Can Yoga Help Heal Past Trauma?

Trauma-informed yoga can be extremely helpful when dealing with emotional triggering, anxiety, and processing trauma with a therapist. Talk therapy has its limits as trauma is stored as memory in the body, making memory difficult to access. 

Being in a state of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn is part of the emergency stress response which causes our logic brain to go offline.  According to Janina Fisher, Ph.D., after the threat has passed, consolidation and retrieval of memory of the event is compromised. Since the part of our brain that can witness experience called the frontal cortex is inhibited during a traumatic event, unprocessed data or memory gets encoded in the amygdala. The amygdala is the brain’s “smoke detector,” and this results in the experience of being highly sensitized to even the slightest reminders of the traumatic event.

I have noticed in my own life that when I am highly activated and anxious, my go-to triggered response is to feel small and have an almost shrinking sensation. Kind of like crawling into a protective shell. At that point my triggered self does not want to take up too much space because past experiences dictate that it is unsafe. As a counter to the sensation of smallness, standing or sitting with outstretched arms while lifting the chest or heart center slightly upward will help quiet the mind, ease the anxiety and help me begin to regulate from a highly triggered emotional state.  This often feels counter intuitive, and I may even feel resistance around moving as my body is telling me not to move.  If that is the case than I will start with grounding myself in the environment before moving. 

Regulating your nervous system through gentle movement, noticing your environment, and bringing awareness to the body and breath and can help ground you in the here and now.  Grounding ourselves in the present can help subtly shift our sense of imminent danger so that we can activate our coping skills, while decreasing panic, anxiety or other dysregulated states.

When we are able to shift into a state of noticing and awareness, something that yoga can help us to do, we are able to rewire our responses from past unpleasant traumatic events in which we felt helpless or powerless to change what was happening.

It is common to feel disconnected from the physical body due to shame-based emotions or physical and sexual abuse.  When the body becomes unsafe, numb or we have a chronic sense of helplessness, disconnection from the body can occur. 

It is important for survivors of sexual and physical abuse to bear in mind that certain bodily movements or sensations themselves can cause triggering.  For this reason, it is highly recommended that you work with a provider or teacher who understands trauma and is certified in trauma-informed or trauma-sensitive yoga.

“Neurons that fire together wire together. Mental states become neural traits. Day after day, your mind is building your brain. This is what scientists call experience-dependent neuroplasticity,” Rick Hanson

Photo cred: Chelsea Gates, Unsplashed