Can Yoga Heal Trauma?

By Lisa Parise, LCSW, TCTSY, Somatic Movement Therapist

So let’s just say that you had a traumatic experience (or experiences) in your life and your body is storing the memory of that trauma as sensations.  

Because those sensations feel intolerable to you, you disconnect from your body so you do not have to feel them.  

Then you go to a regular yoga class and expect to feel relaxed or energized and, instead you feel, overwhelmed, scared, sad, shut down. 

Then you get mad at yourself for having a hard time and go home and wonder why everyone else loves yoga but you just can’t do it.  You blame it on yourself and never try it again.   

What if you go to a yoga class and the instructor tells you to get into a “comfortable” seated position? You try that position and it feels uncomfortable. Maybe this could be either because of the architecture of your body or because you're noticing uncomfortable sensations that you haven’t wanted to feel.  

What if the instructor says “relax and breathe” and you cannot access the feeling of relaxation? You just feel anxious and uncomfortable. And you think that the instructor must be right and you must be wrong.  The instructor is the expert, right?  

Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY) has been created in the last 20 years with the input of trauma survivors and research. The invitation is for trauma survivors to be able to gently guide themselves back to their bodies and reorient to sensations that might have been shut down. This is done using yoga shapes. 

A TCTSY facilitator will never subscribe meaning to sensation for you. They will never say whether or not a shape will be comfortable, relaxing, enjoyable, because the TCTSY facilitator is not the expert of your body and does not know how shapes feel to you. They are open to listening and understanding how to use movement to support you in reconnecting to your body.

The goal is to gain clarity about your internal experience so that you can regain your sense of agency over your own body, giving you the power of CHOICE in your every day experiences.

This newfound clarity and choice is called Post Traumatic Growth. Post Traumatic Growth happens as a part of our trauma recovery - a process of orienting the nervous system to a felt sense of safety. Feel free to try TCTSY at home for free!

Lisa Parise, LCSW is a Somatic Trauma Therapist with training in Somatic Experiencing, Somatic Movement Therapy, and TCTSY. She provides trauma therapy intensives at Seeking Depth to Recovery, that specializes in the treatment of complex and non-verbal trauma, using experiential modalities in an intensive format. In as little as one 90-minute intensive therapy session, participants report marked insight into their anxiety, panic, depression, and trauma compared to their previous experience with traditional talk therapy.

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