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Acupuncture and Mental Health: A Somatic Practice for Trauma

Writer's picture: Nicole Villareal McCormickNicole Villareal McCormick
mental health and acupuncture

For over a decade now, the mental health field has been coming to understand the importance of body-based, or somatic, practices for the recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. When a person is exposed to a traumatic event or events, the reaction of the brain affects the entire body and has long term implications. Areas of the brain that control speech slow down when a person's memory of a traumatic event is activated even as they are flooded with emotions such as fear, anxiety and overwhelm. A person may feel their body responding in a fight or flight response to a situation that doesn’t warrant that level of a reaction without the language to articulate how they’re feeling or why (van der Kolk, 2006). 


Conventional talk therapy is based around language. Yet how do we talk about something that we may not have been able to put into words yet? While stressful thoughts can trigger tension in the body, so too can tension in the body create stressful thoughts in what is called “bottom-up processing”, where the automatic activation of our emotional and arousal systems kicks on before our thoughts can process what’s happening. The younger a person is who survives a traumatic incident, the less they have access to the ability to put into words what happened to them. 


For a trauma survivor, words may have been shown to be unreliable, and the ability to trust the words of either themselves or others may be lacking. Where words can be used for healing and relationship building, but they can also be used to stigmatize, disempower, and conceal. This is where different body-based, or somatic, healing practices have so much to offer when practiced by a safe and empathetic other. While a somatic practice such as acupuncture may necessitate some words, the treatment doesn’t center around them. Words are used to help both the patient and practitioner understand what the patient is feeling in their body. Together, patient and practitioner are collaborating to find a treatment that seeks to address points of tension or imbalance in the body, and grow awareness of what a relaxed state of being feels like throughout their entire being. 


Additionally, there is within the framework of East Asian Medicine (EAM) an understanding of how the emotions live embedded within the body. It is a goal of treatment with EAM and acupuncture that the emotions as well as the different physiological systems are balanced so that no one state of being dominates the others. With this framework, there is the potential to find a non-pathologising way of viewing mental health conditions as well as a recovery-oriented positionality in relation with an imbalanced state of being. Carl Rogers (1961) defined the recovery within mental health as the movement from a more fixed and defensive state of being into a more “fluid process of experiencing" in which the person we feel ourselves to be becomes increasingly congruent with the person we are. Coupling psychotherapy with acupuncture can work together to address the patterns of thoughts, feelings, and the body to help people find access to that point of fluid experiencing.


Sources:


van der Kolk B. A. (2006). Clinical implications of neuroscience research in PTSD. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1071, 277–293. https://doi.org/10.1196/annals.1364.022  


Rogers, C.R. (1961). On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Harper Collins, New York.

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