A beautiful way of healing trauma in the body

I recently had the pleasure of taking the Trauma Touch Therapy training at the Colorado School of Healing Arts. I found so many incredible overlaps with my own beliefs, values, and ideologies that it almost seems like it was designed specifically for me!

The idea that the body stores trauma and keeps it throughout our lives is one that is well established, but I think the issue runs deeper than most of us realize. There are many events throughout our lives that are obvious catalysts for this, but there are an even greater number of smaller (and often more insidious) events that add up over the years to create discomfort, dysfunction, and disease.

Physical, mental, and emotional stresses can cause an accumulation of tension and trauma in our bodies. Physical stresses include putting our bodies into awkward positions for extended periods of time for jobs, doing workouts that our muscles are ill equipped for or simply not designed to accomplish. Mental stresses include worry over careers, local and global events like wars, natural disasters, and an endless stream of stories of human cruelty and failure presented by a constant connection to media. Emotional stresses include traumatic events, loss of loved ones or pets. The body stores all these stresses as sensations. This causes a number of problems, such as a lack of energy, loss of range of motion, pain, discomfort, and sickness or dysfunction.

These sensations trapped within the body over long periods of time can cause dysfunction in the tissue in which they reside. The accumulation of long term stress and pain can also cause us to ignore the natural lines of communication we have with our bodies because of our natural ability to protect ourselves from pain. When we lose this vital communication with our own bodies we lose the ability to process and heal from trauma.

Trauma Touch Therapy provides some amazing awareness, tools, and support to allow people to learn to communicate with and trust their bodies again. This method for gently and slowly recognizing, understanding, processing, and releasing trauma is incredibly powerful. I find this to be especially true for people like me who have decades of accumulated trauma that has never been addressed. A safe, socially engaging, and slow method of gently releasing trauma is exactly what is called for in cases where the trauma is so big or deep that it feels overwhelming to address.

I was blessed enough to create, experience, and witness some incredible transformations while learning trauma Touch Therapy, and I’m incredibly excited to add this much needed work into my practice!

Chris Ost LMT