How Trauma-Informed Touch can Rewire our Nervous System towards Safety
An exploration of Nervous System Literacy, Somatic Bodywork, Co-Regulation, and the Return to felt Safety in our Body
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Many of the folks that arrive to my practice for Somatic Bodywork echoing the same sentiments
“I know I’m safe… I’ve been processing this in therapy for (—) amount of time, BUT my body STILL doesn’t feel safe.”
They are generally very thoughtful, capable, self-aware, individuals and even well supported by cognitive-based talk therapy or personal development work.
They often understand their patterns and have parsed through their personal history. They are able to articulate their experiences clearly, having unpacked their story to the point where they are no longer trigger by simply speaking it aloud. And yet, beneath all of this understanding and awareness, there’s a steady undercurrent of tension, bracing, and a very palpable, felt sense of something not yet released.
Sometimes it’s noticing that their breath never quite drops into the belly. The shoulders, neck and jaw don’t ever fully soften. Sleep feels light and easily disturbed. The hips and pelvic floor holding tension to the point of numbness or pain. There’s an almost imperceptible bracing, as though their body is waiting for something to happen (vigiliance and hypervigilance).
Most folks come in feeling as though this is some sort of failure of insight hindering their ability to see what is still holding them back. This isn’t due to any lack of effort on their part, it’s just not something that can be solved through reasoning and talking it out alone.
As the tumult of their unspoken stories quiets, what comes into awareness is the tone their nervous system has been holding.
Trauma, impact, injury, chronic illness, chronic stress, the series of intense “unprecidented events” that we’ve collectively experienced over these last years, coupled with overwhelming life experiences don’t just live in memory. They shape the physiological baseline of our body and our tissues by way of our nervous system. Over time, the nervous system adapts in order to protect us, and these protective adaptations quietly become our body’s new normal the more they are instilled through impact (whether that is physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, existential, financial etc).
Stephen Porges’ the founder of Polyvagal Theory offers us a useful framework for understanding this. The nervous system is constantly perceiving and scanning our environment for cues of safety or danger through a process called neuroception. When danger is perceived, even subtly, our body shifts into states of mobilisation (flight or fight) or shutdown (freeze and collapse). Our muscles tighten, our fascia constricts and braces becoming more and more akin to armour through repetition, and our breath becomes shallow. Our digestion changes, our pelvic floor contracts as blood is circulated towards our vital organs and our body prepares itself, often without any conscious awareness, to defend against threat.
Our intelligent little meat suits know exactly what to do to keep us alive. However the challenge is when we live in states of overwhelm, stress, trauma, abuse, illness, pain or injury in for long periods, our body can default to these protective states. Forgetting what deep rest feels like.
So a person might cognitively and intellectually understand every miniscule detail of the HOW and WHY behind what they are feeling, but then the work becomes showing the physiology how to find physiological safety, repair the nervous system and shift out of these defensive states wheen they are still organised around protection.
This is where trauma-informed somatic bodywork becomes profoundly therapeutic, because safety isn’t a thought or an affirmation that we can trick out body into feeling, it is a very real, FELT sensation.
Our nervous system doesn’t respond to explanations. It responds to cues; porosity or tones of voice, pace of movement, orientation to our environment through the felt senses, quality of presence, and especially, quality of touch and connection. All of these work together to communicate directly with the parts of our brain responsible for repair, regulation, and connection. Deb Dana’s work reminds us that our nervous system is always asking one primary question beneath the surface of our lives “Am I safe enough to soften?”
Somatic Experiencing practitioner, Bodyworker and Psychotherapist, Beth Dennison’s teachings on co-regulation are firmly rooted in this understanding. That we as humans, we don’t learn safety in isolation. From infancy, our nervous systems co-evolve and co-develope through attuned contact with others. Through being soothed, held, and touched, we learn what safety FEELS like in our bodies long before we cognitively understand language. That learning never truly disappears, it just becomes layered overtime by adaptation and protection.
This is why touch, when offered in a skilled, attuned, trauma-informed, and consensual way, can be SO VERY POWERFUL. It speaks the original language of our body and our nervous system.
Our skin as plays a central role in this process. It’s not merely a covering for our meat suits, it’s one of the most important sensory organs of our nervous system. It’s an extension of our social nervous system, a primary sensory organ and a literal boundary between self and other, self and world. Within our skin are specialised nerve fibres (our afferent or c-tactile CT nerves) that respond specifically to slow, attuned touch and communicate directly with areas of the brain involved in emotional regulation and feelings of safety. Our body interprets this kind of touch as relational and, it can’t be faked.
Through our skin, our nervous system can begin to convey a different message to our brain.
You are not in danger.
You can rest here.
Beneath our skin lies the fascial network, an incredible filamentous connective tissue web that wraps every muscle, organ, and structure of the body. Our fascia responds to stress by constricting and thickening and over time, this creates what many somatic practitioners and bodyworkers describe as armouring. This armouring can be felt as a hard belly, restricted ribs, braced diaphragm, tight pelvic floor, perpetually tense jaw and shoulders that never seem to let go. This is our literal physiology and tissues responding to the state our nervous system has been surviving in. To the point that our tissues eventually begin to mirror the expression of being in these long-term protective states.
Again, fascia can’t be reasoned with because it is not made of thoughts. The tone of our tissues is responding to the tone of our nervous system patterning.
OUR STATE QUITE LITERALLY BECOMES OUR STORY, EMBEDDED IN OUR VERY FLESH.
