Trauma-Informed Bodywork: Embodying Resilience - Healing Trauma Course

Tools for Transcending Trauma

Holding Space for Healing: Safety, Agency, and Consent

As practitioners of the healing arts, our work with survivors begins long before we see them in our physical spaces. This portion of the workshop gets into the nitty gritty of survivor-centered care. We review how to create a safe(r) space for survivors, from our intake forms and processes, to how we set up our treatment spaces, to how we interact with our clients before, during, and after the session, to how to address “triggers” if and when they do arise. We discuss the importance of invitational rather than directive language in giving survivors a sense of consent in every aspect of the treatment process, and allow time to practice using this verbal approach in various stages of our interactions with clients.

We also discuss how to empower survivors to get in touch with their own nervous system response, and begin to build the tools of self-regulation. For many survivors, the body itself can feel like an unsafe space. We move through several different practices we can offer survivors (and ourselves) to encourage exploration of the body’s own capacity for resilience and transformation. Finally, we discuss the importance of our own self-care as healthcare practitioners in the trauma field, and explore concrete techniques we can use to bolster our own nervous system awareness and regulation. We discuss both the importance of firm boundaries and the power of selective vulnerability in creating an effective, sustainable therapeutic relationship.

The Personal is Political: The Collective Experience of Trauma

Individual trauma cannot be viewed independently of its sociopolitical context. We experience traumatic events within a larger trauma reality based on identity and community. As healing artists, we have a responsibility to address trauma on both the personal and the collective level. If we attempt to separate a survivor’s trauma from its political context, we are invalidating their lived experience and further isolating them from the healing capacities of their community. Therefore, our work as trauma-informed practitioners must be grounded in anti-racism, intersectionality, equitability, and social justice.

We discuss how the effects of trauma differ across groups based on access to care, believability, bias, and privilege. We examine the intersectional barriers to care, and how we can create space in our practices to center survivors in under-resourced, underprivileged, and underestimated communities. Many of the tools we have learned as healing artists are highly colonized in that they are created by people with white/cisgender/heterosexual/thin/able bodied privilege. Practices based in oppression cannot bring about liberation, so we discuss alternate approaches to our work, leaving plenty of time for questions regarding specific modalities. We also look at forms of generational, cultural, epigenetic, and ancestral trauma and how these embodied memories intersect with the lived experience of personal trauma.