{"id":32525,"date":"2023-04-23T19:17:40","date_gmt":"2023-04-24T02:17:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=32525"},"modified":"2023-04-23T19:17:40","modified_gmt":"2023-04-24T02:17:40","slug":"embodied-healing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/embodied-healing\/","title":{"rendered":"Embodied Healing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trauma is an urgent public health issue and one that Dr. Bessel van der Kolk has dedicated his career to addressing. In The Body Keeps the Score, <\/em>van der Kolk describes his intent for this book \u201cto serve as both a guide and an invitation\u2014an invitation to dedicate ourselves to facing the reality of trauma, to explore how best to treat it, and to commit ourselves, as a society, to using every means we have to prevent it.\u201d[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

Trauma impacts the body, mind & spirit.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The central theme of The Body Keeps the Score<\/em> is that trauma not only impacts mental and emotional health, but it also impacts the body in numerous ways. This explains why traditional talk therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy alone doesn\u2019t always help people with post-traumatic stress disorder. \u201cThe act of telling the story doesn\u2019t necessarily alter the automatic physical and hormonal responses of bodies that remain hypervigilant, prepared to be assaulted or violated at any time.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

If trauma is stored in the body, it makes sense that trauma must also be released from the body. This is where exciting developments have taken place over the past few decades regarding new options that help people heal from traumas of all kinds, as der Kolk explains in part five of The Body Keeps the Score.<\/p>\n

Paths to Recovery<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thanks to neuroscience and non-traditional therapies for processing trauma, there are more options than ever to help those who feel trapped inside a body that no longer feels like their own. Somatic treatments such as EMDR, yoga, neurofeedback, dance, and even acting out scenes in theatre have all been shown to help the body release stored memories and reestablish homeostasis. While not yet mainstream, these approaches are showing great promise with more and more practitioners utilizing them. Unfortunately, my experience has been that these treatments are largely not yet covered by insurance and therefore there is a great discrepancy in terms of who has access to them. As more research is conducted to determine the efficacy of such treatments, I predict that advocacy will be necessary to ensure they are accessible to all.<\/p>\n

Relation to NPO Research<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is an interesting connection between releasing stress and trauma through the body to the research I have done over the past two years on resilience. In researching the most effective ways to teach resilience-promoting skills to early adolescent females, I discovered the following statistics regarding how much information we retain when learning:<\/p>\n