July 16, 2024
Episode 73:
Trauma Sensitive Movement: How to Integrate it into Your Practice with Janis Isaman
In this episode, Janis explains how to integrate movement when working with clients who have experienced trauma.
Show Notes
Kayla: Welcome back to the Designer Practice Podcast. I’m your host, Kayla Das.
In today’s episode, Janis Isaman, Trauma Sensitive Movement Specialist, will explain how to integrate movement when working with clients who have experienced trauma.
Hi, Janis: welcome to the show. I’m so glad to have you here, Janis.
Janis: Me too. Hello.
Kayla: Janis, before we dive into today’s episode, please introduce yourself, where you’re from, and tell us a little bit about your own practice journey.
Janis: Absolutely. As you mentioned, I’m Janis Isaman and I’m the owner of a studio in Calgary called My Body Couture. And I named it as such because it really is about customizing the experience of the body. So, my practice is all around the body and movement and exercise. And it crosses into therapy because I am a trauma sensitive practitioner. I use that term, and we will get into that, but I’m using that because I am a trauma centered, trauma sensitive yoga teacher. So, it has a really precise meaning that we’ll define.
But I really got into trauma work as a result of experiences that I had in my own body. As well as what I was seeing happening with clients. So, for almost 20 years I have taught and facilitated and led something that we used to call quote unquote mind-body exercise So we’re going to think of things like yoga and Pilates. But I also do body work techniques. There’s a technique called the amino body rolling. I would actually consider yin yoga a form of body work There’s another technique I teach called critical alignment yoga and therapy.
And I noticed both in myself and in my clients that when we started doing the body work and in my studio were one to one, I would suddenly have people having emotional responses, they would be crying and sharing stories about their sexual trauma histories or present-day moment, really, really, really difficult things. And often they would even look up at me and say, I don’t know why I’m sharing this. So as there’s a ball in their armpit, and so I knew at that moment, that was some time ago, but I knew that there was something about the body and movement and opening space in the body and doing this kind of body work in the way that I was doing it and exercise in the way that I was doing it, that was pulling something to the surface. And as somebody who actually didn’t come from a social worker or therapy background, I rushed off to a therapist, asked him, you know, what do I do? Put crystals in my bra? Like, I don’t actually know what to do with this.
And so he directed me to some training that I did end up taking, which was Gabor Maté was doing this work, he’s was kind of one of the first people doing this work in the way that I could understand it. Also, trauma center trauma sensitive yoga, which I have already referenced so that’s coming out of Bessel van der kolk’s trauma center. It’s a division under that etc. So, that’s kind of where I pinpoint the beginning of what is relevant therapists and therapy. And that was already 11 or 12 years ago. So, at that time, it was kind of difficult to find some of these trainings and start to introduce it into my work, but I am doing that in a myriad of ways now. That is just so fulfilling.
Kayla: Wow, that’s amazing. I know you mentioned that you have noticed that movement has a lot to do with trauma. So, can you explain a little bit about what movement has to do with trauma?
Janis: Absolutely. So, I have lensing that really is quite informed by three people, four actually. There is Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, Gabor Maté, and Stephen Porges. So, some of those names you may know, some of them you may not. But those are lenses through which I heavily work. And when we’re talking about trauma, at least three out of those four people have been working in trauma research for 30 to 40 years. So, we’re talking about men who are now in their seventies or eighties who have literally devoted their entire career to it. And in many cases, they’re kind of the forefront of what we now call and named trauma. So, I will just kind of say that that’s the lensing through which I’m about to define it, but trauma and traumatic experiences are not cognitive. They are in the soma. They are in our somatic experience. They are in our body. And when we respond to things from a trauma lens, we are doing so from our body. So a trauma response is, it could be a tightening of the stomach. It could be burning through the chest. It could be dissociating.
