Free Intro Sessions!
I’m pleased to announce that paid subscribers to my substack can get free intro sessions for some of these therapies, provided by my friend Hàle Denizden. Personalized Yin yoga and Somatic Experiencing introductions can be done online (although obviously better in person). Massage and water therapy in-person. Contact her on Instagram to setup your intro.
Physical brain health is preliminary
If you’re one of those people who finds that none of these therapies work on you, you should consider brain health and neuro-inflammation first.
Sleep, meds/drugs, supplements, herbs, pain, nutrition, and general health can all change how much therapy you can tolerate. I have a separate sleep guide here. And then check out my neurological de-armoring guide. They go hand in hand. You don’t necessarily need to wait until your brain is at some ideal level of health before beginning therapy, and therapy should also help you to make the lifestyle changes needed to improve your health in general as well. Everything is depending on everything else.
Introduction to this Guide
While my general approach to healing trauma is reparenting the inner child, I wrote this guide to somatic therapies because sometimes that vulnerable-feeling part of you is more accessible physically than it is mentally, especially at first.
The body was involved in surviving what happened to you, and it has its own innate resolution process. Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing therapy, in his book, In An Unspoken Voice, explains that his accidental realization about the need to complete the body’s trauma response was corroborated by a park biologist in Malawi. He told Levine that captured animals who hadn’t trembled and breathed spontaneously before being released were unlikely to survive in the wild.
But discovering the body’s programming isn’t simply something you can read a book for. Some bodies are frozen and need to shake. Some are dissociated and need to feel, cry, laugh, self-massage, breathe more, less, in new ways, etc. Learning to feel the body, connect with it, and let the energy flow the way it needs to, is like learning to ride a bike. You can read about it and follow the practices, and even pay lots of money to a Bike Expert, but ultimately, you have to feel it out and see what works.
Every year we get like 50 new kinds of therapies, with 100 new kinds of ex-spurts, as my dad called them. Most of them are actually just permutations and combinations of the ones already invented. It becomes a bewildering morass of therapies so frightening to choose from that one needs a meta-therapy after being bombarded by suggestions to pay $250/hr to try the hottest latest one. 😜
So, let me save you $50k right now. Put simply, I find that lasting complex trauma recovery tends to have some obvious layers supporting each other (sequenced like this maybe):
Understanding your body’s feeling cues, so you can stay present and choose what comes next.
Regulate or discharge accumulated activation energy.
Compassionate exploration of trauma feelings before the story comes in.
Work with memories you can actually point to: the actual events and the triggering events.
Integrate, differentiate, and build a life of meaning. Decide your boundaries, direction, relationships, and overall identity.
Because specific somatic therapies are on a spectrum of physical<->emotional (or conscious<->subconscious), as well as a spectrum of intensity and specificity, we can often guess which one might be right for someone at which time. These don’t all have the same level or type of evidence supporting them, and there’s definitely no scientific roadmap that could survive peer review, but ultimately everyone somehow builds their own map of what makes sense, and this is mine.
I use these therapies partly to make the body safer to inhabit before going into deeper inner-child therapy, where we intentionally re-expose ourselves to traumatic memories in an effort to re-parent the little one-one inside who was hurt.
Don’t be so serious, you silly willy!
Remember, therapy is not just work. It’s also play! That’s why they call it pl/ork! We often make the most incredible discoveries when we approach things with playful curiosity. For example, here’s a bridge between somatic therapy and inner-child therapy which I recently learned from Professor Baby Sheep:
Speaking of silly therapy, I also like Denzel Washington’s advice.
Jules Evans’ post on How to Stop Thinking is particularly provoking, as he details the stories of folks who tried all kinds of therapies to stop ruminating, and eventually found that the best therapy was to stop imagining they needed therapy. Go to yoga class (without assuming it’s therapy), do regular real life stuff, just chill. Ironically, as Jules showcases, this advice has a formally studied therapy behind it, called Meta-Cognitive Therapy (MCT), where you simply notice the thoughts without worrying about what they’re saying (which looks a lot like beginner mindfulness meditation). On the other hand, many people actually do need to analyze their issues, but they’re avoiding doing that because it’s painful.
So the answer is basically the same regardless of what your problem is in life: pay attention to what works and what doesn’t, without making that process itself into an endless spiral.
