Reconnecting with your body after trauma: How therapy can help

People living with trauma, especially sexual trauma, often talk of not feeling connected to their body. They don’t feel they live in it. The body feels numb, as if you have no control over it. How does this happen and how can therapy help?

How trauma affects the brain and body

During a traumatic experience, like an assault, the brain’s survival system (the amygdala), will do whatever it thinks is necessary to keep you alive and safe. This might mean fighting back against the attacker or running away ('fight or flight').

The survival system can also choose 'freeze' as an option if it thinks fighting or running are not possible. The brain immobilises and numbs the body, to minimise the impact of the assault. Many people also dissociate at the same time – your conscious awareness is cut off from your present surroundings, to protect you psychologically from what is happening. People describe experiencing the assault as if it were happening to someone else, or later have little memory of what happened.

The lasting effects of trauma on the body

Sometimes (for instance, when someone is trapped in an abusive relationship, a child in a violent home, or a particularly frightening experience), the brain’s ability to process memory is overwhelmed by the volume of incoming sensory information. As such, the experience of the trauma cannot be processed and stored as memory. The experience gets stuck in the amygdala, which doesn’t understand time and place. If something happens which reminds the amygdala of the original situation (even years later), it can think it’s happening again and you will experience what you felt at the time, emotionally and physically. If your body froze, went numb or limp at the time of the trauma, this will happen again. Over and over again.

The nervous system of a body which is triggered will be full of trauma, stress, tension and pain, feelings of helplessness, powerlessness and weakness. It’s not that you are helpless, powerless or weak, it's just a physical memory of how you might have felt at the time of the assault, still held in your nervous system. It’s as if while you’re living now, in the present, another part of you is still living in the past and feeling those feelings. Fear and helplessness are an uncomfortable combination to feel at the same time, another reason your mind might want to keep its distance from the sensations of the body.

A traumatic memory can be held in the body as a felt sensation: tension, stiffness or pain perhaps. But it can also be experienced as absence: the feeling of not feeling your body, of numbness, of lack of control, lack of sensation, of living outside your body.

The importance of reconnecting with the body

Being cut off from your body can impact negatively on your quality of life. We’re not always aware of it but we experience the world through the body. Imagine if your sense of touch was blunted or numbed, how that would limit your enjoyment of the world. The internal processes of proprioception (understanding where the body is in space) and interoception (understanding how the body is), both essential to safe and healthy progress through the world, would be weakened.

Cutting off from the body may protect you from unpleasant sensations such as fear or helplessness but you can miss out on the benefits of pleasant feelings, too. Dancing, sex, and hugging can all lose their appeal, creating difficulties in relationships, as you don’t get to feel the positive physical feedback usually created. Touch can be also experienced as threatening or abusive, no matter how lovingly intended, because it will remind the amygdala of the earlier, traumatic experience, again causing issues with intimacy.

Therapeutic approaches to healing trauma

EMDR therapy

EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing) is a model of therapy designed to work with deep trauma - trauma held in the body - including states of disconnection with the body. EMDR uses bi-lateral stimulation (BLS) - moving your attention from left to right, using eye movements, tapping, or sounds - to stimulate the brain’s memory processing mechanism and move traumatic experience from the amygdala to the hippocampus, the brain’s library, which understands time and place.

If a memory is held there, you can remember what happened, without re-living it. BLS can also forge a connection between the part of your experience which feels stuck at the moment of the trauma (the body then - full of fear, pain and helplessness), with the part of your experience which lives in the present and feels safer and perhaps stronger (through being an adult, not a child body - the body now).

An EMDR therapist will ask you to focus on the worst moment of a memory and the negative thoughts and emotions which come up when you do. They will ask you to notice where you feel the emotions and to focus on what you feel in your body during the session, further strengthening the connection. Your therapist might also ask you to notice how your body now feels, to notice the strength of your adult body and to show you how to use that strength to help your younger self at a moment when they felt frightened and overwhelmed.

Physical movement

Working directly with physical movement is also an essential part of reuniting the mind with the body and fully recovering from trauma. There are many ways to get back in contact with your body again. Pilates and yoga are obvious examples, with their focus on mindful movement, focusing on how your body feels as it moves, to rebuild the connection between brain, muscles and joints.

Many psychotherapists will use physical techniques in the therapy room too, such as grounding or progressive muscle relaxation (slowly working around all of the muscles in the body, contracting the muscle and then releasing it. This requires your brain, nervous system and muscles to communicate and work together, using neuromuscular coordination.) This can be an emotional experience – if you’ve been apart from your body for some time, to avoid the discomfort it contains, feeling those sensations again can be intense. So, it’s a good idea to go through this with a therapist, at least initially.

Trauma-informed weightlifting

Trauma-informed weightlifting is now growing (Laura Khoudari’s book, Lifting Heavy Things, is a great place to start if you want to learn more). Focusing on how your body feels as it lifts and controls weights, and tuning into the proprioceptive feedback this creates, is a great way to reconnect with your body.

Khoudari discusses how beginning with a focus on the external stimulus of holding a dumbbell or kettlebell in your hand can help you ease your awareness back into your body and avoid the overwhelm of going inside too quickly. Lifting weights makes you stronger and lifting mindfully, with increasing bodily awareness creates within your nervous system the impression of a strengthening body, which can protect itself, a great antidote to the feelings of fear and helplessness of the then-body.

Trauma is a physical and psychological experience as it impacts body and mind and full recovery often requires working with both. Combining EMDR with physical movement can relieve trauma by processing traumatic experiences into memory, reducing the impact of being triggered and learning to live safely in your body again, enjoying the world and relationships again.