But it happens so incredibly quickly, like an animal response. If there was a bear behind me, it is not a thought. Hey self, you need to run. It’s literally, my actual fascia and muscles will tighten up. My viscera will shift. My digestive system will basically turn off. My heart rate increases. I’m flooded with hormones and away I go. And that happens in an instant. And so, when we’re talking about trauma, it means that we have unprocessed experiences in our system, quite often from childhood, but certainly not always. We can get traumatized as adults. It could be from car accidents, it could be from other difficult life circumstances that are big, big things. But it also can be from relationships. It can be from something that we didn’t get as children. So, there’s kind of an increasingly broadening definition of what is trauma. But when we’re seeing, especially during the therapeutic process, that we have people that, and I certainly would be the first to put my hand up. I mean, it’s part of why I’m sitting here. I could go to therapy all day long and I could talk a blue streak and I’m cognitive and I’m intellectual and I can have all these insights, but it didn’t change a darn thing. And it’s because when I was out in the world, I was having trauma responses to things. So, I would feel that kind of clenching my stomach. I dissociate and I’m out of there. I can’t even use any of the skill sets. So, one of the known tools that we can use, and it’s certainly not the only one, but to reintegrate experiences and start to make changes is through movement and exercise. And again, it’s worth saying again that that is not the only tool. It’s the one I’m talking about today because it’s the one I’m trained in. But we have things like art therapy, play therapy for children. And there’s a whole other range of somatic tools that we can use, but they are heavily, heavily linked because the body is where we’re experiencing those physiological changes, our nervous system shifts. So, movement and exercise are core to the experience of trauma.
Kayla: I love that because we talk a lot about how trauma affects the mind, but we don’t often talk about how it affects the body. And I love that you’re bringing and you’re integrating that into that approach because it’s our movement. It’s our mind. It’s our soul. All of those are connected.But sometimes we focus on one and not the other or we don’t acknowledge the other as much.
Janis: It’s true, and I think when we actually get into what is trauma doing to the body, I see all kinds of kind of imprints that it can leave behind. There is a correlation, and it is a known correlation, a research correlation, between pain and trauma. That does not mean that everybody who has sciatic pain or back pain has trauma. But it could be a root cause issue as well. So many people who have trauma exposures have everything from fibromyalgia to digestive issues, to inflammation, to pain.
I see– and this is anecdotal, but there is a significant correlation between a lot of females who have early childhood sexual trauma. And quite often, there is a visual and muscular shift throughout the abdomen. So quite often, there’s an inability to actually engage those muscles properly. So that woman might really focus on having strong arms or strong legs because she can fight with those. And so again, when I see somebody with low tone in their abdomen, I’m not saying that that’s 100 percent a trauma experience. But it often doesn’t surprise me when later that very same person says that they’ve had that early childhood sexual trauma.
Another really prevalent and very known experience of somebody who has had trauma exposure is that they don’t like their body. So again, that isn’t necessarily inversely correlated because we live in a society where women in particular are often trained not to like our bodies. But when we see people that have eating disorders, that may be from trauma, when we see people that have really disparaging comments about their body, they often will talk about their body as if it’s an outside entity and that it certain things need to be fixed. So, it could be anything from these flabby thighs to, you know, this is gross to things like that, that can be trauma linked. So again, we know that. Bessel van der Kolk actually openly speaks about that where trauma will disconnect you from the body. So you often see it as a separate entity and you will often see it as something that you don’t like.
I have seen a lot of experiences where people’s literal bones and tissues will shift. So, when we have trauma, quite often, the response is to seek comfort, and we will roll our joints in so we have really closed shoulders, the tissue hydration will shift, we’re often lacking flexibility, we’re tight, things like that.
So, it really does impact the body, it’s not just kind of like an experience that we had and we think about it and we process it and it’s out. It might be. But it also might leave these kind of lingering imprints many of which you’ll notice that I said they may or they could be. So even though we have research that shows some of these things are known to be linked we can’t also say oh that person doesn’t like their body, their trauma exposed it could be from that It could be from something else So that’s where it gets tricky because it’s not a one-to-one correlation backwards and forwards. And so when we really work with the body in the way that I do, there’s things that come to the surface and that we can identify, but I have to be really careful not to work backwards and say, “Oh, you have pain, you have trauma exposure.” They might or they might not. It might actually just be from sitting at their desk too much or being sedentary.
Kayla: No, that makes complete sense. I know when we chatted off air, you had mentioned there’s a difference between trauma sensitive versus trauma informed. Can you share a little bit about what that looks like?
Janis: Yeah, so this is really important in 2024 and forward because we now have a bit of a cultural conversation happening about trauma. We’ve had Bessel van der Kolk’s book out in the market for a decade or so. If you open up TikTok, you’re likely to be served some trauma content on some level. So, it’s kind of in the lexicon now. And so what’s happening is that a lot of practitioners in a lot of different industries are seeking information about that, which I’m very in favor of. I think that that is helpful for all people in a lot of different industries.