The Dominant Trauma-Memory Therapies Are Missing Something
Currently, as a PTSD or cPTSD patient, your health insurance (if you’re lucky enough to have it) might cover the most scientifically validated trauma therapies: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and trauma-focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapies.
All of these focus on the trauma memory itself, reactivating it in order to change the meaning and/or the processing and response to it. Their logic is simple: slowly increase your exposure to painful memories until you can fully re-live the experience without overwhelming your nervous system. The CBT trauma therapies also use regular CBT to re-narrate the meaning of the experiences, so that, for example, being abused as a child no longer creates a story that “I deserve abuse.”
Those therapies do show meaningful impact for many people in terms of reducing hyperarousal, and sometimes dissociation. But there are two main problems with them that Peter Levine, et al. have explained. On the one hand, as Levine points out, exposure desensitization therapy can itself be re-traumatizing, which isn’t well-captured in the positive evidence, because reasons for dropout and adverse events were often poorly or inconsistently reported. On the other hand, even when these trauma-memory approaches “work,” they are working against the body’s understanding of things by creating new cognitive-behavioral patterns that suppress the old conditioned fear responses as they come up. That can produce a reduction of symptoms without solving the root of them, in the same way that disciplining a child can force proper behavior without making it natural.
Another very recently discovered problem with CBT-style therapy is it assumes that people actually have some kind of inner narrative thinking, but that’s not true for everyone. So a CBT therapist might ask how you felt about a situation, and you put it into words even if it never was in words to begin with (you literally just felt it). Now the therapist asks you to change your narration, without realizing that it was created for them right then.
The philosophy behind somatic therapies starts from the other end. It assumes that the body actually knows how to release the tension it has stored. Instead of treating dissociation and hyperarousal as symptom endpoints to reduce, they use them to diagnose the structure of nervous system dysregulation. In Levine’s SIBAM model (In An Unspoken Voice, ch. 7), we can understand how dissociation and hyperarousal actually work by splitting up our ordinary holistic experience into five layers. Dissociation is when these layers are not well-connected. Hyperarousal is when channels are so tightly linked that one rapidly activates the others:
Sensation: feelings inside the body, like tension, balance, heat, etc.
Image: what you see, remember, dream
Behavior: voluntary, involuntary, and crucially, actions that got aborted mid-stream during the traumatic incident.
Affect: emotions, like fear, anger, grief, disgust, and joy. Also bodily feelings like vulnerability, hyper-vigilant panic, or profound relief.
Meaning: the story that explains all of these, containing beliefs and judgements.
With this therapeutic model, one can direct their attention toward individual layers of experience that are either flattened/ignored, or hogging the show.
Levine and many other somatic theorists believe that once the body can fully feel itself and unleash the energy that got stuck, the meaning layer that CBT addresses often handles itself. EMDR also works at the bodily level and allows the meaning level to handle itself, but it uses the body more as a barometer and metabolizer of distress encoded in memory networks rather than as the primary instrument of finishing the action that got blocked by trauma.
However, other somatic therapists and even Levine himself (in academic writing like the article linked), agree that re-evaluating the meanings and narratives around trauma can still be useful for many people, especially if the bottom-up process is honored first or concurrently.
Layer 1: Gently Feel Inward and Loosen Up
Breathwork
There are many types of breathwork. My favorites are explained on my breathwork page, and I explain that more at the end of this article. But for the purpose of gentle grounding, I’d say the most useful one is Buteyko reduced breathing. By simply pursing your lips together on exhale, you can slow down your exhale. Slower exhales, combined with not breathing more on inhales, lead to overall reduction in breathing. That slight oxygen hunger feels a bit anxiogenic for the first 20 seconds or so, but after that, you’ll feel much calmer. This targets one actual cause of anxiety, which is over-breathing. You can use this any time, not just during a therapy session.
Somatic Experiencing
I put Somatic Experiencing up at the beginning because it helps people to reconnect with their body, to begin to feel it again. And as you can see from my intro, it’s founder, Peter Levine, has developed what I consider the most comprehensive framework for understanding trauma and the way the body releases it.
Imagine your body is like your child (I keep falling into that analogy 😛). Your child is saying “Mommy, daddy, I need something.” But you’re busy with your work so you don’t hear. After a while, your baby boo is going nuts because you don’t listen, and s/he starts screaming and throwing a fit. Now you yourself are “triggered” or “flooded” and screaming, and you don’t even know why. But if you could just learn to listen to your body before it becomes a crisis, that could solve a lot of problems before they even start!
