Women and Trauma: How Embodied Yoga Practices Can Help
Trigger warning: This post talks about trauma from sexual violence.
Embodied group yoga practices have a positive contribution towards reversing the neurological impact of trauma on the female mind-body. In this post I examine the impact of trauma on the human brain, on human DNA, and then specific considerations to females. I look at neuroplasticity and epigenetics and the potential they offer of reversing the effects of trauma on the brain and on DNA. Finally I investigate how yoga practices can be used to help with this reversal of traumatic impact, with a specifically female viewpoint.
Impact of trauma on the human brain
A word initially about the two types of trauma:
Shock trauma: This is the trauma of sudden events such as accident, sudden death of a loved one or violent attack.
Developmental trauma: This is the trauma of childhood physical or sexual abuse or neglect.
Unlike wild animals, when threatened we humans have never solved the dilemma of whether to fight or flee (perhaps because we have been both predator and predated in our history). An impala will freeze in the jaws of a lion, but if the lion is disturbed, the impala will recover, shake off the experience, and soon be back to eating grass. When humans are confronted with a life-threatening situation however, we don’t know whether to fight or flee; instead we can freeze, which will result in the creation of trauma symptoms. Psychological trauma can also be caused by a traumatic incident due to fear of not being able to escape. These feelings can become trapped in the body.
Both trauma types also profoundly alter the mind (Levine 1997: 4). I recall that, during my personal experience of serious accident, I did not experience an emotional reaction to what had happened for many days. My body and mind’s mechanisms for dissociation kicked in, meaning that I was able to have laser focus on the actions that needed to happen. Only after I had ensured that my family were safe, I had received the surgery that I needed, my physiotherapist had helped me get out of bed and get walking again, did I take myself to a bench with a beautiful view and allow myself to emotionally process what had happened in the preceding days. Sometimes however, if trauma is ongoing and persistent, we never have that opportunity for the dissociation and denial to wear off and for the necessary emotional processing to occur. We remain in a situation where the traumatic experience is trapped in the body, and has profoundly altered the mind.
Where the stress is repetitive or unprocessed, chronic stress leads to negativity and self-protection, and this can wear down healthy brain structures networks. Van der Kolk said the brain ‘fragments’ under stress; it grows stress-reacted structures, and networks that actually just make us more and more ready to filter to look for stress. ‘Confirmation bias’ is the tendency that humans have to look for facts that align with and reinforce opinions that we hold. A stress-accustomed brain behaves with confirmation bias too; it looks for and reacts to more stress, in a vicious cycle, growing more reactive trauma circuits, leading to chronic reactivity and stress-related illnesses.
Impact of trauma on human DNA
‘Our bodies are the texts that carry the memories and therefore remembering is not less than reincarnation.’ - Katy Cannon (quoted in Van der Kolk 2015: 184)
Epigenetics is the science of study of is the study of biological mechanisms that switch genes on and off; and these mechanisms can be both through nature and nurture. Moreover, and importantly, gene patterns can be passed to offspring (Van der Kolk 2015: 152). We inherit trauma in our DNA. Van der Kolk even goes as far to say that developmental trauma is a hidden epidemic in our society; parents who are subject to development trauma caused by childhood abuse are extremely likely to perpetuate the trauma by abusing their children, and the DNA traits are passed on until the cycle can be broken.
Specific considerations to females
‘Rape, properly understood, is more like an injury to the brain than a violent variation on sex.’ - Naomi Wolf
Wolf (2013: 113-165) describes how rape and deliberate vaginal trauma is a frequent and deliberate strategy of war; her hypothesis for this is that, due to the uniquely female vulnerability of the vagina as what she calls the ‘mediator of [female] consciousness’, the perpetration of violence to a woman’s vagina is the most efficient way to break a woman psychologically. Wolf says that when a woman is raped, or sexually abused in childhood, her body and brain may be repatterned for the rest of her life in ways that embed fear and predispose her to more easily triggered stress responses, and permanently change her sympathetic nervous system, crucial to healthy sexual arousal and response. Rape and sexual assault are not just a form of forced sex; they should also be understood as a form of injury to the brain and body, and even as a variant of castration.
