I've literally just come away from our ABMT autumn meeting with Sue Frazer which explored trauma and how to work with trauma.

The session started with a sharing of what we thought trauma was and I thought it was helpful for Sue to use the definitions in Babette Rothchild’s book, The Body Remembers, to distinguish between different types of trauma:

• Stress:  non specific responses in the body to any demand both positive and negative.
• Post Traumatic Stress: likely to be from an incident where the PTS persists and where the body is held in fight/ flight.
• Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: where stress responses accumulate to such a degree that the person is showing symptoms within the DSM V classification and there is a clear dysfunction.

It was helpful to be reminded of the differences between body psychotherapists and biodynamic massage therapists and what we are equipped to work with. In essence, body psychotherapists can work with all three and biodynamic massage therapists can work with the first two.

I have just come off a Tony Robbins ‘Ultimate Breakthrough Challenge’ and there was a lot of attention paid to ENERGY (every time this word was mentioned, it was in a HIGH ENERGY way). We did a lot of quick exercises to ‘prime’ the body to get the body moving and blood circulating to improve focus to ‘change state’ to feel good. We also had talks on nutrition and juicing to provide the body with essential nutrients and to flush out toxins. All of this is really good stuff and I have incorporated some of the quick-fire exercises into my daily routine. So far so good. Looking at it from my Chinese roots of ‘yin yang’, it occurred to me that this type of approach to how we maintain our energy level is a ‘yang’ way – more overt and action-oriented- POW, POW. 

Equally important is to be able to access ‘yin’ approaches to energy. If ‘yang’ is the more overt or extroverted way of managing our energy, a ‘yin’ approach is to be aware of what is covert, hidden or not obvious. For instance, residual trauma. We might think we have dealt with an event because my memories, thoughts and feelings have been sufficiently processed and ‘put to bed’ and it no longer holds any ‘charge’ for me. As Biodynamic Massage Therapists, we also know that sometimes possible that within the body, there is still some residual trauma held in the tissue, structure, fluid that we are not necessarily conscious of until we experience dysfunction. With the right listening and attuned touch,it is possible we can contact what is still held in the body and assist in enabling final releases. It is very interesting to me that these traces can be pesky, requiring patience and an alertness to when conditions are right for them to reveal themselves. Yin is also about waiting, resting, withdrawing and being in repose. Gentler exercises with awareness such as Qi Gung, some forms of yoga and meditative practices.

​Written by: Amy Barnes

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We were one of the many thousands of people who decided to move house during lockdown. In this article, I am picking up the strands from Louise Chunn’s posting on 1st September 2021 about her house move, Guy Gladstone’s Top 10 tips to help with the emotions of moving house and weaving into those strands the role hands-on therapy played in helping me find my footing when the ground shifted beneath me.
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We had lived in our previous home for 18 years. Although we knew we had outgrown our place quite a few years ago, it took the pandemic, the lockdown and the stamp duty holiday to facilitate our move. At first, we were delighted to be moving out and we looked forward to moving from commuter town to the countryside in East Sussex. We grew up abroad and our work also took us to different countries so we treated the move as largely a logistical challenge. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The reality was, beneath the logistical challenges were layers of history melded together by and the highs, the lows and the routines of life. Each round of clearing things out involved repeatedly asking ourselves the questions ‘do I still need this?’, ‘will I ever use this again?’ and the sub-text ‘does this still have meaning for me?’ Layered on top of these reflective and sometimes emotional moments, we were still navigating our way through the day to day business of living within the context of a national lockdown and majority of interactions being conducted virtually.