The usual therapy theory here talks about expanding your “window of tolerance,” but I think my analogy is a better representation of what Levine is trying to say. He uses the concepts of titration (going from the shallow end of the pool slowly deeper), pendulation (going in and out of the deep end to learn safety there), and orientation (coming out of the pool, drying off, noticing you’re safe). That’s the beautiful thing about not actually being in the trauma. Since it’s a memory, you can approach it in an optimal and safe way, bit by bit.
While Levine doesn’t use self-hypnosis in his SE, he has mentioned it can be a valuable fit if done right, which is why I’ve integrated SE into my self-hypnosis guide and app.
A real world example of SE saving a life!
My friend B. is a super intelligent, caring, and hard-working PhD chemist who’s now in 3rd year ivy league med school in Colorado. Ivy league med school work load is absolutely brutal (like some bizarre hazing ritual), and on top of that, various Palestinian family members of his died recently. Plus, he’s been in a relationship recently with a woman with borderline personality for the first time ever. So every kind of stress combined, but he didn’t have time to understand it or deal with it.
Previously, he was a healthy young man. But his body began breaking down and he couldn’t understand why. He had what seemed like a heart attack, a stroke, one-sided paralysis, and all kinds of other “somatic symptoms” as he later understood them. He went to the ER to get checked 3 times in one week. One doctor at the ER told him, “When you’re under a lot of stress, if you don’t listen to your body, your body will figure out a way to get your attention. I think that’s what’s going on here, because there’s nothing wrong in your tests.”
And so B. tried Somatic Experiencing therapy. After just a couple sessions, he was feeling 30% better, and he learned how to pay attention and listen to what his body was asking for. That’s how he went from dying to living again. He concluded from that experience that his medical school training is irrelevant for many health problems because it doesn’t contain the mind-body framework required for understanding this, and it’s a lot more common than doctors might imagine.
Try Somatic Experiencing for FREE!
SE is a therapy you can do for yourself, but it really helps if you have a therapist first, as with most other therapies. As mentioned at the top, as a paid subscriber on my substack, you’re eligible for one free SE intro session with Hâle. She describes what she offers below:
Trauma-Sensitive / Restorative Yoga
After calming down with the breathwork and learning to listen to your body with SE, yoga can help the body-mind connection become more of a two-way conversation, which is more useful in the real world also. After all, we need to move in healthy ways and use our body as well as listen to it. We need to stretch, to have good posture, and to move the energy purposefully in our body so that we are able to meditate (which was the original point of yogic posture training).
Yoga is also good in other layers of the map: after shaking to help the body settle and rebalance; or after deeper processing for stretching and reconnection.
Trauma-sensitive yoga is not the same as power yoga, hot yoga, personal-trainer yoga (“You can do it, push harder!”), nor is it about forcing you to open your hips & psoas muscles to release your trauma. Instead, I’d go with Yin yoga, which is a slow type that’s more focused on developing the mind-body connection and flexibility than it is on looking like you can do cool poses.
A good teacher for this should give you personalized adjustments to your level of comfort. They should use invitational language, like “you might try…” or “see how it feels when you…” rather than “now stay there, just 10 more seconds!” They won’t be pushing one version of the posture on you, but rather seeing what will work best for your body.
Hâle is offering my paid subscribers one free Yin yoga class. She describes it:
Gentle Shaking / TRE
Somatic Experiencing can include some bodily shaking if that is what your body seems to want to do for completing the original activation energy. There’s also a group of somatic therapies that’s more focused on invoking involuntary shaking. You may have heard of TRE/Trauma Release Exercises, which was founded by Dr. Berceli. It can get chaotic and crazy when taken to its limit, but when you just dip your little toe in, it can help to release some stuck energy. Here’s an intro to TRE:
We’ll get more into “shaking medicine” in the next layer.
Layer 2: Regulate or Discharge Accumulated Activation Energy
Now that we’ve felt inward and loosened up with layer 1, perhaps we’ve become aware of some energy that’s wanting to come out. Maybe it doesn’t even care if we’re in a therapy session. So, here are some relatively anytime kind of DIY hacks for that:
EFT / Tapping
The Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) is a very simple anytime anywhere practice that only takes a few seconds or minutes of just lightly tapping on different parts of you head (NOT with a hammer!). It helps with all kinds of situations. Your pet monitor lizard peed on you. Your inner child ran away from home. You’re in a crowd of strange people who think you’re the weirdo. Maybe you think you’re the weirdo and nobody would want to be with you, and that’s making you freeze, panic, or hot and bothered. Whatever is triggering you, EFT comes to the rescue. It’s not a cure for trauma, but it is a nice present-moment re-orienting button.
