We are not stuck if we move
‘We are not stuck if we move’ blog article was written by Sarah Carr, Therapeutic Specialist and Assessor at Australian Childhood Foundation.
Throughout our lives, the body is our intermediary for the world; it is how we connect to our environment and others.
It keeps us alive through relationships and attachment, but it also holds our stories, preferring to hook into our most adverse or emotionally charged experiences. These narratives come up again in the body, in thought, action or feeling, i.e., worry, tension, anxiety, sadness, and hypervigilance, especially if we cannot easily work with our nervous systems to metabolise them.
Childhood trauma and experiences of violence are also stored in the body, especially when their origins have started in pre-verbal stages of development – when sensory systems and ways of processing are body-dominant, and language is not yet developed.
Trauma, therefore, may become compounded in the body without narratives or words to help make sense of things.
Trauma is usually encapsulated as ‘events that overwhelm our ability to cope’, but I also see it as synonymous with a robbed sense of safety felt in the body and mind.
True reclaiming of the nervous system hijacked by childhood trauma happens over time – it requires acquiring a level of comfort in the body, listening to physiological cues, learning procedural skills, developing strength and mobility and repetition.
It demands responding to different physical and emotional states (most of the time) without heightened dysregulation. It does not require feeling absolute safety in the body immediately, but the taste of activation (hyper and hypo) and the ability to return from overwhelm to more regulated functioning states, as necessary. This, of course, must first occur within a relationship with another, as goes the first dance between caregiver and child.
So, to support children in getting back to more grounded, safer states, what can we do? It may help to move more and talk less!
The body craves movement, exertion, nourishment, play, touch, and rest to thrive but also to heal trauma, wounds and abuse. While talk therapy and medical interventions can be important, body-based therapy and physical activity and practice can help survivors regulate, feel safe and feel in control.
This can prevent their body and nervous system from being repetitively hijacked by distressing memories and narratives – which frequently can lead to unconscious shutting down, fight, fawn or flight responses, relational rupture or even disassociation.
This becomes the norm, rather than victim survivors being able to learn to use themselves as tools and resources (eventually) for mastering or dissipating negative emotions and restrictive states.
From a place of physical and emotional attunement, we can model to children that they can move through strong feelings, first in connection and partnership with us (the safe adult) and later more independently within themselves.
Tools that rest on attunement include deep listening, ‘being with’, using safe, reassuring touch, and practising regulating activity or movement to return to regulated states.
Attunement also includes adults demonstrating the element of openness, curiosity, and safe conversation – positive experiences that always involve connection but which may have seldom been experienced by children impacted by childhood trauma.
By families and children engaging more often in activities like yoga, Pilates, sports, sensory play, being with animals, meditating, resting, and dancing, we can positively impact the nervous system and improve or spark neural connections in the brain.
From here, we likely start to see gains in problem-solving skills, mental health, and somatic complaints and move toward improved behavioural outcomes. As touched previously on, movement-based therapies such as Theraplay, Art or Dance Therapy also help improve emotional regulation, somatic literacy, self-acceptance, empathy, and understanding of self and others in targeted and complementary ways.
There is a cognitive component to managing emotions that can often only be accessed when we feel safe in the body and are perhaps sitting outside of acute negative experiences.
And that is knowing that feelings are sensations or emotional states or reactions, and much like clouds or waves, we can see that they move – they can be big or small, near or far.
We also have the choice to either sit with these feelings until they change, or we can actively move through them, through ‘doing nothing’ or ‘doing something’ and discharging that emotion until it leaves and another arises.
This understanding also teaches us to embrace, protect, and work with parts of ourselves we feel shame, sadness, or anger at or about.
In doing so, we actively promote the notion that adaptation and growth are available to us all and that healing from trauma with the right support is possible and can be self-determined and sped up even through working with the body.
We are not stuck if we can comfortably inhabit the body, be held by those we share safe relationships with, and move regularly for fitness, calm, connection, and joy.
In time and with practice, the body can become a place we learn to visit, a place for us to find safe harbour, comfort and strength. This ‘place within’, may not be quiet or peaceful yet – especially for survivors of trauma – but it belongs to each of us, alone.
The body is our true home, it has the incredible capacity for revision, reclamation and self-healing if we only would attend to it and teach our children, how to do the same.
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