Trauma Touch Massage Therapy
My junior year of college my best friend went through a series of difficult events and sicknesses which eventually triggered and lead to the uncovering of suppressed childhood trauma. I still remember the night that she had her first painful and fully embodied flash back. Following that night, she had fairly severe PTSD. I remember driving to therapy sessions with her and her boyfriend—now husband. We would sit in the waiting room during her sessions and then afterward the therapist would invite us in to teach us different strategies to intervene in helpful ways during difficult flashbacks and nightmares. We learned grounding techniques and breath practices, and I am forever thankful for that experience. I am additionally thankful that my friend trusted me to walk through that journey with her. She is still my dearest friend.
The reason I mention that is because—though she never fully recovered the details of her trauma— the trauma she experienced took the shape of repeated abused by a woman close to her, though not a family member. During some of her more difficult flash backs I was unable to sit near her or touch her in any way because it sent her into further panic. It took many weeks of therapy and yoga for her to begin to feel safe in her own body again, and to feel comfortable with another female touching her. It was difficult not being able to hug my best friend; not being able to rub her back or hold her hand when she couldn’t catch her breath.
After one of my friend’s therapy sessions the therapist talked to me and mentioned that my friend wanted to begin to work on experiencing safe touch again, and because she trusted me she wanted me to enter into that work with her. The therapist gave me some articles on abuse survivors and the recovery to trusting touch again, but she also pointed me in the direction of a method that has fascinated me ever since. She told me about a massage therapy certification program called Trauma Touch Therapy. Though the program is still only offered at a select number of schools around the country, I was fascinated by the literature around it. The program website states that the program itself is “designed to train massage therapists to work at an advanced level with individuals who have experienced trauma and abuse” (http://www.csha.net/advanced/trauma.html).
Though I am not a licensed massage therapist—which is a requirement for the further Trauma Touch licensing—I became extremely interested in the fact that there were methods outside of the confines of the talk-therapist’s office or the pharmacy for dealing with PTSD. At this point in my education I was very unfamiliar with trauma and had not studied it at all. The concept of trauma being stored in the body as we have read in Bessel van der Kolk (Van Der Kolk 2014) was absolutely revolutionary to me. One article that I first encountered says, “People who have been traumatized are no longer at home in their bodies. Talk therapy alone does not always adequately address the fear and mistrust that has been encoded into their bodies. In a multidisciplinary context, massage therapy can help bring clients back into themselves by increasing their ability to feel safety and mastery in the world, to be freely curious without fear, to feel comfortable with their body, and to experience boundaried intimacy with another human being.” (Dryden 2000)
I still hope to someday (hopefully soon) become a licensed massage therapist and become certified in Trauma Touch therapy. Though my friend and I were able to walk through her PTSD journey in different ways and recover her sense of embodiment and non-threatening touch, Trauma Touch therapy is a skill that I would love to have to be able to legally extend that healing to many more people.
Dryden, T., M.ED.,R.M.T. (2000, March 21). Recovering Body and Soul from Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder. Retrieved April 21, 2017, from https://www.amtamassage.org/articles/3/MTJ/detail/1817
Van Der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of
Trauma. NY, NY: Penguin Books.