Massage and Energy Transmission
Massage is one of the most obvious, and yet, one of the most oft-overlooked somatic therapies, possibly because it’s also seen as a luxury pampering service that anyone could enjoy. Imagine your partner says, “you need therapy!” And you say, “Yeah babe can you rub my feet?!” 😜 But therapy shouldn’t always be hard work. Touch itself is critical for mental health, as many studies have shown. And in modern society, many people, especially single people, are touch-starved. But it also depends on who is giving the massage, because it’s a mode of energy transmission. Just as you wouldn’t want to eat food made by someone who was angry, you definitely wouldn’t want to get a massage from someone who hates their job or life.
A good massage can be very grounding, while at the same time showing exactly where your tension is stored, and helping to unravel it. Some massage therapies are super aggressive in that domain, like Rolfing, some are fairly aggressive still like Deep Tissue, some are medium-aggressive, like Thai massage, and some, like Swedish Massage, are quite gentle. Choose the level that feels right for you.
On the other hand, not everyone enjoys a massage, and some people are repulsed by being touched. I’d say first try giving yourself a massage, which is also a lot cheaper usually. I love to gently massage my feet, especially when I wake up in the morning. I also love to massage my head, especially after shaving the hair down fairly low, for that ASMR feeling. And if even your own touch doesn’t feel nice, you can try energy feeling non-touch modalities, like Reiki, or “Therapeutic Touch” (which ironically is mainly non-touch).
Energy Work vs Energy Don’t Work
Energy work comes in many forms. Some common ones are Reiki and sound healing. I’ve had some incredible, mind-blowing Reiki (from Key, Key’s friend Happy Being, who teaches Pranic Healing in Addis and once from Hâle). Interestingly the Reiki from all of them felt exactly the same, like a blissful magical energy wave, even if they called it by another name.
Hâle and I agree that energy healing is not a substitute for more truly somatic therapy that actually helps you listen to your body and use it in a healthier way. While some people do seem to get profound actual resolution of disease or trauma from these energy sessions, I didn’t get anything other than a beautiful magical feeling while it was happening (and I was physically ill most of the times I received, so I should have noticed a benefit). However, my theory is that if you’ve never been exposed to that kind of magic before, it could really open you up and set off some healing process, sort of like faith healing. And I’m sure if it’s done on a more continuous basis, it would be more healing than just feeling it for a few minutes.
I had one friend who went to a ton of different energy healers. He said about 90% of them have zero ability, and that makes sense to me. Anyone can take a course and then get certified as a Reiki Master, but if you don’t have the actual connection to good energy, you might never even realize that. Here’s one Reiki master that’s popular on YouTube. From this video, it sounded to me like he actually doesn’t know what Reiki feels like. Although I haven’t watched his others. I left a comment, hopefully he doesn’t take it bad:
As with massage, giving your energy to others can be really taxing, especially if they have a lot of trauma. That’s why energy healers have their protocols for cleansing with salt water and so forth, but I’m still not convinced how well they work. What I do notice about a lot of energy healers (not all), is that their own lives are a wreck and they often either have to quit or limit their sessions only to people who they feel good with. And another thing I notice about real energy healers is they tend to be empaths, in the sense of feeling everyone’s energy all the time without trying. That kind of pushes them to learn powerful self-healing practices, and it also explains why they often tend to be unstable personally (including my first wife, who was incredible at massage and supposedly a Reiki master altho she never gave me any Reiki).
Sound Healing
Sound healing is one type of energy work that doesn’t completely depend on the healer’s own internal connection to whatever this magical universal energy is. You can actually hear their sounds on YouTube/etc and see how good they are. So it’s partly some actual kind of musical talent and partly their connection to good energy. And that’s helpful in one sense, to see who has talent and who doesn’t, but it’s also possible you could be blinded by someone who has incredibly beautiful music, like the psychopath iboga shaman, Sidney Simila, without any actual good energy.
