Sublime

The critical issue is whether they can incorporate a feeling of being viscerally safe with their parents or other caregivers.20

In the traumatized person, these resources are diminished. Often, any stimulus will activate the frozen (trauma) response rather than the appropriate orienting response (i.e., upon hearing a car backfire, a traumatized vet may collapse in fear).

Schleip recommends an attitudinal shift that is clearly beneficial to both manual and movement practitioners. It errs towards fostering self-regulation as the purpose of any intervention, rather than creating dependency upon the teacher.

I might ask a patient who is collapsing into silence to see what happens when he sits up straight. Some patients discover their own islands of safety—they begin to “get” that they can create body sensations to counterbalance feeling out of control. This sets the stage for trauma resolution: pendulating between states of exploration and safety, betw

Such changes are called “switching” in clinical practice, and we see them often in individuals with trauma histories. Patients activate distinctly different emotional and physiological states as they move from one topic to another. Switching manifests not only as remarkably different vocal patterns but also in different facial expressions and body