Releasing Trauma From The Body – What You Need To Know
Updated: Jan 20, 2025
Brianna Anderson is a well-known and highly skilled trauma resolution practitioner, energy healer, and educator. She is the CEO of Healing with Bri and is the founder of Ascend, an online healing program designed to help people resolve body trauma.
Startled, the young boy began to step back. His father approached screaming, “what the f#$! is wrong with you.” The boy backed into the wall, seeing his angry drunk father charging at him, knowing it was about to happen again…
Trauma stays alive in our body. It doesn’t matter if it is more psychological in nature or a physical attack, it always affects the mind, body & spirit.
This is because the brain ‘is’ the body and the body ‘is’ the brain. It is all connected through the nervous system.
So how does one release trauma from the body (and the mind)?
Firstly, you need to know ‘what’ constitutes as trauma and ‘how’ does it stay alive in the body?
Trauma, in its most basic definition, is anything that is too intense and overwhelming for the system. It can occur in a single moment, a catastrophic event, or even in micro moments that happen over and over again.
Let’s talk about the boy above to understand what is happening inside the body.
For a moment, I would like for you to put yourself in the boys shoes, about to be attacked and let’s take a snapshot of this moment.
There are so many things occurring simultaneously in this snapshot. The child is likely experiencing:
Shock
Fear or terror, realizing the attack is coming
Anger that it’s happening
The desire to want to escape
The desire to protect and defend oneself
The desire to fight back
In 3 seconds a human in this position is literally experiencing each of these and more, and these are not just psychological and emotional responses, they are also physical impulses.
And yet the Wisdom of the Body takes over and the child moves into a state of freeze in order to survive. If the child chose to fight back, scream at the parent, or try to escape, the likelihood that the abuse would be worse is likely - so the body takes over and freezes.
As this happens each of the above impulses becomes thwarted inside the body, thus trapped inside of someone.
Trauma symptoms are essentially the manifestation of:
Incomplete protective/defensive responses
Ruptured boundaries
Stuck impulses to want to escape and fight back
Emotions trapped inside the body
In order to release this trauma it is necessary to engage the body. You can absolutely not talk your way through this to resolve trauma symptoms.
How to engage mind and body for effective expression and metabolism
1. Develop the capacity and discipline to be with the sensations in the body
Resolving trauma requires the mind to literally be able to be focused on the sensations one is experiencing in the body.
Whatever the sensation is, anxiety, physical pain, or a stomach ache, you have to learn to do more than just ‘know’ the pain is there. You have to be able to focus on it so completely that your mind almost goes inside the sensation. And then be able to hold your attention there.
Without this, the body won’t fully be apart of the process and the trauma will stay inside the body.
2. Become curious about the sensation and witness it without making meaning of what ‘it’ is
As you develop the capacity to ‘be’ with the sensation it is necessary that you remain open and curious as to what is happening. We live in a world where our mind leads and the body follows. In order to release the trauma we need to let the body tell its story. So we need to learn to not be so quick to make meaning, but rather allow the body to communicate to us.
You can keep your mind open and curious with these types of questions:
Can I trace the perimeter of the sensation?
Is the sensation different at the core verse the periphery?
As I continue to focus on it, what begins to happen? Does the sensation intensify, diminish or stay the same?
Does this sensation have a temperature or movement to it?
Within this sensation, how many others can I feel?
By learning to do this and making a daily practice of it for 5-10 minutes you will strengthen the mind body connection in such a way that your relationship to your body will begin to change. In the process you can become more regulated, you will begin to make choices that are more congruent, and with time the symptoms will become more manageable and can lessen.
To completely resolve trauma one needs to work with a skilled professional. A person who is stuck in trauma symptoms literally needs a stable being with them to support them in completing the protective/defensive responses, metabolize the suppressed emotions, to repair the ruptured boundaries and to express the thwarted flight and fight responses in a way that is titrated and manageable for the person's nervous system.
Conclusion
The experience of trauma is never pleasant and the resulting symptoms keep people stuck in uncomfortable and painful experiences that manifest within their mind, body & spirit.
The way to resolve the trauma is through a mind-body approach, Somatic Experiencing is one of the most effective methods to do this. To learn more about resolving trauma out of the body check out this podcast in which we spend more time diving into the topic.
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Brianna Anderson, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner
Brianna Anderson is a forerunner in Mind, Body & Spirit healing. She endured 10 major reconstructive hip surgeries in childhood that severely altered every aspect of self. This led her down a path of studying multiple forms of bodywork, spiritual and energetic healing, psychology, art therapy, breathwork and multiple forms of trauma resolution. She has since devoted herself to helping others heal and transform pain and trauma. Brianna is the CEO of Healing with Bri and the founder of Ascend, an online program designed to help people resolve body trauma.
