Trauma/Tension Release Management

When we hear the word ‘trauma’, we associate it primarily with a physical occurrence, be it singular or multiple; something like a car accident, personal injury, natural disaster, or serious harm. A time that one can recognise and identify as a disturbing, overwhelming, and stressful experience. Experiences of prolonged psychological, emotional, child or spousal abuse, domestic and/or social violence are not as highly recognised as traumas, as they most often aren’t of a single event origin! Chronic stress, be it stemming from any of the causes listed above, or as is the case for most of us, be it from repeated daily stress due to work, family, social expectations, etc, must also be considered, as it will also result in tension patterns in the body. This form of ‘trauma’ is considered less frequently, as most people ‘expect’ to have ‘stress’ in their lives, and don’t realise the long-term effect that chronic stress can have on them.

When one experiences a situation that is ‘traumatic’ or registered in our mind as a stressful/overwhelming situation/threat, our ‘fight or flight’ mechanism is stimulated by our sympathetic nervous system. When this occurs, deep muscle contractions occur in our body to protect our body from harm. Unfortunately for us, we struggle to relax these deep muscle contractions once the stressful/traumatic situation is removed, thus leading to chronic muscular tension, and potentially predisposing us to physical pain, constrictions and/or injury.

The normal physiological response once a ‘traumatic situation’ is over, is shaking out the deep muscular tension. This shaking/tremoring is evoked by our central nervous system to relax our body and return it to its normal state. Unfortunately, in Modernised Society, we are taught to try and calm these tremors as soon as they start occurring; whether it be in the form of one person calming another person after an accident by means of giving them a pat or hug (whilst they are tremoring, inadvertently hindering their recovery), or by virtually trying to consciously override our body’s tremoring response, in order to match social norms. We have become so accustomed to allowing our mind to control our body, that we hinder the body’s natural trauma recovery process. By blocking these tremors from occurring, we don’t allow our body to release the deep muscular tension, which our body then stores, adding to our chronic stress cycle, thereby adding further chronic muscular tension. When the body can’t release the sudden energy that it has experienced, and stores it, it also stores with it the associated memory, resulting in a heightened response by the nervous system, when a similar situation (be it less threatening or not) is experienced once more. Additionally, because of our now altered thought distortion, when there are repeated experiences of trauma, our mind automatically directs the body to freeze and/or numb out the anticipated experience/pain. At this point, we have moved from a ‘fight or flight’ (mobilise) response to a ‘freeze’ (immobilise) one, and unless we find a way to effectively move back down a mobilised state, our body and mind will not be able to heal effectively and lastingly.

Let’s use an animal as an example for this, a dog. Most people know that dogs are afraid of fireworks (or even loud thunder), and as these things are occurring, a pet owner is likely to tell you that their dog shakes from fear (the tremoring that we’re talking about). The description of ‘shaking from fear’ is not 100% accurate, as it’s more a case of ‘the dog is experiencing a fearful situation, and its body is tremoring to help it release the sudden surge of energy that it is experiencing (fear), in order to return it to its normal state’. As the dog does this, not only does it decrease the amount of chronic tension that it will store in its body, but it also prevents it from storing a ‘strong memory association’, which is why the next time it’s faced with fireworks or thunder, it has the same response as the previous one, rather than a heightened response. Animals have a greater capacity for allowing their ‘tremoring’ process to occur, as they don’t allow ‘cognitive override’ to hinder their recovery. They don’t have the ‘need’ to match any social norms of their animal friends, where ‘tremoring’ would seem abnormal; unlike us humans. 

During his time in warn-torn countries, David Bercelli observed this ‘tremoring’ phenomenon, and created Trauma Release Exercises (TRE) from it. What he witnessed whilst in a bomb shelter with adults and children, was the children ‘shaking’ as the bombs went off, whilst the adults stood ‘strong’ like nothing was happening. Once the bombings had subsided, he watched the children return to their normal ‘pre-bombing’ happy states, playing and laughing with their friends, whilst the adults appeared to be ‘frozen’, and stuck in a constant ‘stressed, and on-alert’ state. The children had allowed themselves to succumb to their bodies’ innate healing powers of ‘tremoring’, whilst the adults had tried to ‘remain strong and not show fear’ to the children, inadvertently hindering their own recovery.

Trauma Release Exercises are designed to stimulate and encourage the release of the stored deep muscular tension from within our body, through tremoring. They are a set of exercises that one can do, including stretching exercises (ankle skiers, psoas stretch, adductor stretch, hangover), loading/building up charge exercises (calf raises, quad bends, wall sit, bridge), and the final tremoring exercise (butterfly sequence), to try and relax the nervous system, and restore the body to its normal relaxed state. They have a fatigue scale, not a pain scale, as none of the exercises are to elicit pain of any sort, and the individual doing the exercises is in full control throughout the exercises; you can stop the tremoring whenever you want/need to. These exercises are taught to be self-regulated, and safe to do on one’s own, on a regular basis, as no matter how hard we try, we are always exposed to some form of stress.