Trauma - The Four core reasons why Craniosacral therapy, as a body-based therapy needs to be included in the treatment of trauma

​In order to heal your trauma and emotions you have to process it through the body – what is missing in the current cognitive talk therapy model.
 
A couple of times in my career, I have been vetoed by psychologists and psychiatrists, who advised their clients to work exclusively with them as they process their events, trauma and experiences, on a cognitive level and/or medicate them – dampening their disturbed physiology. Whilst I never met or spoke with their respective therapists and they possibly may not know what craniosacral therapy is, I respect their professional advice and view their advice as a gift. A gift that it is my responsibility to contribute to the education of Craniosacral Therapy for all trauma suffers – developmental, chronic toxic stress, shock trauma - and the medical world. I would like to encourage an open ongoing dialogue in how we can mutually support a Trauma client and the complementary domino effects craniosacral therapy has to talk therapy and vice versa, in a holistic and integrative healing model. I have benefited from talk therapy myself but when it comes to trauma it needs a broader approach. The current model emphasises so much on cognitive functioning without the integration with our bodily experiences.  Trauma impacts the body so strongly and the body has often not metabolised its responses, and it can get stuck, repeating the same patterns over and over again. It is through pioneers like Stephen Porges and his Polyvagal theory, Bessel van der Kolk – in the bestselling book the body keeps the score – where he recommends craniosacral therapy, and many other trauma informed practitioners, including my own craniosacral teacher, that hopefully one day the global medical world will play full catch up. Healing trauma and regulating the nervous system by including the body through: Craniosacral therapy – Yes. Trauma Yoga, Breathe work – Yes. Art/Music/ Dance Therapy – Yes. Mindfulness & Meditation – Yes, yes and well of course, yes. 

​                The body remembers what your mind forgets. (Martha Manning)
         Why body-based therapies need to be included – The 4 core reasons:

1. Trauma is a physiological event that happens in the body. Trauma has a profound impact on the body, the nervous system and the brain. Craniosacral Therapy works with all parts – it works with the body, the brain, and the nervous system. Craniosacral addresses physical pain and the physiology, regulates the highly activated sympathetic fight and flight or freeze (dorsal vagus) response of our nervous system by coming back into the healthy-rest and digest (ventral vagus) parasympathetic nervous system. Furthermore, it downregulates brainwaves out of the highly activated Beta waves into healthy and restorative Theta brainwaves and works with and addresses the brain centres where the actual trauma is stored. 
2. In Trauma, the arousal cycle of the nervous system is interrupted. In order to heal, we need to complete the arousal cycle (see my previous blogs). In a perfect world we move from our healthy nervous system into fight and flight maybe a little bit of freeze when appropriate as we cycle through the different events and parts of our nervous system throughout the day to meet the demand and always coming to a complete full cycle, in a balanced and relaxed state. In trauma – the nervous system gets activated, aroused to mobilise us into action but it gets curbed, disrupted, perhaps because you could not run away, or fight back, the overload and toxic stress never stopped and/or you very simply too young. This leads to an incomplete arousal cycle – as the cycle is interrupted, it does not come to full circle and you get stuck in hyper arousal (anxiety, fear, insomnia etc) or in a last ditch attempt your body goes into freeze – body crash of depression, chronic fatigue etc. In Craniosacral we address this part of the physiology, we assist the client to complete the response, to recalibrate the nervous system – discharging the hyper arousal or the freeze and allowing the body to come to full cycle, to base line functioning and regulated emotions. 
3. Talk therapy tends to focus on verbal communication and is known as a top down  - mental, addressing thoughts - approach. Talking, listening and understanding happens in the neocortex, the prefrontal cortex part of our conscious brain. Trauma and its memories however are stored in another part of the brain, in the limbic mammalian brain, which is subconscious. You can have a rational and logic understanding of what has happened to you but if unprocessed traumatic memories and incomplete arousal cycles remain stored on a subconscious and nervous system level, your body can still be displaying many symptoms. I see this so often in my clinic when a first trauma perhaps was cognitively dealt with or not and then a second slightly similar flavoured experience happens and the house of cards start tumbling down as the first experience was not fully addressed, restored and completed on a bodily, nervous system memory level. Furthermore, talk therapy is left side brain dominated.  The left side of our brain is the logical and verbal side – the conscious mind. During a traumatic event – the brain switches from the left side of the brain to the right side of the brain and disrupts this part.  The right side of the brain is our emotional and nonverbal side and lies in the subconscious mind and is particularly implicated in development trauma as it is pre-verbal. Craniosacral therapy also known as a bottom up – addressing physiology - approach as it involves the body - bypasses the logical thinking and left side of the brain and is able to access the right side -the subconscious mind and addresses the brain centres where the trauma lies.
4. Explicit memories and implicit memories. Explicit memories hold our memories in the form of factual information and general knowledge – the holiday you took, what you had for dinner, the dress you wore and when WW2 was. Not all memories are conscious. Implicit memories are memories that are held in the body and hold our emotional responses and body sensations. Implicit memories are being held, kept and stored by the body as they did not get encoded during the trauma – they are body oriented. They exist as a memory in our nervous system. These two types of memories access different parts of the brain and travel along different pathways. For healing to happen – they need to be integrated. In Craniosacral therapy people are able to access, with the right resources, these implicit memories – their bodily feelings – through the body. There may be no specific connection to any memory, often a thought might come up around the trigger or a long forgotten event, but the body is able to unravel, process and let it go. This is very important when it comes to our senses – a touch, a sound of footsteps in the hallway, a smell of cigarettes or perfume, a tone of voice can be triggering for trauma victims as it reminds the very subconscious primal part of the brain of what the perpetrator smelled like, the colour of their hair, the tone of their voice – this happens on a subconscious level but will leave your nervous system in overdrive and all of a sudden you feel anxious, and people can’t figure out why…..

