Craniosacral Therapy for shock and trauma

Trauma may result from shocking accidents or injuries, it can also be the result of abusive treatment, unresolved grief or the shock of a diagnosis of a life-limiting illness for you or for someone close to you.

Even everyday events can become overwhelming if we are unable to deal with them at the time. The effects of stress can build up in the body until one last shock tips us over the edge into illness, depression or exhaustion. The results of a traumatic event can become imprinted into the body and manifest themselves later in life, perhaps at  time of more stress.

When a situation is too much to deal with, our central nervous system has powerful mechanisms to protect us from becoming overwhelmed: We become numb and the body shuts down, leaving us feeling detached and “spaced out”, sometimes for years.

These are some of the ways that clients have described their experience of being overwhelmed by shock or trauma:

• Feeling cut off from my body and also cut off from the world.

• No longer taking delight in the things I know are wonderful

• Not responding to others in a congruent way

• Feeling constantly tired and anxious

• Having difficulties sleeping or eating

• Feeling tense all the time and unable to relax

• Lack of confidence

• Responding with fear to simple events

• More prone to illness

• Feeling constantly on guard against the world

In more serious cases you may experience:

• insomnia

• panic attacks

• intrusive unpleasant thoughts

Sometimes it may even be impossible to do the things we expect to take for granted

It can be hard to recognise and give words to these experiences. They may have their origin in pre-verbal experience, but also, because shock is stored in the right hemisphere of the brain which is largely non verbal, we may know we feel “wrong” but be unable to say why.

Although it is uncomfortable to experience symptoms of trauma, they are the body’s best effort to protect itself from being overwhelmed. It is crucial to allow the healing to be at the pace your body can cope with and to honour the defences it has created.

In my practice I have specialised in treating shock and trauma, doing post graduate training at the Karuna Institute in Devon and studying with Annejet Rumke and the work of Peter Levine.

Maybe the poets are best able to describe the pain of being in this state.

Here is Coleridge in Dejection:

An Ode

A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,

A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,

Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,

In word, or sigh, or tear—

O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood,

To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo’d,

All this long eve, so balmy and serene,

Have I been gazing on the western sky,

And its peculiar tint of yellow green:

And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye!

And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,

That give away their motion to the stars;

Those stars, that glide behind them or between,

Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:

Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew

In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;

I see them all so excellently fair,

I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!

 Wordsworth too describes the feeling of being cut off from the beauty of the world:

Ode: Intimations of Immortality

But there’s a Tree, of many, one,

A single field which I have looked upon,

Both of them speak of something that is gone;

                      The Pansy at my feet

                      Doth the same tale repeat:

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

In your Craniosacral Therapy sessions this situation will be met with clarity and compassion, creating a space for healing and stillness where the gentle process of treatment allows overstretched systems of the body to return to neutral and recover.