Transforming Touch®

Kevin offers Transforming Touch ®, a nervous system support and healing modality developed by Dr. Stephen Terrell in collaboration with Dr. Kathy Kain. 
 

Transforming Touch® can be particularly helpful for working with the after-effects of early trauma, or “developmental trauma”, which includes pre-birth trauma, birth trauma, and traumas that happened in childhood and adolescence, when the nervous system and brain were developing.  

Untreated early trauma, often unremembered,  persists into adulthood and can lead to not only to chronic health problems but addiction and compulsion and other kinds of problematic compensation — which are often viewed by the culture as a character weakness, defect or personality trait.  

These after-effects of early trauma often appear to be intransigent because they are pre-verbal and unresponsive to talk therapies and other kinds of trauma treatment.  

But the work of Dr. Terrell and Dr. Kathy Kain have shown that this kind of trauma too is indeed responsive to the right kind of nervous system support and treatment.   

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

Transforming Touch®  uses touch to work directly with areas of the body affected by nervous system dysregulation  (kidney/adrenals, brain stem, limbic system).   TEB 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.   

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.