For most people, bodywork is about working on bodies, and muscles in particular.  And this is a peculiar thing, because if one asks the same people what their main reason for getting a massage is, the #1 answer is to relax or reduce stress, and their #2 answer is to relieve pain.  Relaxation, or stress reduction, is much more about the mind than it is the body, and while pain is a very complex topic, it, too, is also much more about the nervous system than it is about muscles.

Clearly bodywork has relevance far beyond the body and bleeds over into the realm of psychology whether it wants to or not.  In many bodywork sessions, clients find that emotions arise during the session that don’t normally arise outside of a bodywork session, and most clients leave a session with a feeling that isn’t fully captured by the word ‘relaxed’ but more often is better captured by a word such as ‘aliveness’ or ’embodiment’.  At PCAB, we think the feeling of aliveness or embodiment is a good thing to have more of.

Trauma-informed Care and Trauma-specific Treatment are two related, relatively new, and loosely-defined terms that are often confused. PCAB is a trauma-informed school that teaches trauma-informed bodywork, but it does not offer trauma-specific treatment, similar to how a company may abide by standards of equality and non-discrimination while its products or services are not directly related to such issues. Trauma-informed services or practices are often characterized by the 4 Rs: Realize, Recognize, Respond, and Resist Re-traumatization.

As humans, and even as mammals, wanting connection with others is central to who we are.  To be seen, understood, accepted, heard, and touched…all of these are part of a core set of wishes that we are born to pursue without hesitation—our very survival depends on it.  

But at some point, this gleeful pursuit doesn’t go as we had hoped, and we begin to hedge our bets, hesitating in these pursuits or even creating subconscious psychological strategies that block our awareness of these wishes to varying degrees.  For many people, this leads to an adult life that is characterized by a simultaneous longing for connection juxtaposed with a potent aversion to it.  The longing is the original wish of our true selves, while the aversion is the protective strategy that emerges, and these two opposing forces create a tension or dilemma that becomes a central theme in that person’s experience.

Many massage clients and therapists have noticed that strong emotions can come up during a massage therapy session. In this article, we’ll briefly explore why this happens.

One common idea is that massage is “releasing emotions” or “releasing trauma”. This idea is incorrect because it assumes that emotions or trauma are stored in the body when in fact storage is always the domain of the nervous system. It’s never accurate to say that something was stored in the body. And with emotions, it’s not even accurate to say that they are stored. Emotions indeed require a body to exist in the first place, and they certainly have further impacts on the body over time, but they are not “stored”. They are always being generated in response to something (e.g. a thought, memory, or sensation) in the moment. Having addressed this common notion, we can move on to possible explanations:

The term “trauma-informed” or “trauma-sensitive” is a recent term in our culture that has been rapidly growing in popularity.  This rapid growth reflects how our culture as a whole is becoming more aware of phenomena such as PTSD, complex PTSD, developmental trauma, and how Adverse Childhood Events (ACE) affect physical and psychological health as adults.  This is a positive step, but along with the popularity of the term also comes misconceptions, the most common misconception being that “trauma-informed” refers to “trauma treatment.”  But these two terms mean very different things.  Trauma treatment is something that only mental health professionals can provide, whereas providing trauma-informed services is something that every individual, institution, and business can (or should) do.

In this episode of the Transforming Trauma podcast, I discuss what it means (and why it's so important) for bodywork and bodywork education to be trauma-informed.