Trauma-informed self-defense can promote healing

Our training emphasizes a respectful and compassionate environment. Trauma-informed self-defense can not only make you safer; it can also promote healing.

Respectful training for people who have been attacked can reaffirm a sense of personal power and can be effective in healing the emotional scars of trauma. See for example, Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., The Body Keeps the Score (2014), Judith Herman, M.D., Trauma and Recovery, (2015), Peter A. Levine. Ph.D., In an Unspoken Voice – How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness (2010).

Trauma-informed training can help trainees supplant their body memories of helplessness and paralysis with new sensations of power and control, promoting trauma recovery and healing.

Trauma-informed self-defense training takes into account the effects of trauma on memory formation, storage, and retrieval. As noted trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk explains, the body keeps the score. See, Van der Kolk, Bessel, The Body Keeps the Score: brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma © 2014 Penguin Books, Levine, Peter A. Levine, Trauma and Memory, North Atlantic Books, (2015); Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery – the Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (2015). 

Trauma experts Bessel van der Kolk and Peter Levine explain that we can heal from trauma through active physical practice.

As neuroscientists have discovered over the last decades, our neural systems are plastic. We can restructure our neural systems and our body’s cellular memories.

Thus, in addition to offering violence prevention options, trauma-informed self-defense training can also help people to restructure their body memories so that they can recover from trauma.