Safely Connecting with the Body in Healing Trauma

We're talking about physical touch and the importance of this. A good example of a modality that uses a lot of this is something like EFT. And EFT, if you're not familiar with it, it uses various points around your body where you just start to tap onto these points. You move around very, very slowly and you start to talk to the fear or maybe the anxiety or distress that's there. And it's a way to kind of gradually wind down the nervous system, which is aggravated to calm it down very, very slowly. But touching this is very, very important. Now, a lot of these EFT, for instance, there has been some kind of questioning about, well, why these specific points? Why do we touch these points and not different points? That's a big question, but there has been a lot of research done on it that has shown that it's very, very effective. This treatment or this approach to kind of self-soothing came about as a treatment measure for sufferers of PTSD. So these were war veterans, for instance, and they would come back and talk therapy was not all that helpful for them. So this was kind of a modality that has been very, very useful for PTSD. Now, what I would say about this, the way I kind of explain why it's helpful for people as a thing to add to maybe talk therapy or something like that is well, how do we calm down the nervous system once it's aggravated? And the way I put it to them is, well, how would you calm down a dog? Let's say you had a pet dog, right? And there's a thunder and lightning storm outside. Now, the dog is terrified. The dog runs in under the table and you're trying to get the dog out. Now, you don't look at the dog in that situation and explain, look, statistically speaking, it's very unlikely there's going to be any danger here. The dog won't respond to that. It doesn't respond to words. It doesn't respond to working with the thoughts, right? What you do with the dog, hopefully, is you use soothing tone of voice and you maybe pet the dog very slowly, and eventually you feel safe enough to come back out again. The other question I usually add to that is, well, how would you calm down an angry crocodile if you came across one? If you're unfortunate enough to come across an angry crocodile, how would you calm it down? And the correct answer to that is you wouldn't. You wouldn't even try. Because there's a difference between the reptile and the mammal. And humans are mammals. We have the same limbic system as the dog. And this is where all our emotions are. It's very much pre-verbal. So touch for mammals is essentially important, okay? This is kind of above the old, the very old, ancient reptilian brain that we have. And it's before the neocortex, where all our language capacity is. In that center, that midbrain, it's the limbic system, which we're trying to kind of soothe. And it responds very, very well to touch. So EFT, there's loads of resources on that. You can look up EFT as a way to kind of calm down any aggravated emotions within the nervous system, even trauma or PTSD or anxiety, things like that. But also, just I found in therapy, touch beyond even EFT is very important. So let's say you're able to start to feel into your body more now, and you're doing more body work, and you're finding out where the sensations are arising. Maybe old traumas are located in certain areas. Just to actually start to lay your hands on the areas in which you're feeling it strongly. And it may feel like there's something constricted, or it may feel like there's a block there, or something very, very intense in a particular specific area of your body. To start laying your hands on that is very, very soothing and very, very helpful. And you'll often see people who are very much sort of dissociated from their body, and maybe they're in their head a lot, is that they very rarely do that. So it's a very interesting thing to become aware of. But to integrate that into our practice, into our healing and our recovery is hugely, hugely helpful. Also, even if you're in a relationship with somebody, it can be very helpful to ask that person to give you more physical touch. It can be really, really helpful to calm down the nervous system. Also, other things that can be helpful for that, too, are when you're doing this, is any of the soothing tones that I mentioned before, particularly for old traumas that we're carrying. So any kind of relaxing music that you could use or something like that could be really good also. So this is, I guess, an invitation for you. If you've noticed that you're, certainly if you have an aversion to physical touch, it's something to go very, very gently with and very slowly with. But it can be really one of those things that helps you kind of unblock a lot of the things that are in the body. Again, it's not, it doesn't have to make sense to us, you know, intellectually or logically or rationally. This is free logic and rationality. So maybe if you're in therapy, talk to your therapist about that as an option. And also, even if you're doing work on yourself by yourself, try to incorporate that, you know, try to get into a place where you're really relaxed, where you feel safe and start to incorporate some touch into your practice. So it's a little tip for today, guys. I hope it's helpful and I will see you again soon. Bye for now.