The most authentic and amazing sound healer I know (aside from stars like Chantress Seba) is Hâle’s friend, Asli. Don’t ask her for a session though, she’s not taking new clients. I’ll never forget the “sound healing” session I went to in Philadelphia some years ago. It was literally just someone playing some dumb YouTube sound healing videos on a speaker in a room with a bunch of people, each of whom paid $10. Freakin’ hilarious! That’s what I’m saying though. If you know, you know. If you don’t, you don’t.
But the other truth really is that you don’t necessarily need any talent or magic to make incredible healing sound. A giant gong or sound sword really can do miracles, for example.
Ecstatic Dance & Shaking Qigong / Shaking Medicine
Shaking Qigong is a creative fusion of TRE style shaking with qigong. Qigong is an ancient sort of “martial art” designed for health. It looks a bit like Tai Chi, with slow, flowing movements connected to the breath. Qi/Chi means vital energy, and the idea is that health is automatic when your Qi is flowing well. Emotional blocks or physiological blocks can block that Qi flow.
The form I am linking to is a class for $10 per month on Skool which my friend Louka took. I am recommending this specific class because Louka tried many different healing and somatic modalities, including basic TRE, but nothing helped him much until he got into this class. I do not recommend taking the super expensive personal coaching from the teacher of the class unless you can easily afford it.
We already discussed gentle TRE/shaking in Layer 1. Now we’re getting deeper into it. This is what we talked about also in the introduction, how an animal needs to shake off the activation energy from when they were in flight/flight/freeze before they can heal. If the Somatic Experiencing didn’t get that wiggles out of you completely, you’ve come to the right Layer.
Some people think the benefits you get from dance, and especially ecstatic dance, might be connected to the benefits provided by shaking. Both of them contain rhythmic movement, muscular de-armoring, greater mind-body connection, and basically just a release. So if you prefer wild dancing, you can try that. If you prefer to try discharging all this pent up energy in a more organized therapeutic framework, you can try shaking medicine. Either way, it can still get crazy! Personally, I don’t feel super open for dancing unless I’m kinda high, because there’s a social/show aspect to it.
With shaking medicine, we might aim for a regular practice of 10-45 minutes, or whatever you feel resonates. The main thing is you want to be able to settle and orient yourself afterwards. With ecstatic dance, people could sometimes go all night.
I would not consider shaking or dancing to be a full trauma therapy all by itself. I’d say it’s more of an opening tool. It’s also not appropriate for everyone, as it can cause dissociation when overdone. One physical safety note: forceful, rapid back-and-forth neck movement can injure the neck. Make sure you’re supervised and held if you’re going that deep.
The Discharge → Settle Stack
One daily sequence I like is simple:
Shaking Qigong / TRE to discharge excess activation.
Restorative or gentle yin yoga to rebalance energy flow and mind-body cooperation.
Massage to ground back down lovingly.
EFT tapping if there is still emotional activation or mental looping at any point in the day.
I have some stuck energy in my solar plexus because I got beaten up every day in kindergarten, with kids punching me right there. When I wiggle that out, I feel like I can put my hand on there and the other hand on my heart and open up some nice inner-child self-love feedback loop. Everyone will feel something different, but pay attention to what’s new, what’s freeer, what’s nicer than before. Sometimes you can miss it if you’re not paying attention.
Layer 3: Compassionate Exploration of Trauma Feelings Before the Story Comes In
After becoming more aware of bodily sensations and doing some cycles of crude discharge/settle, it’s time for some practices that can help you go deeper in a nuanced, loving and gentle way.
Aquatic Bodywork / Water Therapy for Deeper Exploration
My friend Hâle is trained in aquatic bodywork (see her video). I helped her attend her training. I observed it, and she taught me some also. If you can get to her, you can get a free intro session as a paid subscriber!
She finds people tend to regress to a much younger state in the water, even to the point of feeling as if they’re back in the womb. We have both been surprised to see how many people are crying during and after their sessions. You’re warm, floating, being held lovingly (assuming you have a good water therapist). It’s also a uniquely powerful physical therapy. The therapist can stretch and move you in directions that would be very hard to reproduce on land. We both agree water therapy is an excellent introduction or bridge to inner child reparenting.
The thing Hâle worries about is that the emotional effect can outrun the therapist. She doesn’t like dropping somebody straight into a water session cold. She first wants to know what they’re feeling, where they are in their journey, and what they want to work on. Then the water. Afterward, she gives an intuitive massage to close back up what was opened, and return them to their current physical body. And if something is still open, she’s still available for them later to help process.
