somatic Trauma-Focused Therapies into Treatment Plans
The majority of people who are living with BPD, eating disorders, and self-harm have experienced at least one form of trauma. Through its impact on our nervous systems, muscles, emotions, and cognitive processes, trauma underpins and maintains mental health symptoms.
This means that effective treatment and lasting recovery require addressing trauma from the start of a treatment program, integrating trauma-specific approaches with other modalities and maintaining a trauma-focused perspective throughout.
Somatic trauma-focused therapies may be combined with trauma-focused talk therapies like DBT-PTSD and other trauma treatments such as EMDR. They may be practised in combination with other treatment modalities, such as MANTRA treatment for anorexia or dialectical behavioural therapy for BPD and self-harm. They may be offered alongside non-clinical approaches like life skills development and enriching experiences, building connectedness and self-worth through various means.