How does the body play a part in trauma therapy and healing the adult child?

How does the body play a part in trauma therapy and healing the adult child?

An ACoA is usually coming to therapy with a dysregulated nervous system due to the relational trauma experienced over time. Relational trauma is trauma that happens in the relationship: considering an ACoA grew up in a home where one or both parents were alcoholic, there is a high likelihood that the home felt unsafe. Children receive messages in the home like sponges; safety, nurturing and care is essential to their growth and development.

When children feel unsafe, fearful and neglected, their little bodies go into a stress response of fight/flight/freeze. Their brains go “off-line” and they will often dissociate (space out/act out) to protect from the incoming attack and threat.

This is how so many gaps in memory can occur– the brain goes off-line but the body absorbs the attack and the memory, and at times the nervous system can remain stuck in this state.

In adulthood, events may end up being triggering for the Adult Child and trigger the stress response when it might not be needed– responding to NOW as if it was as threatening as then. The response might be to dissociate, isolate, run away, fight or self-destruct in some way. So the body and re-regulation of the nervous system are essential to the healing of the ACoA.

The ACoA can learn to find safety in their body again and can learn to feel feelings fully again while titrating their experience (keeping it tolerable enough to approach and process it.) The ACoA’s nervous system needs a large update to come out of the past where there were trauma, abuse and lack of safety and into the present where one can find calm, choice and adult resources available.