Shock Trauma Theory

The Bodynamic model of working with Shock Trauma and PTSD includes the body in a direct and physical way. The aim of Bodynamic trauma therapy is not only to work with the origin and lasting effects of the trauma itself, but to help the client develop new cognitive, psychosocial and physical resources that allow greater possibilities for future action. The client becomes able to remain focused and in contact with others while successfully containing the high-level energies of the traumatic experience.

Since the themes of mutual Connection and individual Dignity are also basic to our work with trauma, our perspective lies at the intersection of attachment, trauma, and developmental work. Many years of experience and practice in healing individual trauma, as well as trauma in massive crisis situations including several war zones, have helped the Bodynamic System develop a multi-faceted approach to the treatment of Shock Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which includes several therapeutic aspects and goals:

• Reducing and ending PTSD symptoms — hyper-vigilance, flashbacks, insomnia, or obsessive thinking related to traumatic events.
• Spotting, understanding and ending dissociation.
• Unlocking impulses frozen in the body.
• Spotting life-changing decisions connected to trauma, and making re-decisions.
• Including the body directly and physically when working with PTSD, using body sensing, understanding reflex movement patterns, and helping clients recognize and let go of body tension patterns through resistance in movement and counter-movements.
• Helping the client re-establish a healthy reflex system — fight, flight, and orienting.
• Helping the client understand the peak experience embedded within the shock, and the power they used to survive the original shock experience — whether fighting, running away, or “playing dead.”
• Helping the client understand, sense, and integrate the ME — the instinctual system, automatic, intuitive and collective knowledge activated in high-energy states such as shock and peak experiences.

Peak Experiences and Transpersonal Reality

Bodynamic explores Peak Experiences as an initiation into knowledge of a transpersonal reality and a sense of connecting beyond the self. Peak experiences can be treated as something positive and powerful in themselves, or as part of Shock Trauma therapy.

“Working with shock as a peak experience helps clients find the qualities and resources that ensured survival during the shock situation. In peak experiences there is a state of bliss, a higher kind of joy. It can seem like a conflict to think that intense fear or horror can be present at the same time as bliss, but it is true; working with this enables us to reclaim dignity and strength from the experience.”

Bodynamic Analysis helps people find hope again, and helps them look at the subconscious decision they made during a shock situation, in order to reconsider and make a conscious decision on the same matter — an important part of resolving a particular shock. Working with a Peak Experience means working with a unique, positive, high-energy experience that is normally surprising to people. It is worth exploring these experiences because they are full of high intensity and joyful, treasured moments — by helping a client understand the factors that contributed to the peak experience, new possibilities open toward a heightened quality of life.

Instincts, Emotions, and Feelings

The Bodynamic approach to understanding and healing shock also includes an exploration of the intertwining patterns of Instincts, Emotions, and Feelings in the human experience.

Brain research has shown that Instincts are reactions that involve activity in the oldest part of the brain, the brainstem. Instincts are active in situations where the ego cannot manage the high-intensity energy coming from Shock Trauma situations, horror-terror situations, and life-threatening experiences — the brain perceives a threat of life and death whether the threat is real or not. Emotions are basic responses used to handle and regulate interaction with the outer world, seen across all mammalian societies and connected to activity in the limbic system, including the amygdala and hippocampus. Feelings contain a mixture of one or more basic emotions and activity in the cerebral cortex, expressed in thoughts and words.

By studying the relationships of these three layers, we can better understand our responses to trigger events, memories, words and situations. Each layer can be a source of inner guidance and strength, but can also overwhelm and control us. Part of the Bodynamic approach to therapy is learning to contain energy and let emotions and instincts become part of our inner guidance, developing each characteristic as a resource and expanding our options for self-expression and containment in daily life.