But when we’re working with trauma informed movement professionals, so yoga instructors, Pilates instructors, aerobics instructors, etc. We have to be aware that that is not a regulated term in the fitness and movement industries. And I’m not going to speak about other industries because i’m not in them. But in the movement industry, there is no regulatory body that says this is what trauma informed means.
Trauma sensitive, however, means something very specific. So, the only people that are using that terminology have gone through the trauma center trauma sensitive yoga program. And within that, we have evidence-based components that have been in development and been in research that we know are effective tools for trauma exposed people.
And the most recent research that has come out around that has studied– all studies that are kind of on a very narrow slice of people, but we have studied American military veterans who are women who experienced post-traumatic stress disorder. And there was a longer-term study on that populace on a trauma center, trauma sensitive yoga protocol that was 10 weeks long. And that protocol has certain components, which I’ll cover in a moment, but we know that that was as effective as cognitive behavioral therapy for that group of people. There are similar evidence-based studies happening right now on other really specific populations, including a group of incarcerated youth in Georgia.
So when we’re talking about trauma sensitive yoga, these principles can be applied to all people. Whether they have trauma exposure or not, because I personally think many of them are really good, sound principles for movement and exercise. But it really means that we, as a group of practitioners and facilitators, are working really in depth with people, with trauma exposure, PTSD, that may be treatment resistant. We’re working with therapists, we’re working with not-for-profit groups, etc. So, knowing that difference is super important because we can refer, absolutely, to a trauma informed yoga class.
Where we may see some principles of trauma information, the instructor might have some systems information, et cetera. But it’s going to be really different than if we’re seeing a client who we want to help get into their body, who has PTSD or who has some other kind of trauma exposure. Who really needs somebody with that evidence-based practice and an evidence-based approach.
Kayla: That makes complete sense. So, for listeners, how can they help clients go into their body or integrate some of these concepts? And is there a time where maybe we shouldn’t do that?
Janis: That is a really good question. So, I’ve alluded to this a couple of times and I just want to be kind of get this into the air and then answer that. Exact question. So, some of the principles of a trauma centered, trauma sensitive yoga approach are going to be interoception. And that means that we’re going to notice and name things that are happening in their body. And that’s going to be done in a certain dosed and titrated way. So that’s really a familiar concept to most therapists.
We are also going to look at choice. So that language of choice is going to be very key to what we’re working on. So, a really specific example of that is going to be, you may choose to raise your arm. You may choose to bring your arm in front of your body. Because trauma survivors, often were in a situation with their body where they weren’t given a choice.
Then we are able to do what we call taking effective action. So that student or that client is going to be able to make that choice and decide what they want to do with their body. So that part becomes really important because when we’re looking at how do we get a client into their body, we know that somatization is important. We know that we need to get the client into their body. A lot of the queuing around what do you feel and where do you feel it can be challenging for certain clients. There’s obviously going to be a body of clients who can respond to that, who can answer that, and who can excel at that. And then they get that kind of integrated somatization.
Where a lot of my work really comes in is somebody who maybe cannot do that. So, then what do we do with that? You know, maybe we learned that in therapy school. What do you feel? Where do you feel it? Notice, name, all that stuff. So that’s where some of those pieces that I just named are really important.
So, when somebody is having an experience of moving their body, maybe just focusing on moving their arm, for example, they’re going to perhaps have some sensation in the body. But how that’s dosed and titrated might be really different than what do you feel in your arm, where do you feel it? So we can lower that dose for them where they’re focused on something else, they’re experiencing the choice, they’re experiencing attunement with me as a facilitator. They’re experiencing invitational language, and they’re experiencing some non-coercive language around moving their body.
But the goal isn’t what do you feel, where do you feel it? And if they start telling a story, bringing them back there. Those are good therapeutic techniques. There’s nothing wrong with them. In fact, they could actually be everything that a client needs. But, we also can see people who dissociate. We can also see people who cannot complete it, or that just have other responses to it.
So, there’s a dual thing happening in my work. One is that we’re getting people moving and exercising. I believe that no therapy is complete in a sedentary body. hard stopped. We cannot help a client gain skills and have a phenomenal connection to people and have wonderful relationships and have amazing kind of integrated mental health care when they are completely sedentary.
There’s study after study after study that shows that correlation between activity, and it doesn’t need to be going to the gym and pumping weights, although it could be. But just walking, standing, sitting, being able to just move our body in a functional way. is absolutely one of the most powerful mental health tools. So when we have clients who are in pain or sedentary, who can’t experience any sensation in their body. Just bringing them into that movement in a more gentle, attuned way, where they might have some other experience of moving their body in a different way, can help break through that barrier of the most common therapeutic technique. Which, again, I’ve taken training in this myself, and it can be really powerful and healing. But what do you feel? Where do you feel it?
