Help to Heal Trauma with Acupuncture

Acupuncture can be a powerful healing modality to choose when working with your trauma.

When I speak of trauma, I am speaking more in the realms of a part of us that holds a strong emotional charge or feeling that has not been able to be integrated or processed yet, and which shows up within us when triggered by an external or internal associated event. This triggered emotion or feeling is often unbearable and overwhelming. It can send us into fight or flight, freeze or even dissociation. Different events or triggers can get associated with the original trauma to create offshoots of the original overwhelming emotion/feeling. This can result in a confused web of unbearable emotions/feelings with a single root but many branches.

Trauma can be conscious or unconscious. Unconscious trauma is usually rooted in childhood before we could properly form memories. This type of trauma is more chronic, hidden and difficult to treat/work with. It takes a lot longer to get to the root of unconscious trauma as if we're not aware of the pattern, then we don't know that we're under its spell. Trauma that we're aware of can be worked with a lot easier as we can begin to pin down particular feelings and the events that provoked them.

Acupuncture works to settle the spirit/mind/body (known as shen and jing in Chinese philosophy) and create resilience that supports the ability to stay with and not become overwhelmed by feelings and emotions. It works to create a centred and calm/safe space in the self to better deal with what life throws at us. In this way, when triggered, the originally overpowering bodily sensations and feelings begin to have their edge taken off and slowly that unprocessed/dyregulated part can be integrated to a point where the triggered feelings are manageable and can dissolve all together.

It is important to note here that its not necessarily the story/event of the trauma that is making life unmanageable, but the challenging feelings that are attached to that story that overwhelm the nervous system. If you can begin to manage and heal the feelings associated with the event, the story begins to lose its power over you.

If you need help working through your traumas please get in touch. I use acupuncture in a way that allows one to begin to gently face these darker parts of themselves. Find me at The Forest Row Osteopath Clinic or in East Grinstead at The International College of Oriental Medicine.

Harry Freedman