August 02, 2019 //
3 min read
As a Trauma Center Trauma Sensntive Yoga Facilitator, I am bound by the International Association of Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga Guidelines for Ethical Practice. These guidelines include a committment to faclitate TCTSY in a way that stands true to the 5 core principles of the TCTSY methodology. Let's explore in a little more detail what these principles are and why they exist.
If we think of relational trauma as an experience of being coerced, controlled and having choices taken away, we can start to see the basis of these principles. Let's now explore each principle in more detail.
We invite people into movements, starting every cue with an invitation such as, “maybe”, “possibly”, “if you like”. The facilitator shares power and offers opportunities for participants to own their body, something which may be unfamiliar if trauma experiences have meant having their body controlled and violated. We know that for trauma survivors, connecting with their body isn't necessarily a relaxing experience and in fact can be very challenging. We hope that thorugh consistent use of invitational language we will enable clients to travel at their own pace and work out what works for them. No one person needs the same thing as the next person, so we create safe spaces where everyone in the room is able to make different choices about what they want to do with their body.
Complex Trauma drains our capacity to practice agency. We give choices throughout the practice as a way to facilite regaining a sense of agency. These might be A-B choices such as "you could move your left arm or your right" or more complex choices such as “you may wish to decide how much you move based on what you are feeling”. TCTSY offers opportunities to practice choice-making in the context of a safe relationship.
We offer opportunities for people to notice the sensations in their body right now such as, “if you are lifting your arm, you may notice some sensations in the muscles in your arm". Dissociation is a powerful tool in surviving trauma but not something that is easy to live with permanently. Dissociation is a mental process of disconnecting from one's thoughts, feelings, memories, sense of identity or body and is a tool that our bodies can employ to help us to survive an unbearable experience. In TCTSY, we invite people to practice something called interoception (more on that here), or experiencing feelings in their own body, which is the opposite of dissociating. We hope that through having some safe present moment experiences, people participating in TCTSY might be able to start reconnecting with their own body and making choices about what they want to do with it.
We facilitate and participate at the same time. We engage in the practice as we are offering it to another person, sharing in the epxerience with them. We hope that this offers an alternative to the normal western medical model where the 'expert' decides on treatment and imposes it on the patient. TCTSY is a relational practice and as such, as facilitators we enter into the experience of the practice jointly with clients in the hope that this will enable power sharing and the building of a safe relationship. As facilitators, we take responsibilty for our own experience in the practice, this is the opposite of trauma dynamcics in which the perpetrator relinquishes responsiblity for their actions.
We continually look for ways to balance or shift the power dynamic in favor of the survivor. We practice by Judith Herman’s words: “no intervention that takes power away from the survivor can possibly foster her recovery, even if it appears to be in her immediate best interest”.