And in my studio space, when I have clients come in, That is one of the first things I ask them, and I can speak from my own relatively lengthy body of experience that some clients have a lot of words about their body, and some clients have none. They literally can’t feel, they can’t access, or they can’t verbalize. So, it’s a limited base of a toolkit to ask, what do you feel, where do you feel it? That could be great for some people, but adding a more holistic 360 degree movement and exercise capacity to somebody’s body to help them experience emotions, to help them experience their body, to help them connect and have choice and agency is going to be absolutely life changing in a therapeutic context for any therapist,
Kayla: That’s amazing. So when we think of say, integrating, like, let’s say a listener typically comes from a talk therapy standpoint. Are there any tips or are there any strategies that can help them integrate movement into their already existing repertoire of skills?
Janis: So, obviously this is a little bit practitioner dependent, but if you can notice things like if your client fidgets, might they actually be able to connect to their body and speak if they’re allowed to sit or stand? Or might you be able to cue, if you would like to, you may move your arm and see how that changes the experience for them. Additionally, I think bringing in questioning about that person’s exercise and movement and relationship to their body to even just get that baseline of does this person connect to their body? Does this person connect to nature? We often will focus in therapeutically around relationships. So, there’s a lot of inquiry about that, but the relationship to other humans is not the only relationship. What’s the relationship to their own body? and what’s the relationship to the outdoor environment where we could do a lot of exercise.
Then beyond that, we do have the body scan, which I’m a little bit on the edge about because I think doing a body scan is a really advanced technique, but you could check in about one area. Can you feel your shoulder? If that person can’t feel their shoulder, doing a gradiated body scan is going to be really difficult. So, maybe peppering that more throughout the session as opposed to going from feet to head could be useful because then you can get a sense for yourself of, is there any access to body sensation or is there a lot of access to it and are there spots in the body where perhaps they can excel at?
So many people do, in my experience, have places where they can deeply feel and that’s going to give them that sense of victory. So they can actually focus on that as a win as opposed to, I know what it’s like to be in therapy and you’re sitting there feeling like you’re failing because you can’t access the information at all.
And lastly, I think. Really, the root of my work its what therapists do well, but I do it on the body, and it’s noticing small details, and so those could be often the shoulders, the jaw, the throat are the most accessible points for therapists to notice. But are we noticing a slight shift of the voice? That’s something that a lot of therapists can do, but we can do that with somebody’s shoulder tension. We can do that with somebody’s jaw tension. So, starting to tune into that component and then mirroring it back to the client. So that’s a huge technique that I am using. I’m doing it with bigger muscles and bigger, more global movements. But I will often say to a client, do you notice that your This is obviously related to a squat, but do you notice that your pelvis has just tipped when you straighten your legs? And then I get a sense of, did they notice what my eyeballs noticed? And I make it really clear that this is in a non-coercive environment, where I may have noticed that, but that doesn’t mean that I’m the expert or authority on their body. So, oh, I thought I noticed this. Did you notice that? And quite often they will validate that, and then we can kind of converse a bit more about it. If they say, no, no, no, that didn’t happen, I’m just going to step away. And then. Observe it later or notice if there’s a bit of a pattern. So, for therapists, I would recommend a gray area. It’s just in the facial muscles. Are you noticing somebody’s eyebrows? Are you noticing somebody’s jaw? And then just as we do with other pieces of their life or other bits of the therapeutic process, perhaps mirroring some of that back to them and seeing how they react and respond.
Somebody who has no sensation could probably benefit from working with someone like myself with an expertise in that. Other people are going to have a lot of positivity by integrating that in, in that gentle way so that they’re getting that somatization and it helps with the brain insights because they start to link the brain and the body together.
Kayla: I love that you shared these ways we can integrate it. Because sometimes we think we have to do something really scary, right? Like, let’s go for walk and talk therapy, or let’s do something, outside of the therapy room. But the truth is, is you can integrate this into the therapy room in small doses.
Yeah, you might not have your client do a squat, maybe if that works for you.
Janis: Yeah.
Kayla: But there are these other ways to integrate movement and even evaluate movement as a therapist to be able to reflect it back to your client. So I love that.
