How Somatic Therapy Can Help You Recover from Medical Trauma
How to work with the body to heal from medical trauma.
3 min read
When we think of trauma, what comes to mind might be an image of a veteran returning from war or a survivor of physical or sexual violence. We might also be familiar with the trauma that comes from childhood abuse or neglect. A kind of trauma that doesn’t come to mind as frequently, but is no less devastating, is medical trauma.
So what is medical trauma? Like other traumas, it overwhelms the body, putting it in a state of fight, flight, or freeze. The form it takes though is as diverse as the medical and health experiences of the people who endure it. David Charme, a therapist at Downtown Somatic Therapy notes, “A bad break from a trip and fall can lead to a sudden cascade of overwhelming experiences – an unexpected emergency surgery, complications during or after the surgery, and medical errors during the hospital stay, any of which can overwhelm a person.”
Even just having anesthesia can be traumatic. Childbirth experiences can also be traumatic. Aside from the more obvious hospital related causes of trauma, there’s also trauma that can occur from receiving a serious diagnosis or suddenly developing a chronic illness like long Covid, something that those living in New York City can relate to.
“A bad break from a trip and fall can lead to a sudden cascade of overwhelming experiences – an unexpected emergency surgery, complications during or after the surgery, and medical errors during the hospital stay, any of which can overwhelm a person.”
Often it’s only after we’ve left the hospital, recovered from an illness, or departed from our doctor’s office, that the impact of our trauma can be felt.
What makes medical trauma so hard to live with is the silence that accompanies it. As Downtown Somatic Therapy therapist David Charme notes, “so often what can make medical trauma worse is the sense of aloneness that people feel when what they went through isn’t validated or acknowledged by doctors, medical staff, or friends and family.” Silence can communicate to medical trauma survivors that what happened to them isn’t a big deal.
Recovering from medical trauma can be challenging, especially when our inner voice tells us that we should feel better. Medical trauma survivors also have to contend with family and friends who may not be equipped to give the support that’s needed, and who in place of offering space and validation, can sometimes push people to “move on.”
“So often what can make medical trauma worse is the sense of aloneness that people feel when what they went through isn’t validated or acknowledged by doctors, medical staff, or friends and family.”
Somatic therapy can help people recover from medical trauma. The first way it does this is by helping to undo aloneness. Even when friends and family are involved, so much of the time is spent going through things alone. Therapies such as AEDP can help medical trauma survivors undo their aloneness and feel all the emotions that couldn’t be experienced and felt at the time.
Somatic therapy can also help people to rediscover a felt sense of safety. For example, Sensorimotor Therapy works directly with the body to help individuals to make contact with and create internal resources. As Downtown Somatic Therapy therapist David Charme notes, “When trauma occurs, the body has been sent into a fight, flight, freeze, or immobilized state, which is not a place of calm and safety. And even after the trauma is over, our bodies store the trauma, so what occurred still feels very much alive. In order to heal, we need to reestablish safety.”
“In order to heal, we need to reestablish safety.”
Finally, somatic therapy can help us to move forward with our lives. When resolving medical trauma, there can be an understandable desire for life to go back to the way it was before the trauma occurred. While that may not always be possible, somatic therapy offers tools and inner resources to forge a new path forward, and allows those who’ve been living with medical trauma to not feel held hostage by their past.