What is Trauma Release Exercise?
Trauma, tension & stress Releasing Exercise. No frills, no story, just 7 simple exercises and the healing power of the body.
TRE® stands for trauma or tension & stress, releasing exercise. It’s a series of 7 simple exercises, developed by world renowned trauma therapist, Dr. David Berceli, designed to unlock the body’s natural tremor mechanism and use it to shift the body from fight or flight, back into rest and repair.
We live in stress. It’s unavoidable. Stress is what gets you out of bed in the morning. A little bit can be exciting and challenging, too much can fill you with terror and dread. Unfortunately we’ve socialized ourselves out of our built in stress relief system. That system is rooted in the most primitive parts of our brain. Once your fight or flight response is triggered there’s no talking (or thinking) yourself out of it. Your rational brain goes off line. The only way to shut it down is to flip the right switch.
Finding the switch in the dark
You have evolved an incredible alarm system to help you survive. That system, the Autonomic Nervous system is made up of 2 parts: the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) that handles fight or flight and the Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS) which allows us to rest and digest.
These 2 systems toggle on and off all the time without much input from our conscious mind. It’s the primitive brain that determines threat or safety based on your past experiences, memories and their encoded emotions.When there’s a threat to your survival it triggers fight, flight or freeze faster than you can form a rational thought. And it’s a good thing because at one time in history (think lions on the savannah) your life depended on reacting before you could think.
To switch those alarms off you needed to run away or fight for your life. Survival demands action, it requires that you discharge energy built up inside the body. That discharge lets your primitive brain know that the danger has passed.
Tremor Mechanism
In the body, when the primitive brain registers a threat, fight or flight kicks in, causing increased muscle tension, heart rate, blood pressure to prepare for action. Simultaneously shutting down all systems that aren’t necessary for immediate survival, like digestion, immune system, and reproduction. You are ready to either fight your way out of the event, run away from the situation or if the threat becomes overwhelming, the brain stem takes over and you freeze, completely shutting everything down until the danger is past and it can reset and come back on line.
People and mammals come back on line the same way. They shake it off. Polar bears do it, dogs do it and humans do it. At least, we’re supposed to. The tremor mechanism is how the body resets itself back to rest and repair. It’s how it switches fight or flight off and switches rest and digest back on.
Stuck “on” in the modern world
These days there aren’t many lions wandering around trying to make a meal out of you. But that doesn’t mean you don’t feel threatened. Your primitive brain still sees everything as either life or death, safe or potentially deadly even when your rational self doesn’t agree. So any sensation of threat sets off alarms. In other words,it can feel like life or death in the body even when your rational mind knows it’s just a memory, a smell, or a deadline.
We get stuck because in modern life it isn’t socially acceptable to physically fight our way out of a contentious meeting at work, or run screaming from the bosses office. So instead we lock those visceral sensations in the body. Effectively forcing ourselves into a “freeze” response. There are entire careers built on living in a high functioning freeze. We depend on soldiers, police, paramedics, firefighters, surgeons and others are trained to ignore their bodies' signals to fight or flee so they can do their jobs.
Trauma trapped in the organism
Childhood abuse, assault, rape, war, car accidents, natural disasters all fall under the category of trauma. But trauma can be anything that overwhelms the organism physically,mentally or emotionally. This includes basically anything and everything that has happened to you in your lifetime beginning with your birth and possibly before.
For a lot of us that includes the stuff that we don’t consider to be trauma. Witnessing an accident, chronic pain or illness, any surgery elective or otherwise, a doctor visit, a fall, a loss, a family conflict, a toxic relationship, exposure to mental illness or addiction, you name it and it could be trauma because your body interprets and remembers trauma differently than you do.
We are taught, conditioned, to ignore our body’s natural response to anything that scares us from a very early age. Big or small, that energy, that survival tension, doesn’t go away simply because you don’t let it out. It gets stored as deep tension in the body, in your muscles, tissue & fascia.
The physiological response to trauma of any kind is tension. If you don’t (or aren’t permitted to) release that tension by allowing yourself to complete the stress response (ie: fight or flight) then over time the body will freeze. You can start to lose awareness, mobility, flexibility and sensation in entire areas of the body. This loss of awareness slowly disconnects the body and the mind and eventually shrinks areas of the brain responsible for emotional awareness, body awareness and social engagement.
When traumatic memory gets stuck in the body, it can continue to send the same messages and sensations of threat, fear and pain to the primitive brain. Every small stress added over time amplifies those messages until even the smallest most random insignificant event can push us over the edge triggering emotional outbursts of rage, panic, or complete dissociation*. When that happens it’s scary and bewildering for everyone around us. The outburst can seem completely unrelated and out of proportion to the present moment.
(*This can also happen when people come out of a frozen state too quickly and find themselves in fight or flight.)
Accessing the release valve
If trauma, tension and stress are locked in the body then TRE® is the release valve. The tremor mechanism taps into the body’s natural switches between sympathetic & parasympathetic nervous systems.
TRE® uses 7 simple exercises to start the tremor in the body with as little effort as possible. Unlike a postural tremor that you may have experienced in an exercise class when you’re at the edge of total muscle failure, TRE® taps into the involuntary neurogenic tremor response that occurs through the autonomic nervous system and requires almost no physical effort.The exercises themselves help you reconnect through sensation with focused awareness in your body something that for many of us has been lost or frozen.
The process teaches safe self-regulation by giving clients freedom and permission to control the pace by bringing in stop and rest at any time in the session. Learning when to stop & rest is critical to re-establishing a sense of empowerment & agency within the body. Clients practice letting go of any attachment or judgement to the story and just observe the body. There’s no good or bad or right or wrong. In TRE® you’re free to feel what you feel and notice what you notice.
Re-establishing your body’s natural off switch does some remarkable things. Some people find themselves not getting as upset as easily. Some might notice a feeling of lightness or freedom in the body. Some feel fewer aches and pains in the body. Some might notice that it’s easier to sleep at night. Some feel their appetite coming back. Some start to feel more relaxed in social situations. Some notice a better sense of well-being.
The goal of TRE® is to safely down regulate the nervous system. We’re all different so that’s going to look different for everyone. But here’s a tool to naturally relieve tension in the body through the body. It’s a way to reconnect the mind and the body without having to relive the story.
My name is Ericka Thomas. I offer trauma release yoga memberships and private coaching for survivors of stress injury and overwhelmed people just like you.
If you want to learn more about the trauma release process or find a certified provider in your area go to traumaprevention.com
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