I would ask a water therapist about that before I booked: what happens if I come out much more emotionally open than I went in?
Now before you squawk that water therapy is just another newfangled tomfoolery to make your wallet lighter, or that it’s just the Western misunderstanding of Chinese water torture, there is actual research on WATSU, one branch of aquatic bodywork. A 2024 randomized study found immediate improvements in body awareness, pain and mood after WATSU, and a 2025 retrospective PTSD study (without control group) in 111 veterans found PTSD symptoms were reduced immediately after a course of trauma-informed aquatic therapy.
Keep in mind that some people are prone to “swimmer’s ear” infections. There are drops at the pharmacy for this. Ear plugs help, but are not fully protective.
Brainspotting
Brainspotting is a lot more accessible for most people than water therapy. You don’t need a pool at home, and you don’t even need a therapist in many cases for this. It’s another type of gentle exploration. It doesn’t go so deep and feel so amazing as water therapy of course, but it does help to find where, in your actual field of vision, do you feel safe vs re-activated.
It’s a quick and fun practice you can try right now which is especially suitable for diffuse or pre-verbal trauma which might not have an exact memory associated with it:
Further reading: D’Antoni et al., 2022 — Comparative study of EMDR, Brainspotting, and related methods
Layer 4: Unstick the Memories You Can Actually Point To
This is the part of the map I think of as targeted memory work or “reconsolidation,” which refers to the way we untangle the charged memory, reprocess its significance, and put it back together in a healthier way, while still being honest about what happened. It works best when you are having flashbacks to a specific event, rather than something more general that brainspotting or other prior therapies could touch with a broader brush. The goal here is to reduce the “stickiness” of these memories, so that we don’t get stuck every time they pop up.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing
EMDR is the main modality designed exactly for reducing the charge held by specific traumatic events, like accidents, assaults, fights to the death, and so forth. Although it’s not completely understood how it works, the best theory is that by moving the eyes from side to side (or doing some other type of bilateral stimulation), you can split your attention, which weakens the durability of the memory you’re focusing on. In that more flexible state, you can re-encode a positive image (like, “I can handle this.”) onto the event before memory hardens again.
While EMDR is often treated as a therapy for anyone with trauma, the truth is that going directly into the trauma memory can sometimes be re-traumatizing. Not everyone handles EMDR well, which is one reason I have all these other layers here. After an EMDR session, it’s a good idea to do some grounding activities.
Hypnosis, the ancestral therapy
Inner Signal Guide to Self-Hypnosis (& APP), including Reparenting, Conscious-Subconscious Spiritual Communion
This guide has an app coming soon! Working hard
Hypnosis is a therapy as old as time itself. While the modern technique of it was discovered by Franz Anton Mesmer in the 1770s, shamans have been using dancing, music, and drugs to induce hypnosis for therapeutic purposes forever. We enter into trance states every night which resemble hypnosis as we go to sleep and as we wake up as well. Those states can also be used for deep therapy.
It’s interesting that EMDR used to be critiqued as a re-branded, minimal distillation of hypnosis. Even when you look at moving the eyes back and forth, that’s almost the classic hypnotic induction. That’s not to say that EMDR is hypnosis or it requires suggestibility, but the idea of splitting your attention is also similar. In hypnosis we use attention splitting to subdue the conscious mind and allow access to the lower-level programming layer in the subconscious.
I believe hypnosis can be an even more powerful reprogramming tool in many ways than EMDR, but because it depends so heavily on the technique and skill of the therapist (or you if you’re doing self-hypnosis), it is harder to do randomized trials to measure the effect size, which is why insurance generally doesn’t cover it.
One thing that’s exceptionally useful and dangerous with hypnosis is its ability to give us information we normally don’t have access to. You might have tried many things to understand what happened to you in childhood, and yet you still can’t quite remember. Maybe you can’t even remember your childhood at all. In that case, EMDR might be useless. Hypnosis could be uniquely useful there. But we need to be very careful to treat the memories recovered this way as provisional. They can bring up real feelings for us to work on, but the actual event narratives may be confabulated, and require empirical verification. I would treat the memories like dreams to start with.
I’m personally not a fan of mainstream command hypnosis, which is why I wrote my communion self-hypnosis guide that also integrates my inner-child reparenting therapy as well as Somatic Experiencing methods.
