Comments on Trauma and NSEW
A brief description of our work in relation to trauma reactions.
We have developed an energy healing approach based on the work of Bill Gray, which works directly with the nervous system. My colleague, Carol DeSanto, and I are both psychotherapists as well as healers, and the Nervous System Energy Work (NSEW) is the most specifically effective and useful energy work we have practiced for psychotherapeutic concerns because it links so directly with the bodily system in which so many therapeutic concerns are based. The natural route for awareness is through nervous system tissue. Connecting to bodily experience, grounding, and so on are best accomplished through opening the nervous system to awareness.
Over the course of our learning to work directly in the nervous system, we began to identify patterned energy responses spread throughout the nervous system whenever trauma clients thought about or evoked recollection of their trauma. We developed some ways to loosen these patterned energy responses from the nerves and clear them from the nervous system, and clients reported significant diminishment of their trauma responses. One of the advantages of this process was that it specifically required the most minimal stimulation of the recollection and so is much less retraumatizing in nature than techniques that require stronger evocation of the trauma response. It appears to have a significantly lasting effect on trauma survivors.
Some other areas of application of our NSEW work in trauma:
- Clearing frozen/stored emotion and sensory impression from peripheral nervous system tissue– many chronic pain states and somatic triggers for trauma response are due to local, peripheral, encapsulated sensory impressions, which, when activated, re-create the trauma experience.
- We have developed a range of processes that work directly with the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems to reduce sympathetic reactivity, increase vagal and parasympathetic response, and facilitate self-calming and self-soothing.
- Work in the nervous system, especially in the spinal cord and nerves of the legs, creates an access route for abuse survivors to find their way to the ground and stay anchored into their bodies more. The route through the spinal cord is the natural route of awareness from the brain into the body, but it has the advantage of not going directly through the visceral core of the body. For most abuse survivors, the visceral core is where strong emotions are felt and stored or contained, and connects them to the front of their body where they felt intruded on, and so trying to ground them through the core tends to be restimulating. Many survivors can find a connection to their legs via the spinal cord without going into their visceral insides, to the sciatic nerves, and down.