How do we survive traumatic incidents which take away our choices and our sense of who
we are? 

When we are threatened we don’t choose our responses,   We rely upon our survival instincts – or we use old ways of managing what is threatening. This happens automatically and afterward there is a sense of not really knowing how we did it, but relief that we have gotten past the danger.

If our safety is threatened we cannot choose to be inactive.  In crisis we receive impulses from our brain stem that trigger automatic activation in our nervous system.  We automatically breathe fast, tense up, get ready to run or to fight, our heart pumps hard, and our adrenaline stress response is activated.  Our neo-cortex receives signals to shut down to conserve energy for the fight or flight.

If the traumatic incident is an isolated event, and if we have adequate support, we will emerge from shaken up but with the sense that we have “left it behind.”   But what if we don’t have sufficient support?  What if we were a child when this happened and if we never told anyone about it?  What if the trauma kept on happening again and again?  We will have survived somehow and we gone on to new stages of life and development but there is something unfinished in the nervous system. 

Psychotherapists have traditionally used talk therapy to help clients understand what happened to them in the past.  It was hoped that in the understanding there would be healing, and there is some peace in understanding the past.  But often the reverse is true:  talking about the trauma can cause a re-experiencing of the trauma, and an increase in the traumatic activation in the nervous system.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, developed by Pat Ogden, Ph.D., is a way of working with the traumatic activation so as to reduce retraumatization.  This method addresses the activation in the nervous system and uses mindfulness techniques to slowly begin to heal the trauma.  Clients can expect to work safely with traumatic memories, to regain what was lost to them in the past, and to explore and develop new actions that were not available to them because of the limiting effects of the trauma history.


EMDR, (Eye Movement Desensitization and
Reprocessing), developed by Francine Shapiro, Ph.D.,  also uses mindfulness and “bilateral stimulation” to help a client achieve a more adaptive state of being and thinking with regard to traumatic memories.