Healing Principles
Understanding how trauma heals is essential for working safely and effectively with TRE. This section covers the core principles that guide trauma healing in somatic approaches.
Why Talk Therapy Alone May Not Be Enough
Traditional talk therapy is valuable, but trauma is fundamentally a somatic (body-based) condition.
The Limits of Top-Down Approaches
Top-down approaches work from cognition/thought to body: insight and understanding, cognitive restructuring, making meaning of experiences.
Why this is limited for trauma: Trauma occurs in pre-verbal, subcortical brain regions. Survival responses are not cognitive. You can understand trauma intellectually but still feel it in your body. As Bessel van der Kolk put it, "The body keeps the score."
The Power of Bottom-Up Approaches
Bottom-up approaches work from body to mind: somatic awareness, physical release, nervous system regulation, completing incomplete responses.
Why this works for trauma: Accesses where trauma is actually stored (body/nervous system). Works with survival responses directly. Doesn't require narrative memory or understanding. Can release pre-verbal trauma. Regulates the nervous system at its source.
Best approach: Integration of both top-down and bottom-up. Talk therapy provides context and meaning. Somatic work releases the actual traumatic activation.
Pendulation
Pendulation is the natural oscillation between activation and settling, between distress and resource.
In nature: Animals naturally pendulate: they tremor, discharge, then rest, then may tremor again. The nervous system naturally moves between states.
In trauma healing: Rather than staying in distress, we move back and forth – touch into difficulty, return to resource, touch into difficulty again, return to resource.
Why this matters: Staying in overwhelm re-traumatises. Pendulation allows processing without overwhelm.
In TRE: Tremors increase and decrease naturally. You might move in and out of emotional material. Rest periods are part of the process. You control the pendulation using self-regulation.
Titration
Titration means working with small, manageable amounts of activation at a time.
Metaphor: Like titrating a chemical solution drop by drop, we work with trauma in small doses rather than all at once.
Why this matters: Too much too fast overwhelms the system. Small amounts can be processed and integrated.
In TRE: Short tremoring sessions initially (5–10 minutes). Working with body areas gradually. Stopping before overwhelming. Building capacity over time.
The goal: Gradually increasing capacity to handle activation, widening the window of tolerance.
These principles are so important that they're covered in detail in the self-regulation section. They're fundamental to safe TRE practice, especially if you have a trauma history.
Building Capacity
Capacity refers to the nervous system's ability to handle activation without becoming dysregulated. A person with high capacity can experience significant stress, intense emotions, or challenging situations while maintaining access to their regulatory resources.
Capacity is not fixed; it can be developed. This is one of the primary benefits of regular TRE practice.
Capacity is built through:
Pendulation: The natural rhythm of moving between activation and calm. In TRE, we allow tremors (activation) to arise and then use self-regulation to return to calm, repeatedly. This teaches the nervous system that it can move into activation and successfully come back.
Titration: Working in small, manageable doses rather than overwhelming the system. We do not seek the most intense tremors possible; we work within our window of tolerance.
Successful completion: When the nervous system has the experience of moving through activation to successful resolution, it learns that activation is survivable. This is fundamentally different from having activation interrupted or suppressed.
Resourcing: Building awareness of and access to states of calm, groundedness, and safety. The more familiar we are with these states, the more easily we can return to them.
Some people assume that more intense tremors or stronger emotional releases mean better healing. This is not the case. Overwhelming the nervous system with intensity it cannot integrate is counterproductive. The goal is always to work within the window of tolerance, building capacity gradually.
Resilience and Post-Traumatic Growth
Trauma is not destiny. Humans are remarkably resilient.
Resilience Factors
What helps people be resilient: social support, meaning-making capacity, felt sense of agency, somatic resources and regulation skills, spirituality or connection to something larger, prior experiences of overcoming difficulty, genetic and temperamental factors.
Even if you didn't have these resources initially, they can be developed.
Post-Traumatic Growth
Some people report growth following trauma:
Domains of growth: Greater appreciation for life, stronger relationships, increased personal strength, new possibilities in life, spiritual or existential deepening.
This doesn't mean trauma is good: No one would choose trauma. But humans have remarkable capacity to find meaning and grow through even terrible experiences.
Somatic practices support growth: As the nervous system heals and regulates, capacity for growth increases.