Trauma Therapy & Movement: How Action Heals the Mind | Dr. Pat Ogden

The Nugget

Trauma treatment benefits from engaging the body; actions and movements can heal the mind by allowing individuals to reclaim their somatic narrative and regulate their emotional states.

Make it stick

🧠 The brain is an anticipation machine. It constantly predicts movements and experiences based on past interactions.
🤲 Our bodily posture reveals our traumas. A collapsed stance may indicate fear, while an open posture suggests confidence.
🚶‍♀️ Action reflects attachment dynamics. How we reach out for connection reveals our attachment style and past relational experiences.
🌍 Cultural traumas impact individual bodies. Collective experiences like pandemics affect personal trauma responses.

Trauma shapes both the psychological and physical self, leading to habits of movement and posture that reflect individual and cultural history.
The somatic narrative—how our body tells the story of past experiences—reveals personal and relational traumas.

Movement and body awareness can facilitate emotional shifts; clients learn to align with gravity and find their physiological balance.
Specific actions—like reaching out—can tap into deep-seated feelings of safety or fear based on past experiences.

Window of Tolerance: Effective therapy helps clients regulate their nervous system's arousal to integrate traumatic experiences.
The regulation process includes recognizing misrecognition in relationships, which can lead to trauma themselves; therapy aims to rebuild a sense of safety and connection.

Somatic resources should be tailored to each individual; what works for one person may not work for another.
Techniques like self-touch can be both evocative and potentially triggering, emphasizing the importance of personalized approaches in therapy.

"Our bodies might start to pull in like this... if we grow up in an environment of constraint."
"The story is very personal; the meaning that comes from the body is really just ger M to that individual."
"If my body is pulled in from fear of showing myself, that's a constant anticipation that something's going to be negative."
"Trauma first and foremost affects the body."
"There’s no one-size-fits-all with somatic resources."

This summary contains AI-generated information and may have important inaccuracies or omissions.