Neuroplasticity and the potential of reversing the effects of trauma on the brain and body
‘Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence.’ (Levine 1997: 1)
The brain is part of the nervous system, and the function of the nervous system is to process information. The brain is constantly changing – both functionally and structurally – due to the information coursing through it. The structural change due to different experiential and informational processing is called neuroplasticity. The good news regarding both shock trauma and developmental trauma is that the understanding of neuroplasticity, the flexibility of brain circuits, is helping us to address the challenge of rewiring the brains of people who have been programmed through both nature and nurture to feel helpless, experience others as threats, and become stuck in fight/flight/freeze behaviours (Van der Kolk 2015: 149-168).
The key to processing emotion is to let it pass through the body until it is no longer felt. Moving our bodies can help us to process and release trapped emotion. With carefully selected hatha yoga practices, we can help to shift these stuck feelings and also take advantage of neuroplasticity to rewire the brain. Read more about yoga for trauma healing here.
Van Der Kolk et al’s study of 2014 used yoga as in intervention for previously ‘treatment-resistant’ adult women with chronic PTSD arising from assaults that started in childhood. The figure below shows the results of the study.
Figure 1. Results from Van Der Kolk et al study (2014)
The study results showed that a 10-week weekly yoga program can significantly reduce PTSD symptoms in women with chronic treatment-resistant PTSD, whereas a control group without yoga intervention reverted to symptoms they had before the trial. What is interesting about the control group, is that their interventions were of a social, supportive nature, encouraging the sharing of food and maintenance of contact outside of formal sessions. This group’s symptoms decreased at a rate even greater than the yoga group, but were not sustained, and rose again, after the study period. The study results support the theory that yoga decreases trauma symptoms and builds resilience in female trauma-sufferers, but what it also showed is that, for this female group at least, building of strong shared community has a potentially even greater remedial effect on the symptoms of trauma, but it needs to be sustained in order for the results to be retained. Yoga has the advantage, despite the results being relatively slower to achieve, of building resilience such that the results are sustained beyond the time of the practice.
Can we also reverse the impact to our DNA?
Acquired or inherited epigenetic changes modulate gene expression states without modifying the DNA sequence itself; i.e. they can be long-lasting, but they are potentially reversible. Studies such as Kaliman (2019) have explored whether meditation-based interventions can influence gene expression profiles towards healthier directions, identifying candidate genes and biological pathways that seem to be sensitive to contemplative practices. Kaliman does note however that to date, the clinical implications of the potential long-lasting epigenetic bases remain mostly unknown. This is certainly a positive beginning however.
Conclusions
‘The magnitude of the trauma generated by the events that are affecting our world exact a toll on families, communities, and entire populations. Trauma can be self-perpetuating. Trauma begets trauma and will continue to do so, eventually crossing generations in families, communities and countries until we take steps to contain its propagation.’ (Levine 1997: 8-9)
‘How we handle trauma (as individuals, communities and societies) greatly influences the quality of our lives. It ultimately affects how or even whether we will survive as a species.’ (Levine 1997: 2)
In conclusion, practices that build and reinforce community have been shown to have fast and positive, but not lasting impact, on traumatised female populations. Current neuroscience is showing that the property of neuroplasticity holds the key to re-shaping the traumatised brain and body, through embodied yoga practices to build in lasting resilience and move away from the negative downward spiral of trauma in our minds and bodies. How powerful therefore to combine both the social and contemplative practices for a truly nurturing and healing experience for women. There is also potential and hope that future research could indicate that we can also impact DNA and hence also heal future generations.
The most important qualities for a yoga therapist are those of courage and hope. Engaging with our own trauma with the intention of healing requires courage, and results from the fields of neuroscience and epigenetics give us hope that we can bring about this positive change, for the sakes of ourselves and of those who inherit our DNA.
Thank you for reading! You may also be interested in The Power of Yoga for Healing of Trauma and The Science of Spirit.
My next Yoga Teacher Training programme starts in January 2024.
References
Kaliman, Perla (2019) Epigenetics and meditation, Current Opinion in Psychology, Volume 28, 76-80, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.11.010.
Levine, P. A. (1997) Waking the Tiger – Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Van der Kolk, B., Stone, L., West, J., Rhodes, A., Emerson, D., Suvak, M., Spinazzola, J. (2014) Yoga as an adjunctive treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder: a randomized controlled trial. J Clin Psychiatry. 2014 Jun; 75(6):e559‐65. doi: 10.4088/JCP.13m08561.
Van der Kolk, B. (2015) The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma, Penguin.
Wolf, Naomi (2013) Vagina: A New Biography, Virago.