Skip to main content

Welcome to the TRE™ Guide

A Practical Handbook for Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises

What If Your Body Already Knows How to Heal?​

The body remembers what the mind forgets.

– Attributed to Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score

Here's something remarkable: your body already has a built-in mechanism for releasing stress and tension. You've probably seen it in animals: a dog shaking off after a stressful encounter, a deer tremoring after escaping danger. This isn't random. It's an innate neurological process that mammals use to discharge activation and return to equilibrium.

Humans have this same mechanism. We've just learned to suppress it.

Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE) teaches you how to reactivate it.

For too long, healing has been something done to us: by therapists, practitioners, experts. We talk about our problems, analyse our patterns, try to think our way to feeling better. These approaches have value. But something fundamental is missing: your body's own intelligence.

TRE changes the equation. Instead of trying to fix yourself from the outside in, you learn to support what your body is already trying to do. The tight shoulders, the clenched jaw, the shallow breathing, the knot in your stomach: these aren't just symptoms to manage. They're held tension waiting to be released. And your body knows exactly how to do it.

Developed by Dr David Berceli while working in conflict zones around the world, TRE activates your body's natural tremor mechanism through a simple series of exercises. No special equipment. No ongoing costs. No dependence on anyone else.

TRE Is for Everyone​

An important clarification: TRE is not only for people who have experienced major trauma. While it was initially developed in war zones and has proven invaluable for trauma survivors, TRE is fundamentally a tool for managing everyday stress and tension that accumulates in all of our bodies.

Modern life is stressful. Work pressures, relationship challenges, financial worries, rushing from one commitment to another: these everyday stresses activate our nervous systems repeatedly without full resolution. The body holds this tension in chronic muscle patterns, even when we're not consciously aware of it. Over time, this accumulated tension can manifest as physical pain, sleep disturbances, anxiety, or simply a vague sense of being "wound up" that never fully releases.

TRE offers a way to discharge this accumulated stress before it becomes chronic. You don't need to have experienced capital-T Trauma to benefit from releasing the small-t tensions of daily life. In fact, regular TRE practice can be a powerful form of nervous system maintenance: like flossing for your autonomic nervous system.

What makes TRE truly remarkable is its accessibility. Once learned, TRE can be practiced for free, anywhere, for the rest of your life. There are no ongoing fees, no special equipment needed, no dependence on practitioners or clinics. After you understand the exercises and self-regulation principles (which this guide provides), you have a tool you can use in your own home, on your own schedule, whenever you need it.

This is a genuine gift: a self-help practice that returns autonomy and agency to individuals. You become your own resource for nervous system regulation.

If you've picked up this guide, you may already have some experience with therapy or personal development work. Perhaps you've explored cognitive behavioural approaches, psychotherapy, or mindfulness practices. These approaches have tremendous value. Yet you may have noticed that despite understanding your patterns intellectually, certain tensions persist in your body. Old stress seems to live in your muscles, your posture, your breathing patterns. TRE offers a way to work with these embodied patterns directly.

What This Guide Offers​

This is not another book about trauma theory or yet another self-help program you won't finish. This guide gives you everything you need to start practicing TRE safely and effectively: today.

You'll learn:

One principle matters above all others: self-regulation. TRE is not about pushing through or achieving dramatic releases. It's about developing a trusting relationship with your body's innate wisdom. The goal is integration, not catharsis: learning to be present with whatever arises at a pace that feels safe.

Start with the Foundations section if you're new to somatic work, or jump straight to the Quick Start Guide if you want to begin. Your body will guide you from there.

The tremor mechanism is waiting. It's been waiting your whole life.

Let's begin.

Use the navigation menu at the top to explore different sections:

Start Here

If you're new to TRE, we recommend starting with the Foundations section to understand the underlying principles, then moving to Practice or the Quick Start Guide.