So while I do believe that talk therapy is INVALUABLE for processing experiences, understanding patterns, developing acceptance, self compassion, and making meaning of our lives, stories and traumas. I have also found that it’s only part of the reparative process and many people find that even after years of therapeutic work, their body still feels tense, stress, in pain or numb. The body remembers what the mind has already understood. I’ve found that Psychotherapy inconjuction with Somatic Therapy and Bodywork bridges this gap and brings us into a place of Holistic Inclusion. Holistic inclusion is the practice of creating spaces, systems, and relationships where we are welcomed and supported into the FULLNESS of who we are. Body, Mind, Heart, Spirit, Identity, Culture, History, and Lived experiences.
This gives our nervous system a new experience of learning from the experience of being in the body and feeling safe, at the same time.
In a trauma-informed somatic bodywork session, this safety is created not through protocols, pressure, practices, or techniques alone, but through relationship. Consent is ongoing and explicit. The pace is very slow and responsive. The practitioner is attuned to your breath, subtle movements, tone of voice, micromovement, rate of your heart and the palpable changes in tissue tone. It’s a space for the body to take precedence and this type of attunement creates co-regulation, where the nervous system can borrow regulation from another human presence. This isn’t dependence, as I mentioned we are humans co-evolve in relation to each other and our primary care givers. This is a form of embodied learning through relationship. It’s biology, we evolved to regulate with one another before we ever learned to regulate on our own.
During Somatic Bodywork sessions, folks often notice very subtle but meaningful changes.
Their breath deepens without effort, that sensation of not being able to easily take a full, deep breath eases.
Sometimes heat spreads through the body as that fascial amouring soften and muscles begin to twitch with aliveness.
Surprising waves of emotion may rise and pass, sometimes visual memories surface.
The body feels heavier on the table, as though it no longer needs to hold itself up.
Very often folks who struggle with sleep and insomnia will fall asleep.
These are all signs that the nervous system is beginning to readjust towards a ventral vagal state or the state associated with safety and connection, our “social nervous system”. The body is updating its understanding of the present moment and finding a new baseline that is more congruent with the state they are moving towards, in lieu of defaulting to protection.
This work is particularly relevant in our current times. We live in a digital, post-pandemic world where many folks are chronically overwhelmed, overstimulated yet profoundly under-touched. We spend hours staring into our screens, with reduced physical contact, lack of quality connect and intimacy and ongoing low-level stress. This has left many nervous systems completely saturated with information starved of sensation. There is a quiet touch deprivation that many people carry without even realising it, I call this Touch Starved or Relationally Malnourished.
Healthy, consensual, platonic, therapeutic touch isn’t a luxury, but it certainly can feel like it in our modern world. But it’s a biological need, without it, our nervous system doesn’t receive enough cues of safety from the world. Somatic Bodywork can restore this missing input, by reintroducing our body to slow, safe, attuned contact in a way that allows our nervous system to gently repair and recalibrate.
Over a series of sessions, I’ve witnessed both gradual and profound things begin to happen. Sure, the shoulders drop more easily. The muscles in the head, neck and back a bit softer. In many cases sleep comes more easily and naturally deepens, generalised anxiety lessens. The pelvic floor and hips begin to softens and open. Sensation and libido often return. Chronic pain reduces. And there is often a growing sense of presence in the body, less bracing through daily to day living. This isn’t work for folks fixated on instantaneous and climatic, dramatic transformations, instead it’s a steady, sustainable re-education of our nervous system.
Our body begins to learn that it doesn’t have to live in protection all of the time, and learns what safety feels like from the inside.
For many Trauma-informed Somatic Bodywork and Somatic Therapy is the missing piece. They are not looking for more insight or revelations, but instead looking to feel more at home in their bodies.
There’s also something deeply human and relational at the heart of this work. Humans co-evolved in close physical proximity to one another. We slept near each other, we held one another, we groomed, soothed, and touched as part of daily life. Our nervous system evolved expecting this level of contact and it’s only been the last few hundred years that we has humans have distanced ourselves from this way of living. In the relation to how long humans have existed on this planet, this shift is pretty recent, and yet the need for closeness remains an essential, deeply human need. Especially after two plus years of the social distancing during the pandemic, many folks are still living without enough safe physical contact for their nervous systems to feel fully satiated or regulated.
This absence is rarely, if ever, spoken about, yet it has a profound effects on all of us. When safe, therapeutic touch is reintroduced in a professional and consent-based setting, our body often responds with a sense o relief that is difficult to describe. There can be a sense of being met at a level deeper than words.
Before we had language, we had contact. Before we could think, we could feel.
And our body still very much learns this way. Through safe, attuned, trauma-informed touch, our nervous system can rediscover what it’s has forgotten… That it’s possible to be here, in this body, and be safe.
If you are living with chronic tension, chronic pain, anxiety, pelvic holding, or a sense that your body has never quite learned how to relax, Somatic Bodywork may offer a gentle and profound pathway back towards a felt sense of safety.
In my private practice her in South Dublin, sessions are slow, consent-based, and deeply attuned to your nervous system. This isn’t "just a massage”, and it’s not quite therapy. It’s a space where your body can have a new experience of safety and begin, at its own pace, to let go of old stories and discover new pathways towards aliveness, joy, freedom, confidence, ease, safety, and even pleasure.
You don’t have to force yourself to relax, in fact, and this should go without saying. Forcing is always going to antithetical to genuine relaxation. ALWAYS. However, through listening to the body, you can be supported to remember how to relax and come home to yourself. If this tickles your curiousity or speaks to you, you are most welcome to book a Somatic Bodywork session and begin this process. To learn more about booking follow the link HERE
