10/17/2026
I will be teaching the second class with my friend and colleague, Mary Ann Tarber, who has over 35 years as an Occupational Therapist doing craniosacral and myofascial release. We're so SUPER excited to combine what we do to help others!
According to psychiatrist and trauma expert Dr. Bessel van Der Kolk, all trauma is pre-verbal; which in essence means we store the trauma in the mind-body system instead of as a logical story. The challenge with talk therapy is that many highly traumatized individuals do not remember their trauma and/or cannot put it into words. This is where the work Mary Ann and I do come in handy, helping the body and mind to remember and process the trauma.
Here's some insightful tidbits from Dr. Bessel van der Kolk's research:
•Trauma is experienced and stored in the survival-based, primitive parts of the brain and the physical body, rather than the cognitive, language-producing areas
•The Limits of Talk Therapy: This concept explains why traditional talk therapy alone often falls short for deep trauma. Because the rational mind cannot simply reason its way out of a physiological danger response, healing usually requires somatic (body-based) therapies like EMDR, breathwork, and neurofeedback help to reset the nervous system.
•Imprints on the Body: Because the experience bypasses normal language processing, the memory is embedded into the "body-mind". A person may not have the words to describe what happened, but their body continues to re-live the stress via muscle tension, digestive issues, a racing heart, or sudden panic.
•The Limbic and Survival System: During a highly traumatic event, the rational mind shuts down, and the limbic system and brainstem take over to handle survival (fight, flight, or freeze). The threat is processed as raw physical sensations, intense emotional reactions, and physiological spikes—not as a cohesive, logical story.