Layer 5: Integrate, Differentiate, and Build a Life of Meaning
Narrative and Cognitive Integration
Once we’ve tuned into our body, our subconscious, and moved the energy in the ways it needed to move, there’s still the cognitive integration layer, because we’re actually humans, not just animals. This is the part that insurance often does pay for to start with (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, etc.), although this guide is predicated on the idea that it’s not always the best place to start.
When I say cognitive integration, I’m talking about revisiting old beliefs, identities, and stories, now that their foundations might have crumbled a bit. We need to rebuild all that so it makes sense now that we’re seeing clearer. When we re-evaluate and start to see that maybe we are actually safe now, we can also take back our power. And at the same time, we might even realize we need to apologize to some folks for painting a picture that we wouldn’t paint about them anymore. We may begin to forgive, and ask for forgiveness. Conversely, we might realize we need to put up better boundaries with people that we let in too easily.
Inner-child reparenting is another form of integration therapy, although it’s more all-encompassing and less purely cognitive, so it can fit in this layer as well as beyond it.
Optional High-Intensity State-Shift and Release Practices
If you feel like somatic therapies are not really cracking you open even after neurological de-armoring, or if they have already started working but you feel you’re ready to dive deeper, here are a few suggestions that I’ve benefited from.
Sky Hypnosis is a very quick 10-second technique I modified from the even quicker 2-second technique that went viral on YouTube a while back. It’s exhilarating, but also brings an immense calm which lasts quite a while after, especially if you sit down and meditate at the end.
Vagal Blitz breathwork is a more powerful technique in the same vein. I developed this by modifying Wim Hof’s breathwork to get the benefits that I sometimes got using his approach to come out more quickly & reliably.
Safety note: both of these methods are designed to produce lightheadedness, and both of them may be risky if you have heart disease. Practice gently at first to see how safe and manageable it is for you. Use the complete guide for each, and don’t feel like you need to do these if they seem dangerous.
Psychedelics
The idea of radically changing your state of mind and body can’t be discussed without mentioning psychedelics. With a high enough dose of these, you won’t even know whether you have a mind and a body or what the difference is!
I’ve gotten tremendous benefits from using psychedelics, but not just any of them. Especially loveyhuasca, cactus, and iboga. These natural plant allies also have immense health benefits. It seems like every month some new study comes out showing how different psychedelics can treat a vast range of physical illnesses. That’s partly due to actual physiological mechanisms, and partly through the mind-body interaction.
You can use psychedelics on their own, although they work much better for trauma when carefully integrated into therapy. Go low and go slow, though, because these tools are infinitely powerful, and you can easily end up worse than you went in if you aren’t careful.
Advanced practices can be a bypass
Aside from the intensity risk of these optional practices, one must also consider the risk of too much good feelings from them (or from anything else). We can use good feelings as a distraction from actual healing. That’s called bypassing, and it’s often discussed in the context of spiritual bypassing. where people use spiritual practices to escape the problems of their personal life.
How I Judge Whether Any of This Is Helping
As mentioned in the Intro section, you will be the final judge of what’s helping, obviously. I say obviously, but I’m surprised by how many people try a particular practice or therapy even for many years just because they trust their therapist, with nothing to show for it at the end. Of course, that’s part of being disconnected from yourself. But we need to consciously take agency back here, not just be passive doers or receivers of whatever therapy we’ve paid for or heard about.
It is good to do some research before jumping into a long course of therapy, especially if it will cost a lot in time or money. But even if you have a zillion studies saying this therapy has a large effect size on the thing you’re treating, it’s still interesting to talk to people who’ve done these therapies and see how they were before vs after. It’s still important to see if they make some kind of sense, and finally, you still have to dip your feet in and see if it’s a fit for you.
While we’re in the therapy, as well as after, apart from tracking obvious things like how well we’re sleeping or how well we can focus, we should look at whether we have more capacity to meet pain, more honesty, virtue, proper boundaries, and healthier social interactions. Or are we still avoiding grief, conflict, practical difficulties, and relational healing?
And as for selecting a therapist, word of mouth is one of the best ways. Interview them and see how they respond. Are they able to show you a bit of what they can do and what their philosophy is before charging you? Do they actually seem like they care, or they just want to get a quick $250? If they are soliciting clients, chances are they aren’t very good. Good therapists usually already have too many clients. And that actually pushes them to be less open for extending free sessions, so it’s a bit of a catch-22.