Beyond Awareness: An Integrated Approach to Healing the Distortions of Trauma
In my previous post, I discussed how trauma and stuck stress create distortions in our thinking patterns and physical responses. These distortions become habitual ways of responding to the world that persist long after danger has passed, creating a cycle of suffering that can feel impossible to break.
Today, I want to share what makes my approach different and why I believe it offers more lasting results than awareness-only methods.
This is the juicy stuff – at the heart of what I do!
The Limitations of Awareness Alone
Many somatic approaches to trauma healing rest on the idea that sensing, and sensing more – paying more attention to your bodily sensations – will be enough to create change.
But the message that’s important to me, and to real healing, is that while somatic awareness is certainly a crucial first step, for many people with deeply embodied trauma patterns, it just isn’t sufficient for lasting transformation.
For example, if you identify that the automatic thought “They are laughing at me, at how awful I look” is not about your current reality but about a learned pattern from the past, and if you allow yourself to sense this as an embodied state, this awareness is helpful – absolutely. But it’s most often not enough by itself, not to create real change away from that automatic pattern of thought showing up again, and again, and again...
An Integrated Approach to Lasting Change
So, what’s different about the approach I use? In a nutshell: I integrate specific neuromuscular release strategies into the healing process.
This means that when someone sees or senses a distortion, a stuck pattern in themselves, I give them specific tools to unravel it at a neuromuscular as well as nervous system level.
This is why I incorporate Clinical Somatic Education, which deals directly with stress response patterns as held in your neuromuscular system. Because, again, if a pattern has become truly embodied in your muscles and nervous system, then simply “sensing” it is not enough to keep it away. It’s a learned pattern, and it will come back if you don’t educate your neuromuscular system not to revert to it.
Identifying, working with, and easing away from stuck patterns of muscle tension has an absolutely crucial role to play in genuinely resolving stuck stress, stored trauma, and the distortions of thinking, feeling, and moving that are part of all of that.
Breaking the Vicious Cycle
Remember that vicious cycle I mentioned in my previous post? Where habituated thoughts and muscle tension patterns feed on each other?
My integrated approach works by intervening in this cycle at multiple points:
Awareness: Yes, we begin with recognizing distorted thinking and feeling patterns, and the physical sensations that accompany them. (This is super important; it’s one of the essential ‘3 Somatic Keys’ I ground all my work in.)
Clinical Somatic Education: Rather than just noticing tension, we use specific movements and techniques to help your neuromuscular system actively ‘overwrite’ and replace habitual patterns of tension.
Integration: We connect these physical changes back to the thinking and emotional patterns, creating new neural pathways that support healthier responses and break the self-enforcing cycles if only one aspect of these patterns is changed.
Practice: We develop personalized practices that reinforce these new patterns in daily life, making change sustainable.
This means changes are more likely to take place and to last.
It addresses the whole story of embodied stuckness, not just parts of it.
Moving From Binary to Nuanced Experience
One of the hallmarks of trauma is binary thinking and experiencing – things are either completely safe or utterly dangerous, with no middle ground. Part of healing involves rediscovering nuance.
In movement work, this might look like shifting from “I can’t move” to “I can’t move that part of me easily, although part of it feels okay right now...” to “If I just allow that tension to be there, and I move into it… then, yes, now I can move better!”
This same principle applies to emotional and cognitive patterns as well.
With an integrated approach that addresses both thought patterns and physical holding patterns, you can begin to expand your capacity to deal with stress and trauma more efficiently, and more effectively (in SE terms, your ‘window of tolerance’). To really expand the range within which you can experience mild discomfort without immediately going into patterns of hypervigilance, flight, fight, or collapse.
Taking in the Whole Picture
Another crucial aspect of healing is learning to take in the whole picture – actually experiencing and sensing the reality around you. This means noticing and accepting signals of safety and connection, not focusing exclusively on signals of threat and danger.
When your nervous system is stuck in hypervigilance, it’s scanning only for danger. It’s not interested in taking in anything else. (This harks back to what I said about your brain being interested in survival way more than it’s interested in efficiency, comfort, and connection.)
Through fully integrated somatic work, you can retrain your system to register the full spectrum of information available in your environment, including the good and the neutral.
This is where the neuromuscular work becomes so important. As you release chronic tension patterns in the body, your nervous system naturally shifts out of survival mode, making it physiologically possible to perceive safety when it’s present.
The Role of Self-Compassion
Moving away from self-blame and facing up to what really happened – and that it wasn’t your fault – is another essential component of healing. Self-compassion isn’t just a nice idea; it’s a physiological state that you need to experience to heal, and it helps enormously with neuromuscular work (and vice versa).
When working with the neuromuscular system, we often encounter layers of self-judgment and shame that have become physically encoded. The integrated approach allows us to address these not just as thoughts to challenge, but as physical patterns to release.
What This Can Look Like in Practice
Let’s consider an example: A client comes in with chronic neck and shoulder tension and frequent anxiety about social situations. In working together:
1. We identify the distorted thinking patterns: “People will judge me,” “I need to be perfect or I’ll be rejected.”
2. We also notice – and might connect these – to physical patterns: shoulders lifted, quickness of breath, jaw tension.
3. Through specific (first generalised, then increasingly individualised) Clinical Somatic Education movements, we specifically address these muscular patterns, helping the client sense and release them.
4. As physical tension decreases, we notice how thought patterns shift, becoming less rigid and absolute.
5. We develop simple daily movement practices that reinforce these new patterns in both body and mind.
Over time, this integrated approach helps create lasting change – never by forcing or fighting against patterns, but by gently educating the nervous system about other possibilities.
Embracing Protective Responses When Needed
It’s important to note that the goal isn’t to eliminate protective responses entirely – these are valuable survival mechanisms! Rather, the aim is to have choice and flexibility, to be able to respond appropriately to what’s actually happening now, rather than being stuck in patterns from the past.
Sometimes, protective responses are exactly what you need. The problem comes only when they’re your only option, when they’re automatic and habitual regardless of the situation.
Through an integrated approach that addresses both neuromuscular patterns and autonomic nervous system regulation, you can develop the capacity to move fluidly between states as needed – to protect yourself when necessary and to relax and connect when it’s safe to do so. This is what you need for a healthy, responsive neuromuscular and nervous system, so that you can spend most of your time in a state of homeostasis, able to enjoy the best things in life, only going into ‘survival mode’ responses (and high levels of muscle tension) when absolutely necessary.
Conclusion: The Truly Somatic Possibility of Lasting Healing
True healing happens when we address the whole story of embodied stuckness – the thoughts, the feelings, and the physical patterns of tension that maintain them.
By integrating specific neuromuscular release strategies with awareness practices, we create the conditions for lasting change.
If you’ve tried awareness-based approaches in the past with limited success, please know that there’s nothing wrong with you. Your patterns may simply be more deeply embodied, requiring an approach that specifically addresses that neuromuscular component.
The good news is that your nervous system has an innate capacity for healing and reorganization. With the right support and tools, you can ease away from distorted patterns of thinking, feeling, and moving, and discover new possibilities for presence, connection, and joy in your life.