Trauma, the body, and how Alexander technique can help

Working with the Alexander technique has much to offer those of us who have been through traumatic experiences of various kinds and who have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), hypervigilance (being extremely alert for potential danger), and/or an overly activated or dysregulated nervous system, with high levels of resulting stress and anxiety.

What happens in the body with trauma

Post-traumatic stress symptoms have their origin in the entire body’s response to the original trauma. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk notes the experience of trauma changes the nervous system and that trauma is held and stored in the body and in tension in bodily tissues and that this tension held in people’s bodies makes them uncoordinated.[1] Biological fight–flight, freeze, and fawn responses are more exaggerated in those who have been through traumatic experiences.

The experience of trauma can also keep people stuck in the past in many ways as they continue to experience chronic biological hyperarousal of the sympathetic nervous system, bodily tension, and hypervigilance. People can also be left with heightened startle responses and intensely physically uncomfortable extreme emotions and emotional triggers, flashbacks, and repetition compulsions around the repetition of past events.

Those of us who have been through traumatic experiences can also disassociate ourselves from our bodies and the way our emotions are felt in our bodies in an effort to shut off terrifying sensations. Sadly, in doing so, we may deaden our capacity to feel fully alive. This alienation from our bodies can also be expressed in different forms of body hatred and just not being as kind and loving towards our bodies as they truly deserve.

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk says that with trauma, “The mind needs to be reeducated to feel physical sensations, and the body needs to be helped to tolerate and enjoy the comforts of touch”.[2]

This mind–body re-education is what the Alexander technique can help with.

Helping those with trauma

While talking therapies are obviously of great benefit to people who are dealing with trauma and PTSD, these can tend to largely ignore the nervous system and the realities that go with an overly activated nervous system or one frozen in fear.

Trauma that is preverbal (ie, related to attachment trauma and early life events) is also not necessarily helped that well by talking therapies. In fact, in some ways, all trauma is preverbal or non-verbal as one of the speech centres of the brain, Broca’s area in the left frontal lobe of the cortex, goes offline during traumatic experiences.[3] This unfortunately makes these experiences very difficult to talk about. Instead, people who have been through traumatic experiences tend to be left with bodies that re-experience impressions of terror, rage, and helplessness. We may also have unbearable bodily sensations and intense impulses to fight or flee, or we may feel frozen and numb inside. Yet these experiences are almost impossible to put in words.

As a psychophysical re-educational method, the Alexander technique helps people to start to slowly reconnect with and feel safe in their bodies. It excels at dealing with the autonomic nervous system and calming biological fight–flight, freeze, and fawn responses and actively retraining deeply ingrained habitual reactions. It does this via the technique’s means whereby – the inhibition (stopping) and non-doing of habitual reactions to stimuli and the sending of anti-stress directions to the body while allowing new responses.

Alexander technique also helps to regulate the overly aroused threat detection system seen in post-traumatic stress and hyperarousal through a combination of using mindfulness and tuning the person into bodily sensations (what van der Kolk calls a ‘top-down approach’[4]) and recalibration of the nervous system through touch and changes to the breath and movement (what van der Kolk calls a ‘down-up approach’[5]).

In comparison to talking therapies, the Alexander technique, as a form of hands-on re-education, is less concerned with the reasons why we are the way we are and is more concerned with how we are in the present and how we may stop automatic and unthinking habitual reactions to change what we are doing in the now.

How the Alexander technique can help

The experience of Alexander lessons can restore a sense of physical safety. Alexander technique grounds us and gets us back in touch with our bodies in a gentle and non-threatening way.

The Alexander technique uses gentle and supportive touch. The relationship developed between the Alexander technique teacher and client through that touch is a nurturing, healing process that helps us feel looked after, safe, and reassured. The teacher uses their nervous system to begin to calm our more activated nervous systems. This relationship developed through touch can mirror early developmental and attachment processes. It allows us to feel safe and reassured, and helps us foster increasing wellbeing and independence over time.[6]

The use of the Alexander technique’s principles of the inhibition and non-doing of our habitual reactions and the sending of anti-stress directions to the body also quietens the nervous system and lowers activation levels, including calming the exaggerated ‘back and down’ fight–flight response and/or head-dropped fawn response seen in many of us with PTSD or who have been through trauma. As part of this, the conscious bodily lengthening involved in the Alexander directions for the body stimulates the vagus nerve (highlighted in Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory) and the parasympathetic nervous system, helping to return the body to homeostasis (balance).

In the Alexander technique, mindfulness and observation are combined with the technique’s principles of inhibition and direction sending – to re-educate our sensory perception and improve our whole psychophysical functioning. As we work with the technique’s principles and its focus on reaction change, we slowly reconnect with our bodies and a new mind–body integration slowly develops.

This new mind–body integration can help us to overcome any dissociation (detachment from our physical and emotional experiences), depersonalisation (where our thoughts and feelings seem unreal), and/or emotional numbing that we may feel after traumatic experiences. This enables our feelings to be more fully felt and resolved and let go as needed, so we begin to feel safe and more alive again.

Alexander technique also helps us to regulate extreme emotions as the self-regulation of extreme emotions depends on having a friendly and accepting relationship with our bodies and the bodily sensations associated with emotions. Lessons in the Alexander technique can help us to rebuild this friendly and accepting relationship with our bodies.

Using the Alexander technique to retrain habitual reactions to stimuli and to build up more positive responses can help to get rid of the feeling of being ‘stuck’ – whether in the past trauma or in some repetition compulsion. Alexander technique brings people into the present. It is only in the present that we can know where we are and be aware of what is going on with us. It is only in the present that we can make real concrete changes, one step at a time.

Agency – your ability to own and control your own life, which is needed to overcome trauma – starts with an awareness of our subtle sensory, body-based feelings. The greater the awareness we have, the greater our potential to control our lives. Knowing what we feel is the first step to knowing why we feel that way and what we want to do about it.

While the Alexander technique starts with working the biological stress response and how we physically react to stimuli, habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting and moving through life can all be worked with and addressed. As we change how we respond to diverse stimuli, we build new, more positive ways of being and new positive habits and neural pathways to replace older, less positive ones.

Patrick Macdonald, a first-generation Alexander technique teacher, used to say the Alexander technique gives us back what we have been robbed of.

It can give us back a level of peace and help us to reintegrate the different parts of our whole mind–body selves.

Interested in trying the Alexander technique?

If you have post-traumatic stress, hypervigilance, and/or an activated nervous system with high levels of stress and anxiety and would like to work with me, please do reach out. I would love to help.

Sometimes those who have post-traumatic stress also have sensory processing differences or they are wired a bit differently from the norm. I can help with those issues too.