Body Mind Spirit

I met with a counselor last week that contacted me to initiate an exercise program or event for her clients who suffer from post traumatic stress disorder. Her clients suffer from sexual trauma or other major events that has affected them and they have difficulty moving on. She spoke about recall and memory and how it is not isolated to the brain. She reaches out to her clients and helps them mentally work through their problems but sees the need to also work on the physical side to “re-write” pathways in the brain and body. Most have a safety mechanism that allows them to “check out” in a sense so they will have times where they don’t feel that their body is their own.
It was fascinating to me to listen to this. I am a believer in the connection between body mind and spirit. I have never met a patient that is in excrutiating pain and smiling, jumping around with movement. I usually see just the opposite that when someone is hurting physically they take a protective posture, appear tired, feel weak and worn out. I can see the connection between those who suffer from post traumatic stress and feeling pain physically or carrying their trauma physically and not just mentally. I think we all exprience this with our senses. The smell of cookies that reminds us childhood memories or touching an object and the texture takes us back to another time, hearing a song and being reminded of a person or event.
The goal of the exercise is to develop new neural pathways to make connections with the body once again. We will accomplish this by performing activities that are new or require a high level of concentration. The program will run for 8 weeks. It’s really not too difficult as we will have everyone partner up so you have to pay attention to someone else and then give exercises that involve the two people working together. This will be done in a circuit in two minute increments with music playing. Basically it will be controlled chaos.
One of the counselors is doing a study so she will take surveys which we know are not the best indicators to see if we were successful but this is quite common with psychological studies. Without knowing the results I am sure we will see a change.
I have always thought of exercise and physical activity as the “silver bullet” but mostly for medical conditions such as obesity, diabetes, coronary artery disease and so on. I had never thought about a psychological application for treatment of PTSD. It makes sense and my belief in body, mind and spirit is further strengthened.