The importance of emotions and sensations in trauma integration

To process and integrate trauma one needs to be allowed to feel sensations and emotions in the body.

It can be very scary to revisit traumatic experiences. So self compassion and understanding for your protection mechanisms is important. We all have these defences one way or another and these mechanisms are what allowed us to survive and not fall apart. 
You body is the most intelligent tool you have. 

It is true that the integration process needs to be carefully crafted, as for many of us with trauma/s certain emotions are threatening, triggering and unsafe. 

Many of us don’t feel safe in our own bodies, because it was the place where we experienced trauma. That’s why dissociation is a common automatic response and it needs to be respected in this work. 

So you must be asking: why do I need to look at these past experiences and emotions since my body has already developed these protection mechanisms? 

Because if you don’t or can’t feel you cannot process. If you can’t process, you cannot integrate and if you can’t integrate you cannot express yourself authentically and will be constantly reliving old patterns and reacting to triggers. 

Processing and integrating somatically is the gentlest way I have found to go about this. It doesn’t retraumatize, it allows emotions and long forgotten sensations to come to the surface in a soft and titrated way. 

The nervous system slowly start to self-regulate and you start to feel more resilience and peace in your daily life. You also start to do things that before would overwhelm you. 

It’s different from psychotherapy where you have to recount your issues. It is not even necessary to remember the traumas you have had in order to benefit from it. 

Somatic Experiencing (SE) has been a life saver for me. I wish I had found it much sooner, but better later than never.
That’s why I now share the way I do, because I have gone through this work myself and wish others to benefit from it as much as I have.