Innate wisdom for releasing trauma
Have you ever noticed that after an intense emotional shock, sudden fear or even an accident, your body starts to shake involuntarily? This phenomenon is a natural mechanism for releasing stress and trauma.
🐾 A reaction shared with the animal kingdom
In nature, animals use tremors after a traumatic event to dissipate accumulated energy. A gazelle that narrowly escapes a predator, once in safety, trembles all over its body, releasing the excess stress.
🧠 The body remembers trauma
We humans have the same biological mechanism! But our minds and social conditioning have taught us to suppress our connection to the body.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score), explains how traumatic experiences leave a physical and emotional imprint on our nervous system: these bodily memories can manifest as tension, energy blockages, physical pain or disproportionate reactions to certain situations.
🌿 Tremor as a therapeutic tool
Some somatic practices, such as TRE (Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises) or dance
therapy, encourage the voluntary reactivation of these tremors to help the body release traumatic memories. These approaches rely on innate bodily intelligence, without the need for in-depth mental analysis.
As therapists, we can integrate different approaches to encourage this release in our sessions: I like to use breathing to allow the body to relax, but you can also train or draw inspiration from TRE’s guided tremors, use energy massage, visualization or sophrology to enable the person to reconnect with their body. Shaking (standing up, relaxing your body by shaking it and letting the natural vibrations spread) or intuitive movement (dancing freely, moving without constraints) are excellent tools accessible to all.
We can learn to collaborate with the body instead of constraining it, and give it back its self-healing power!