Janis: 100%. And it’s worth saying that the way the therapy model works is very similar to how traditional meditation or journaling works, where we take a body and we put it into stillness and then we do the inquiry there. That’s an excellent technique for many people. It’s not an excellent technique for many other people. So, something as simple as allowing a client to sit and stand can move a little bit of energy through the body and that person might recalibrate and come back with a different experience. They might not also, but there are people who need to push a little bit of energy through the body with their body.
And again, as you said, it doesn’t mean that you’re suddenly doing therapy while the person’s doing squats, but I think that I’ve had that experience. I have gone through entire yoga teacher trainings where meditation feels like a form of torture. And it’s because I need a little bit of movement. It didn’t mean that I needed to stand up or that I needed to not do it. It meant that just perhaps a little bit of movement through my torso would have changed that experience tremendously.
So we don’t need to necessarily do huge things. It’s what therapists do is phenomenal and it is evidence based and has been for decades and longer. So we know that it works, we know that it’s helpful, but some clients struggle to sit in stillness and they struggle with kind of let’s immediately down regulate the nervous system can actually cause somebody to dissociate.
Kayla: And it goes back to the mind body connection. We can’t ignore one or the other to that have that holistic approach.
Janis: That’s right. That’s right. And so just even acknowledging that someone has a body can honestly be a huge piece of growth for them. So, Again, in a traditional yoga, often some of the cueing is move the arm. Well, the arm is not my arm. So, I would say the same thing to therapists. We’re acknowledging that we are not disembodied heads and that we do, in fact, have bodies. And that emotions are not just a mindset and that emotions are not just in our head. They actually, exist in our body. And linguistically, we actually know that because we recognize butterflies in our stomach. That is code word for I’m excited or a little bit anxious. We refer to things as a pain in our ass when we’re frustrated or annoyed. So, we know that and we linguistically even have words that acknowledge that.
But often in that therapeutic process, the training, the education, and a lot of the skill set is really focused from the neck up. So it can actually even be just a tremendous shift to recognize that we have sit bones that are attached to a chair or feet that are touching the ground. And what does that feel like?
Kayla: Yeah, absolutely. So, Janis, I know you have a free offer you want to give to therapists, specifically Canadian therapists, since you are in Calgary, Alberta. So, can you share what that offer is and how it can help them?
Janis: Yes, thank you for allowing me to share this. I do presentations and sessions for therapy offices. So, if you have a staff meeting and you’d like to bring me in or organizing a separate event or evening or midday where you’d like to bring me in and allow for some space for therapists to learn a little bit about somatization and mind body work and whatever words you want to use, trauma sensitive movement therapy. I can come into your office. I often start with a Q and A so that we’re really covering the topics that are most pressing and present for your therapist. There’s usually a demonstration. So, if therapists would like to try the trauma sensitive yoga and experience that. And I also can do a little bit more of an information-based session where we talk about the research and it’s a little bit of a continuing education session. So, we can customize that for your office, for your therapists. The minimum number of therapists is one and I’ve done them for really large therapy practices as well. That offer is available both in person. I can come to your space in Calgary. I have also done it digitally. So, we hook it up on Google Meet or Zoom and we can get that information into your therapist’s and into your office
Kayla: And how can they reach you?
Janis: They can best reach me at my email address, which is Janis, J-A-N-I-S, @mybodycouture.com. So that last chunk is three words, my M-Y body, B-O-D-Y, couture, C-O-U-T-U-R-E.com. I am at the website, mybodycouture.com.
You can also look me up on any social media site, so if you prefer to send me a direct message through social media or through my website, you’re also absolutely welcome to do that.
Kayla: Fabulous. So again, if you’re interested in working with Janis, check out her website at mybodycouture.com or email her at [email protected].
Or you can just scroll down to the show notes and click on the link.
Janis, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast. It was so great to have you here and to talk about how to integrate movement. with clients who experience trauma.
Janis: I hope it’s really helpful for people who have therapy practices, because I think that what I’ve seen in the years that I’ve been around is that we used to have the mind practitioners and we had the body practitioners and never the twain shall meet.
And in recent years, I have floated much more together. So I’m really hopeful that some of this information can help somebody with the business of their future therapy practice.
Kayla: I think you really provided some valuable insights to help therapists design the practice that best fits them and that they love.
Janis: Thanks for having me.
Kayla: Thank you everyone for tuning into today’s episode and I hope you join me again soon on the designer practice podcast.
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