Healing From Adverse Childhood Experiences

Source: Peter A. Levine / Used with permission

This post is part of a series on adverse childhood experiences. Read the other parts here.

Peter Levine, Ph.D., is a pioneering trauma therapist and theorist. In his classic work, In an Unspoken Voice, Levine presents timeless keys to healing from trauma, drawn from his vast clinical experience, study, and his own experience recovering from trauma. His healing principles readily apply to individuals wishing to heal from adverse childhood experiences.

1. Kindness powerfully soothes and stabilizes the emotions and body, opening the door to recovery. Just as loving-kindness from a caregiver helps the developing brain wire to be calm, a fully present, kind therapist demonstrates that the survivor is not alone and can feel safely “at home” within themself. Such a helper models the kindness that, once internalized, enables the survivor to eventually calmly confront and process the distressing memories from childhood.

2. Stuck energy needs to be allowed to discharge. Shaking and trembling are common, normal reactions following a traumatic event. Mammals in the wild that shake and tremble after trauma can regain their bearings and return to normal functioning. However, following severe or chronic trauma, people often respond with an immobilized (frozen, numb, or collapsed) state. When people are unable to complete the instinctual survival movements of fight or flight (think, for example, of a child pinned down by a powerful perpetrator or restrained during a terrifying medical procedure), the energy that would normally be expended in escaping or fighting back becomes stuck in the brain and body.

Levine has found that encouraging people to slowly and calmly release that stuck energy helps them return to normal. He might kindly encourage one to breathe and notice one’s tendency to shake and tremble, or the tendency to complete a thwarted self-protective movement (such as moving one’s legs as if running away or pushing the perpetrator away). The survivor shakes, trembles, and/or completes the previously thwarted self-protective movement gradually, in the safe presence of the therapist, so as not to be overwhelmed. In shaking off the stuck stress energy, the survivor learns to come back to his body and experience emotions like fear and anger without bracing and worsening the stress. In changing the response to traumatic memory in this way, the memory becomes no longer paired with helplessness and other unpleasant emotions. Instead, calmness, safety, and kindness infuse the memory.

3. Distressing memories, emotions, and bodily sensations should be embraced and welcomed rather than feared and repressed. People naturally wish to avoid pain. They might brace when they feel their body tense up and try to avoid thinking about the painful memory. This takes an exhausting amount of energy and keeps people stuck in a shutdown state. Paradoxically, if one can learn to simply track distressing bodily sensations. emotions, images, and thoughts—watching them in a curious, friendly way—many favorable shifts occur. One learns to be more comfortable with their distressing symptoms, and this calms the arousal and pain centers of the brain. Second, one restores a sense of wholeness, a oneness with self, emotions, and body. This occurs as key regions of the brain that go “offline” during trauma come back online, permitting one to feel centered in oneself and with one’s body. Feelings of dread, repulsion, fear, and helplessness begin to subside, replaced by growing confidence and calm.

4. The gut contains unresolved stress that is communicated to the brain, maintaining a state of high alert and/or numbness. Levine teaches survivors to utter a sound (voo) throughout the entire exhalation of the breath and concentrate on the vibration that results in the abdominal area. As one tracks subtle indications of calming that occur when stress is released from that area, messages are sent from the gut to the brain—messages that contradict the stuck, agonizing emotions and bodily sensations resulting from past trauma.

5. Thoughts often follow from what we feel and sense in our bodies. As we learn to go within and into our bodies safely and pleasantly, curiously tracking sensations and emotions, thoughts often change in productive ways. The areas of the brain that integrate thoughts and feelings are activated, while the emotional/fear center calms. As attention is gently drawn to stuck bodily patterns (including posture, facial expressions, and breathing patterns), the client learns ways to safely respond to, and alter, these patterns. Such bottom-up approaches calm the body and then the survival and emotional regions of the brain. With equilibrium in the brain restored, the reasoning regions of the brain can more readily change negative thought patterns that are stuck. In the process, we gain a sense of wholeness. Levine states that “the awareness of bodily sensations is critical in changing functional and emotional states.” He asserts that change only occurs with mindfulness of the body: “Change body sensations, change the highest functions of the brain. Emotional regulation comes through embodiment." This helps to explain why traditional talk therapy often fails as an initial treatment intervention.