I thank the psychologists who send their clients to me. The woman with severe pelvic pain due to sexual abuse, who was able to unfreeze and come into the healthy healing response, the woman with chronic pain, a history of trauma and many operations and prescription medications who was able to process and integrate her trauma and come off her opioid addiction and the boy with high anxiety and digestive issues: working with his digestive system on a physical level, down regulating his nervous system out of the anxious state on a physiological level, regulating his emotions that kept his system stuck in a negative feedback loop whilst his psychologist provided coping mechanisms, emotional support, identified triggers and put protective and safety measures in place.
 
The one common denominator that I hear time and time again from all my (trauma) clients is – “I thought I had processed my experiences and memory but it is not until I engaged with my body through craniosacral therapy that I realise that is not the case”. Through Craniosacral therapy, firstly clients regulate their  fight and flight nervous system, so important to address anxiety and hyper aroused brains, secondly in the right environment - clients literally come out of their biological freeze response (imperative to heal) as they process their experience and emotions on a bodily level – they often feel so cold after the treatment, bone cold and thirdly in a very safe and contained way -  memories or insights may come up that they were not aware of, as we tap into the subconscious mind, bypassing the logical thinking mind. Cranio is not a one-off miracle session, it is very much therapy.
 
Craniosacral therapy is absolutely gaining in anecdotal evidence on an ever-increasing scale, being written about in trauma, psychology and healing literature and also gaining in scientific evidence with more advanced measurement techniques made available. I would love to be wired up or for my clients to be wired up and measure their brains, track their nervous system, their heart rate variability, their muscle tone, tissues, their nerves, cortisol and adrenaline levels before and after a Craniosacral session. 
 
This week I treated a man with a severe flare up of his colitis. The client is very body aware, has a great sense of interoception and is working with a trauma therapist on his developmental trauma. The client was able to feel every change that happened in his body whilst I was working on him – he could feel the facilitated nerve in his digestive system switch off, he could feel his diaphragm open, his muscles coming out of hyper tonus, his nervous system go into total healthy parasympathetic state, lowering the inflammation response, his brainwaves enter subconscious mode and as icing on the cake,  he was able to make some important and crucial realisation why his colitis had flared up. We were so attuned. After 3 treatments and with his own ongoing work, his colitis was back in remission. We joked at the end of our session, that I wished I had a camera on my fingertips that could go through the skin of his body and project what I feel, “see” and how the body responds to the craniosacral touch. We imagined those images projected onto the wall of a classroom or trauma conference, as Craniosacral is not necessarily a spectator sport as little seems to happen on the outside but yet So much is happening on the inside, on a brain, body and nervous system level.  
 
Open to anyone who would like to fund me and these scientific measurements in the advancement of craniosacral therapy, trauma and nervous system work.
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Below some heart felt Google reviews from my Trauma clients: Enough said.
Processing Trauma - through the BODY
I was suffering from involuntary muscle movements & cognitive short circuiting. My doctor found nothing wrong with me; sadly, not all health professionals are trauma informed.
Thankfully Dorine not only has a deep understanding of processing trauma through the body derived from her training; she also has an unconditional acceptance and care derived from her experience. This enabled me to feel safe & comfortable, even when I was highly agitated before I walked in the door. I am not usually one to post reviews. I write this for those going through a similar experience to let them know, “you have come to the right place”. Dorine’s help has been invaluable; her treatments are non-invasive yet powerful. And there is absolutely no need to feel self-conscious about your symptoms, I think she has seen it all.
My mind, body and life are back on track now, I am forever grateful.
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I came to see Dorine at the recommendation of my Integrative GP and I'm SO glad my GP told me about her.... I had been struggling with chronic fatigue and was having a lot of difficulty in getting my nervous system to calm down.. My experiences with Dorine have been game changing for my emotional, physical and mental health. With her grounding and nurturing support I was able to FINALLY process and move through traumatic experiences that I had blocked and stored in my body- that talk therapy just couldn't quite help me with to the same degree...Dorine has a way of making you feel so safe and so seen so you can really let go and let out what you have been storing in for years...sometimes decades. Whilst you can move through big stuff, you dont leave the session feeling worse (as you sometimes you do with certain therapies) I always find I feel 100 times better and far calmer...like I can breathe more deeply. More GP's should be recommending this kind of treatment for people with trauma and who have nervous systems that need support in learning to feel safe.