Somatic Therapies for Trauma Recovery

Our culture widely perceives intelligence as a purely mental quality and for many years talk therapy was the dominant modality for working with trauma.  
The last hundred years have brought a revolution in our understanding of other kinds of intelligence, including somatic intelligence.  
The body is intelligent,  every cell, every organ. The heart and gut, for example are lined with brain cells that send more information to the brain in the head than vica versa.  
Somatic intelligence includes felt intelligence, intuitive intelligence, gut feelings, survival instincts,  heart knowing, and  feelings and experiences of well-being that are accessed from somatic support and exploration rather than from mental processes.  
Our somatic intelligence includes an autonomic nervous system that beats our hearts and breathes us 24/7 without any thought or effort on our part. 
Research at Heartmath Institute has shown that the heart brain can sense and predict an event up to six seconds before it actually happens, and that the heart brain can use that precognition to prepare the head brain for what is to come.    

Moshe Feldenkrais was one of the early pioneers and explorers of somatic intelligence and healing.  He wrote a critique of Freud in which he detailed his perspective and experience that recovery from anxiety and other "mental" challenges  could be facilitated more quickly and surely through his somatic work than through pyschoanalysis.

Kevin has been trained and certified in two kinds of somatic healing work:  The Feldenkrais Method, and Transforming Touch, as developed by Stephen Terrell and Kathy Kain.

Transforming Touch (TT) is a Regulation Based Modality.  The modality is based on the theory that when we experience ruptures during our development years, they continue to disrupt our lives at any age.  This disruption can be seen as behavioral challenges, psychological challenges, spiritual challenges, and physical challenges. Transforming Touch® Practitioners create a safe place for you to experience healing through a lens of safety, presence, and regulation. We understand that your body already knows how to heal itself if it is allowed more safety and less survival energy.

Transforming Touch® Practitioners see you as whole and complete from the moment you enter our Healing Space/Offices.  We do not rely on pathology to label our clients.  We lean into the ideal that your body is capable of creating new neural pathways in your brain that allow for less stress/anxiety and more ability to learn, relate, and heal.

Transforming Touch®

Kevin offers Transforming Touch ®, a nervous system support and healing modality developed by Dr. Stephen Terrell and Dr. Kathy Kain. 
 
Transforming Touch® can be particularly helpful for working with the effects of early trauma ... pre-birth trauma, birth trauma, and trauma that happened in childhood when the nervous system and brain were developing (also called "developmental trauma").  

Untreated early trauma, and associated nervous system and behavior adaptations, can lead to not only to chronic health problems but to problematic behavior compensations, addiction, compulsions.   Historically viewed by the culture asa character weakness or defect, these compensations are natural normal and they are treatable.  Much of this work has been pioneered by Dr. Terrell and Dr. Kathy Kain.

Transforming Touch®  uses touch to work directly with areas of the body affected by nervous system dysregulation  (kidney/adrenals, brain stem, limbic system).   Transforming Touch can be particularly helpful for anxiety, panic attacks, incontinence, gut disturbance, sleep disturbance, and many other kinds of nervous system dysregulation arising from early trauma. 

Tranforming Touch® builds new neural connections of safety and nervous system regulation, helping restore the healthy reflexes and early development that may have been interrupted or underdeveloped by trauma.   

Kevin trained with Dr. Terrell and is certified as a Transforming Touch therapist.

To listen to an interview with Dr. Terrell about Tranforming Touch, go here! 
For more information about Dr. Terrell and Transforming Touch go here. 

Transforming Touch sessions are available on a sliding scale of $100-150.

Website offer:
Your first Transforming Touch session is available for $75.
To schedule contact Kevin:   kevincassity@yahoo.com, or (907) 350-1715.

Our heritage is not necessarily our destiny.

A brief history of trauma and Transforming Touch®.

The study and treatment of trauma is a relatively new science. 
 
For a good deal of its short history, Western trauma treatment has consisted largely of talk therapies and mental processing.    It is now being understood that talk therapy is largely ineffective for resolving many kinds of trauma. 

Research has increasingly shown that our bodies and primitive brain centers are equipped with a profound biological and evolutionary intelligence designed to modulate and facilitate recovery from trauma.   

Dr. Peter Levine developed the trauma treatment modality, “Somatic Experiencing,” by observing how animals in the wild recover from shock trauma or “single event” trauma (e.g. an attack by a predator)  and applying that understanding to working with humans.

Dr. Stephen Porges, developer of “Polyvagal Theory” has identified the primitive brain and nerve pathways involved in “fight, flight, freeze” response and the more evolved brain and nerve pathways in humans that facilitate regulation and recovery from trauma.  

These more evolved pathways of recovery and resilience are developed (or not) by our earliest experience of learning nervous system regulation from and with our caregivers.  

If we experienced substantial early trauma and/or had un-attuned or absent caregivers at this critical time of dependency and nervous system development,  these pathways of resilience and recovery may not be well developed (developmental trauma).  But the work of Porges and others also shows that we can learn to repair this early deficit and grow new nervous system pathways of  human connection and resilience in adulthood.

A groundbreaking, and now famous, study by Kaiser Permanente Hospitals, the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACES),  showed that chronic physical illness in adults (heart disease, cancer, autoimmune illnesses …)  can be traced directly to the number and frequency of traumatic events in childhood.  

More recent studies with Holocaust survivors and also with lab mice show that trauma is literally passed down genetically from generation to generation. 

Pioneers in the treatment of early “developmental” trauma, Dr. Kathy Kain and Dr. Stephen Terrell, have developed Transforming Touch® work to mitigate and repair the effects of early trauma by bringing touch and presence to work somatically with primitive survival centers, reflexes, and organs — brain stem, kidney and adrenals, and limbic system —  to  develop new neurological pathways for safety and connection that may not have been established in childhood.

The exploding field of neuroplasticity research indicates that our brain and nervous system are plastic and adaptable and can change throughout life.