How healing childhood trauma with dance therapy improves your relationship

By Orit Krug  |  July 28th, 2021

Healing childhood trauma is an uphill battle for most people, but is it possible that it’s easier than we think?

I spent a lot of time struggling to heal my trauma and have healthy relationships without sabotaging them.

After 15+ years of childhood trauma, I was (passive) aggressive and unable to trust ANY act of love in my relationships.

When I met my now-husband, Aaron, I had already been in talk therapy for 3 years in an attempt to finally break my unhealthy patterns.

Talk therapy gave me the cognitive awareness about why I was STILL sabotaging the relationship and partner of my dreams. But I didn’t know how to stop.

Eventually, Aaron couldn’t take any more of my controlling and abusive behavior. He broke up with me about a year into our relationship. 

That was my breaking point.

I didn’t realize that talking couldn’t help me heal my childhood trauma.

It was 2013. I was 3 years into my dance therapy career and I finally decided to do this work as a client. 

I enrolled in a dance/movement therapy program where I finally accessed and released my childhood trauma from my body. 

My entire life transformed and I got my relationship back with Aaron. Stronger & healthier than I had ever experienced in my life before. 

I went from pushing him away to truly letting in his love without being defensive or constantly questioning my worth. 

Our clients experience a very similar transformation, even after 20+ years of talk therapy, energy healings, and other approaches.

Trauma must be released through the body.

It’s essential to understand that your childhood trauma is stored in your body. 

You may be able to verbally recall memories from the past, but most memories and emotions associated with your trauma are stored in the non-verbal brain & body.

Let’s do a quick recap of the science behind this (click here for a full-on free training).

When you experienced your trauma, your higher-functioning brain went offline. This is the part of the brain that uses verbal language to think, remember, and make decisions. 

Hence, your trauma was NOT stored verbally in your memory.

Your trauma is not remembered in words. It is remembered through sensation.

If you can resonate with the following scenario, then you already know this to be true.

“It happened out of nowhere. I was having a great day and all of a sudden, BAM! I had a flashback. I was simply walking down the street when it happened. Nothing specific seemed to trigger it.”

You might’ve smelled a specific scent or heard a noise that immediately brought your body and nervous system to a trauma memory. As if it was happening all over again.

That’s how trauma gets stored (and triggered) in all of us. Through fragments of sensation associated with the traumatic event.

If your abuser wore a certain cologne, or your mother baked “apology cookies” after hitting you… you only need a faint whiff of these smells to bring you right back to the traumatic event.

There are no amount of words or mindset work that can access most of the trauma you’re holding in your body.

We must access trauma through the body. And the language of the body is movement.

Dance Therapy is the perfect match for healing childhood trauma. 

When you work with a dance therapist who is qualified to heal trauma, then you get to connect back to your body in a SAFE and gentle way.

However, connecting back with your body inevitably stirs up old trauma memories. So you can’t just say, “Great! I’ll just dance at home” or go to a yoga class.

There is a crucial point in time during the healing process that cannot be approached alone. Most people who try it DIY end up making their trauma symptoms worse. 

A skilled dance therapist can see your micro movements & micro body signals that immediately shows us when your trauma is getting stirred up in your body. 

This is the crucial point of time where you have the opportunity to change everything you’ve been wanting.

Instead of dissociating, disconnecting, numbing, or escaping your body, your dance therapist will help you stay regulated, present and connected to your body. 

Through repeated experiences of staying present when your nervous system used to hijack your body’s behaviors, you rewire your nervous system.

Additionally, staying present in the therapeutic relationship, when you’re triggered and tend to escape or lash out, will directly help you do the same in your external relationships.

You deserve to find peace in your body & let love in 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.