Summary and Takeaways from Trauma Sensitive Yoga in Therapy by David Emerson

Transcript

hi everyone this is laura hammock from the marble jar channel and in today's video i will share my takeaways and summary of the book trauma sensitive yoga in therapy by david emerson so you may have noticed that i'm reading a lot of books on trauma i'm a mental health therapist and training and i started out reading a whole pile of books on everything my clients were experiencing anxiety depression adhd self-esteem issues ptsd you name it the problem is that since i'm already doing a bunch of reading at school i can only read so fast so i decided to focus on trauma my reasoning is that this is an area that if i'm not careful and informed i could really do some harm to my clients so in doing all of this reading on trauma one of my main takeaways is that trauma is a full body experience flashbacks and uncontrollable thoughts can make your body feel like it's experiencing those terrifying experiences right now so i've come to believe that one of the most important ways to begin healing from trauma is by working with your body this is known as bottom-up therapy which differs from top-down or traditional talk therapy david emerson ph.d is a clinical and research psychologist who along with bessel van der kok who wrote the body keeps the score pioneered the use of yoga as a therapeutic practice this book trauma-sensitive yoga and therapy is an overview of how mental health therapists can use yoga to help their clients recover from trauma since trauma is terror that is felt powerfully in the body one of the coping strategies survivors have used is to distance themselves from the feelings in their bodies after all if they can't feel it it's not as scary or it doesn't hurt as bad this totally makes sense but even after they're safe many survivors continue to be disconnected from their bodies so this is why you hear stories of sexual assault survivors feeling like they are floating above the bed even during sex with a trusted partner or people not flinching or reacting to loud sounds or noises this disconnection can be so severe that people can no longer sense or notice what their body is feeling at all you can put a key in their hand and they won't know it's there unless they look down at it trauma sensitive yoga is solely about reconnecting clients with their bodily sensations so that they can start to feel again why is this important i'm not going to go into all the reasoning but there are essentially two reasons the first is that the sensations from our bodies help us to make good decisions for ourselves if your body's sending signals that you're standing in a puddle you might make the decision to step out of that puddle without that feedback we are really handicapped in determining when to sleep how much to eat whether we are too hot or too cold the other reason is that our bodies naturally prefer to be in rhythm with others when we're talking with someone we start to move the way that they do they lean to the left and we mirror that movement they touch their hair and we touch hours this attunement helps us to connect with others traumatized people are famously out of sync with other people our social engagement systems shut down so that we can concentrate on survival connecting with our bodies again helps us to get back into sync with others which brings its own form of healing so emerson tells us that trauma-sensitive yoga which he calls tsy is different from regular yoga in several ways first of all it is chair based tsy is meant to be practiced in a therapist office not a yoga studio for this reason most moves can be done while seated from a chair or from a standing position you don't need a lot of space any special clothing or props and generally the therapist is not a yoga teacher but a therapist who has been trained to use these movements in the treatment of trauma speaking of moves tsy uses the term forms not poses so traditional yoga uses a series of poses the creators of tsy didn't like this term because it feels performance-based like something that you would show someone else they like the term form instead since that is something that is only important to you and that doesn't require an audience tsy is invitation only so rather than command based whereas in traditional yoga the instructor may say now go into down dog and then go into a plank tsy therapist will say if you like you can try to lift one leg it should always be an invitation to move but never a command since lack of control is one of the defining traits of traumatic events tsy gives that control entirely over to the client in addition tsy involves choice so a client will always get at least two choices for example if you like you can try a full head circle or you may want to try a half circle sometimes therapists will give three choices if trauma involves lack of choice and control this yoga practice is the opposite you control whether you do the form and what that looks like in addition the client also controls the rhythm with traditional yoga everyone in the class moves at the same time not so in tsy the client and the therapist both do the forms but they do it in their own way with their own modifications and at their own speeds none of it is forced or coerced and the whole point is to promote noticing what is going on with the body therapists will say you may notice a feeling in the side of your neck when you move your head this way so these feelings are never characterized as good or bad only feelings the point is not to do it right or to increase mindfulness which is an inherently cognitive pursuit but rather to have the body and the mind both oriented to what is happening in and what sensations are coming from the body so this may seem really basic but for people who literally cannot feel anything in their bodies or who have a distant hazy sense of what their bodies are telling them it can be life-changing here are the three steps of this process first introspection so this is just a fancy word for noticing body sensations it's the whole point of trauma-sensitive yoga this noticing can lead to the second step which is choice so based on how things feel in the body the client can choose what to do next and then notice those feelings and how they might be different and finally taking effective action so this might sound like choice but it basically means noticing how something feels making a choice and then acting on it so that it produces a good outcome so here's an example that emerson gives that highlights those three steps he had a client who was seated and bending over and the client said this is really uncomfortable so the therapist gave him some options to choose from and so the giant the client chose to stand he realized that his back felt better after he was standing standing was an effective action since he chose to do something that made his body feel better again this seems really basic but if you feel like your body is something that was always acted on and never the um agent of action then trusting your body as a useful functional thing is a revelation the stories that dr emerson tells shows how gaining this sense can change people's lives and lead to healing and wellness so after reading this book i want to attend a training in trauma sensitive yoga but he provides enough forms and advice to begin practicing this immediately granted the more familiarity you have with the forms and the optional variations the more effective the treatment will be let me know what you think comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching