How dance therapy releases trauma memories stored in your body

By Orit Krug  |  October 4th, 2021

In order to understand how dance therapy releases trauma from the body, we need to first understand how trauma gets stored in the body.

When anybody experiences trauma, their higher-functioning brain goes offline. This is the part of the brain that processes verbal language, makes decisions, and plans what to say or do in any situation.

In the moments that you experienced trauma, you lost the ability to make any rational thought or decision, or remember anything in words.

Your primal brain took over to defend, attack, and save your life. This is true even if you weren’t in actual physical danger and the abuse you experienced was purely emotional.

Therefore, your memories and feelings associated with past traumatic events become stored in your body as fragments of sensations.

Have you ever smelled a perfume or cologne that brought you RIGHT back to the memory of an old partner? Even though you had not thought of them in a long time? This is one small example of how smell, touch, sound, and other senses become memories for significant events in our lives.

Trauma is stored in your body as physical sensations that are connected to your trauma.

After working in psychiatric hospitals and clinics for 8 years, I took my first private client in 2018. She prefers to stay anonymous, so we’ll call her Amy.

Amy had been a well-established psychotherapist for over 20 years. She also received her own personal therapy for childhood trauma for 20+ years. Amy started working with me because she was “curious,” but I like to think her body led her to me because there was unfinished business in her healing.

A month into our work together, I guided Amy to explore movements to let go of control in her body. She immediately started crying as she recalled memories of childhood sexual abuse.

“I don’t understand. I thought I healed my trauma and now it’s showing up again,” she said.

I helped her regulate through her emotions and reassured her, “You’ve done so much important work to heal, but these are the memories you haven’t yet reached… until now.”

When Amy did the “letting go” movements, it stirred up a certain sensation in her body that brought up memories of her past sexual trauma.

There was no adequate verbal explanation I could provide her. Her trauma was never stored in words. It has been stored in the body, and, like every other client I work with, there are certain movements that will stir up different sensations in their bodies.

Each of these sensations is directly tied to the memories of their past trauma. This is not a one size fits all process!

For Amy, it was the “letting go” movements. For my client Brigid, it was strong-weighted movements. For another client Claire, it was slowing down and bringing her body to the floor.

And then there’s you.

You are a unique individual with a unique set of traumas. The way that you’ve stored them inside your body will determine your own experience of accessing and releasing them through movement.

Dance Therapy releases trauma in a safe, gentle and specialized way.

First, it’s essential to say that you cannot rely on ANY modality to heal you. You have to do the work too.

Secondly, not all Dance Therapists are equal. Many don’t have specialized trauma training. If you work with a Dance Therapist, make sure they are experienced in trauma healing and that they’re a safe match for you.

With that said, Dance Therapy can absolutely feel MAGICAL in healing trauma, especially if you’ve been stuck for many years.

Through Dance Therapy, we begin by gently & safely helping you connect back into your body so that it becomes safe to start accessing what’s been trapped in there.

Then, as we begin to move together, old trauma inevitably gets stirred up because you’re literally and metaphorically moving what you’ve been repressing in your body for so long.

However, instead of you reacting, numbing, or repressing in response to your trauma getting triggered in session, we see your micro-movements & micro-body signals that show us you’re about to enter into a fear state.

But we don’t let you go into that fear state because the point is to NOT repeat the same patterns that are happening in your life & relationships.

In that exact moment that fear comes up in your body, we help you stay present & regulated in your body AND the therapeutic relationship.

That way, you can stay present in your relationships, even when you get triggered. This allows you to CHOOSE how you want to respond, instead of overreacting or shutting down.

Expanding your window of tolerance to stay calm, even while triggered, is the essence of rewiring your nervous system.

You deserve to find peace in your body & live freely without fear.

The latest trauma research shows that cognitive-based therapies cannot fully access trauma stored in the non-verbal brain and body. Even alternative approaches, such as EMDR and Brain-Mapping, are often not enough to fully heal trauma from the physical body or nervous system.

This makes trauma healing a very frustrating journey for many people. They end up feeling stuck, even after spending decades of therapy and gaining so much self-awareness.

If you relate, you might’ve considered giving up on your healing. You might wonder if a fully integrated healing is not possible for you.

Every human being is 100% neurophysiologically capable of healing deeply & wholly, because we all have neural pathways that can be rewired from fear and overprotection to love, joy, and openness.

But even with an effective neuroscience-backed Somatic approach, going to weekly sessions could still require many more months or years until you feel that “click” in your body that finally makes you feel WHOLE.

That’s why I run Somatic Trauma Healing Retreats where many people experience accelerated, integrated, and lasting healing in just a few days.

(Disclaimer: each attendee must go through an application process that ensures this accelerated healing is possible for them).

If this sounds like something you might be interested in, I’d love to invite you to check out my retreats! There are several options from women’s healing, plant-assisted, 1:1, and more.