The Body, the Memory, and the Story:
Where Trauma-Informed Yoga and ART Meet
Dr. Katrina Kuzyszyn-Jones
Last month, I wrote about my trauma informed yoga teacher training class. One of the reasons I was interested in trauma-informed yoga was that it fits naturally with how I already think about trauma as a psychologist.
Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score helped popularize an idea that has become increasingly important in trauma treatment: our experiences are not only carried in the stories we tell. Trauma can also affect physiological arousal, attention, memory, our sense of safety, and the way we experience our own bodies. Van der Kolk describes recovery as involving not only understanding what happened, but also developing greater safety, ownership, and connection with the body.
Sometimes the body responds before we have words for what is happening. We may know intellectually that we are safe and still feel our heart racing. We may understand that a relationship is different from one we had in the past and still feel ourselves bracing for rejection. We may talk calmly about an experience while noticing that our jaw is tight, chest feels heavy, or we suddenly want to leave the room.
That gap between what I know and what my nervous system is doing is one of the places where I see an interesting connection between trauma-informed yoga and another approach I use in my clinical work: Accelerated Resolution Therapy, or ART.
ART Gives Us Another Way to Work With the Memory
ART is a structured psychotherapy that uses imagery, bilateral eye movements, attention to emotional and physical responses, and techniques that allow a person to change the imagery associated with a distressing memory. In published research, ART has been studied as a relatively brief intervention for trauma symptoms, including a randomized trial with service members and veterans in which participants receiving ART showed greater reductions in PTSD and related symptoms than an attention-control condition.
What I appreciate about ART is that I do not have to rely exclusively on talking about an experience. During ART, a client may bring a distressing scene to mind and notice not only the memory, but what happens internally—the emotion, the physical sensations, and the way the body responds. The process then gives us a structured way to work with that experience rather than simply continuing to describe it.
That is where my yoga training has added another layer to how I think about this work.
How Trauma-Informed Yoga Informs Treatment
My yoga training has emphasized safety, trust, choice, collaboration, empowerment, and awareness of individual differences. It also emphasizes that the same practice can be regulating for one person and uncomfortable for another. Those principles translate remarkably well into trauma therapy.
A client might not notice the tension in their shoulders while we are working with a memory. Bringing that into someone’s awareness can be liberating.
What are you noticing there? Does it feel okay to stay with that sensation for a moment?
Would moving help, or would you rather stay still? Would focusing on your breathing be useful, or would you rather orient to something in the room?
The goal is not for me to decide what their nervous system should do. The goal is to help the client become increasingly able to notice what is happening and experience themselves as having choices about what happens next.
The Body Can Become Part of the Information
This is one of the places where The Body Keeps the Score, ART, and trauma-informed yoga intersect for me. The body is not an obstacle we have to get calm before “real therapy” can continue. It is also not something we need to ‘interpret’ in therapy. It can simply become another source of information.
In ART, a shift in a bodily sensation may occur as we work with traumatic imagery. In other therapy sessions, a client may notice their body tightening as they discuss a boundary, becoming restless when they talk about conflict, or feeling unexpectedly settled when they imagine making a different choice.
Trauma-informed yoga has given me more language and more ways to stay curious about those moments. The training describes embodiment as gradually reconnecting with physical experience while maintaining the ability to stop when something becomes too much. That emphasis on awareness without force is especially important to me.
Healing Is More Than Understanding Why
Psychotherapy is very good at helping us understand. Why do I react this way? Where did this belief come from? Why does this relationship affect me so strongly? Those are important questions. But sometimes a client already understands exactly why they react the way they do—and the reaction still happens.
That is one of the central lessons I take from The Body Keeps the Score. Insight matters, but trauma can involve systems that are not changed simply because we can explain them. Van der Kolk emphasizes restoring the ability to feel safe and in control in one's body and describes movement and yoga as some of the ways people may develop that capacity.
ART gives me a structured way to work directly with distressing memories and the emotional and physiological responses connected with them.
Trauma-informed yoga gives me a broader framework for thinking about what happens between and around those memories: awareness, movement, stillness, breath, choice, boundaries, regulation, and the experience of living in one's body in the present.
It Comes Back to Agency
The common thread is agency. We want to ask: Can I notice that my body is responding without being frightened by the response? Can I stay curious about a sensation instead of immediately trying to get rid of it? Can I recognize when I am becoming overwhelmed? Can I decide whether I want to stay with something, slow down, move, orient to the room, or stop? And eventually, can something that once automatically signaled danger become something I can experience with more flexibility and choice?
Interested in learning more about ART? I am providing a free community presentation in November. See here to sign up. Online Workshops for Mental Health | North Carolina Psychological Association
Ready now? Contact drkatrina@kkjpsych.com for different strategies including trauma informed yoga approaches and ART.
Interested in learning more about ART?
I am providing a free community presentation in November.
See here to sign up:
Online Workshops for Mental Health | North Carolina Psychological Association
Ready now? Contact drkatrina@kkjpsych.com for different strategies including trauma informed yoga approaches and ART.