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, as well as 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 get 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 our 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 exclusively 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 has 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 started crying almost immediately 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, though!
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 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 created 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.
Now that we got that out of the way, 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 when getting triggered, is the essence of rewiring your nervous system.
Get on the right path to healing trauma from your body and nervous system.
Many people spend decades and thousands of dollars in traditional therapies trying to heal their trauma. Unfortunately, even the most popular therapies are scientifically shown to be limited in accessing 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 from the physical body or the nervous system.
This makes trauma healing a very frustrating journey for so many people. They often blame themselves for being “un-healable” and decide that they’re broken.
This is NOT true!
Every human being is 100% neurophysiologically capable of healing from the past, because we all have wiring and neural pathways that can be rewired from fear and overprotection, to love and openness.
My unique, scientific-backed process via Dance Therapy has helped hundreds of clients finally heal from past trauma and transform their relationship (even after decades of trying in other therapies).
You can heal too, but you need the right methodology.
Sign up for my online course (ranges from free to $20 USD) to begin a unique, body-based learning experience that will teach you:
- Science-backed education about how trauma is stored in your body and nervous system. You’ll gain an understanding why it has NOT been your fault you haven’t healed yet from past trauma.
- Gentle, guided body-based movement that is necessary for integrated healing. This is crucial if you want your mind’s intentions to match your body’s behaviors in relationships.
- An embodied approach to healing that has helped hundreds of clients break unhealthy relationship patterns and let in healthy, lasting love.
