Are you aware that trauma affects the entire body including the ability to notice and understand bodily sensations? Which is why childhood trauma survivors can experience changes to their inner experience that make it difficult to understand, communicate, and self-regulate their physical and emotional needs.
My name is Kelly Mahler, and as an occupational therapist, I use body-focused activities to help my clients connect (or reconnect) with their physical and emotional needs. Trauma responses can pose unique challenges to regulation, but these body-focused or interoception-based activities can be an effective way to help someone develop a clearer relationship with their body and assist with the body trust needed for regulation of trauma responses.
How Do Trauma Responses Affect Body Understanding?
Trauma can evoke a wide range of responses. No two people will react to or experience trauma in the exact same way, sometimes leading to confusion about their experience (not to mention having their experience misunderstood by other people). It’s important to recognize the impact that trauma can have on the interoceptive experience:
A Muted Inner Experience – For some people that have a history of trauma, they report that they are completely disassociated from their body sensations.
- Their body sensations are muted.
- They’re unreliable.
- They’re missing out on really important clues letting them know exactly how they are feeling.
This in turn makes it hard to manage the way that you feel. If you’re not clearly aware and noticing how your body is feeling, you’re missing out on vital clues to help you to be able to regulate those feelings.
An Intense Inner Experience – On the other hand, we know that for some people that experience trauma they report the opposite experience.
- They report body signals that can be intense.
- Their inner experience is very overwhelming.
- They feel a lot of different things happening on the inside of their body at once. It’s all encompassing.
That makes it very hard to be able to manage the way that you feel as well, because your inner experience is so overwhelming. It still does not provide very valuable clues to exactly how your body is feeling and what your body needs in order to feel comfortable and regulated.
A Fluctuating Inner Experience – We know that lots of people can have a mix of sometimes their body signals are too small and sometimes they can be too big.
- The strength of their body signals fluctuate depending on the day, their level of stress or the signal that they are receiving (e.g., pain signals may be too big but feelings of fullness/satiety may be too small).
These inner differences are an understandable protective response for someone who might have endured periods of threat and trauma. And this is why I carefully utilize interoception activities with trauma survivor clients. My interoception activities focus on building feelings of safety and comfort while exploring bodily sensations.
How Interoception Enhances Childhood Trauma Support
Interoceptive felt safety is one of the most important things to focus on when we heal from trauma. After a traumatic experience(s), a person’s feeling of safety and comfort can be impacted. Some might take their intuitive interoceptive feelings of safety for granted. Frequently, after trauma, a person can’t quickly turn off their ‘threat response’ sensations. Heightened sensations might come from an instinctive need to identify threats, while numbed sensations come from protection against uncomfortable and intense emotions and feelings. This is why reaching and regaining feelings of safety are the first step towards interoception (re) connection and regulation.
By reconnecting with our body signals, we can learn more and more about what our body needs to feel safe and regulated. So many of these threat and trauma responses are automatic and founded in neurological responses that you can’t simply think your way through. This is why I tend to lean away from cognitive or talk-based therapy. While this type of therapy might have its uses, it’s important to connect with your body and sensations on a physical level before you can address trauma on a cognitive level.
Other Forms of Trauma
When we think of ‘trauma,’ we likely have specific ideas about what that means. However, trauma responses can develop from any number of life experiences that cause us to feel unsafe. Neurodivergent people often experience differences with interoceptive awareness, and these interruptions can arise from traumas that are not often discussed:
Sensory Trauma
The overwhelming and painful sensory aspects of many environments can lead to feeling like the world is unsafe or threatening – particularly when these differences aren’t respected or acknowledged healthily. This often leads to neurodivergents experiencing sensory trauma.
Social Trauma
There are many social traumas that a neurodivergent person might experience such as social exclusion, bullying, loneliness, feeling different, or perceived as such. Many times, a disruption in identity can result leaving a neurodivergent disconnected or dissatisfied with the way that their minds and bodies work.
Compliance Trauma
Neurodivergent people can experience trauma from institutions that push them to comply with ableist standards. While a lot of work is being done to further acceptance, trauma responses from people who are ‘different’ are still common.
Neurological Trauma
Neurodivergents can often be overwhelmed living in a world that is not set up to support their neurology and create uncertainty in everyday life. Additionally, communication differences can lead a person to feel unsafe and misunderstood, leading to this form of trauma.
Medical Trauma
Healthcare providers often rely on fairly strict definitions of how a person’s body ‘should’ feel and when that internal experience is not a match, neurodivergents might have difficulty being heard and getting the medical care that they need.
Throughout these examples, we often see children and adults mask and unconsciously hide their authentic internal experience, including discomfort they might feel isn’t ‘right.’ This is why it is important to respect different ideas about our inner sensations and emotional reactions—feeling different or ‘wrong’ can cause further harm.
Enhance Your Care for Childhood Trauma Survivors – the Interoceptive Way!
Interoception is all about learning about your own internal experiences. This is why structured but self-driven interoception exercises help with trauma – they help re-discover and healthily approach this learning process. The basic overview that an interoception framework provides is as follows:
- Explore and identify body signals.
- Find patterns and understanding of these signals.
- Use these patterns to better understand your emotions and what your body is telling you it needs.
- Connect these feelings with regulating activities and strategies.
This framework provides us with ways to think about how we can help us co-regulate and care for clients with trauma:
Promoting safety and regulation is the first step towards interoceptive exploration. After all, we can’t expect clients to consider their inner sensations when they are overwhelmed by outside distractions.
Once we have helped promote a calm and safe-feeling atmosphere, we can begin to help them explore their inner self. Taking the time to note how their body feels during a playful activity is an excellent way to promote interoceptive awareness!
It can take time, but once a client is more comfortable with their inner sensations and begins to connect those sensations with their emotions and physical needs, we can start exploring methods that will help them regulate and give more agency over feel- good sensations.
Childhood trauma survivors often have an interoceptive experience that their childhood encounters have derailed. Interoceptive activities can be validating for survivors learning to (re)trust their bodies. Interoception activities are one of the most important tools for self-regulating trauma responses while also building self-understanding, self-trust, and self-compassion. I’ve been hard at work to create interoceptive exercises that will help childhood trauma survivors feel safer and. more regulated in their emotional and physical health!