Many acupuncturists are intimidated to treat trauma because they think they need to approach it like a psychotherapist would.
They’re afraid they’ll have to ask their patient to relive the darkest moments of their life.
That they’ll have to support them through painful emotions or in confronting their inner child without proper training in doing so safely. They’re worried they won’t say the right thing or worse, they’ll say something that makes their patient feel worse.
Ok, no wonder that’s intimidating!
Acupuncturists don’t receive the kind of education needed to facilitate those conversations and treatments so of course you’ll feel out of your depth!
Another issue is that when people go to therapy, they expect to work on their trauma.
When they come to acupuncture, they generally don’t.
So it feels really awkward and weird to try to shoehorn a structured mini-therapy session into a treatment. Especially if they’re coming in for back pain.
At the same time, if you’re like most acupuncturists you need to feel like you’re truly helping your patients in order to feel fulfilled in your practice.
A lot of burnout comes from the stress of feeling not skilled enough to help people. We want to help, but we feel out of our depth.
It’s stressful to feel like you want to help them more than you can.
In order to effectively treat trauma as an acupuncturist, you need a different game plan.
One where you rely on your strength as a bodywork practitioner because bodywork can be extremely effective for trauma and emotional concerns. It helps to:
- regulate the nervous system which reduces hypervigilance, dissociation, and physiological symptoms of trauma like heart palpitations, insomnia, memory issues, and more
- reconnect the body and mind so people can be more present, focused, live in alignment with themselves rather than based off of behavioral reactivity loops that form as a result of unprocessed trauma
- process emotions that often get walled off, suppressed, or very dysregulated with trauma (like when someone starts crying involuntarily when you put in Lung 9)
So what I’m saying is that you’re actually already treating trauma, just not in the way we tend to think about it.
Treating trauma is divided into 2 camps: the top-down and bottom-up.
Simply put, top-down starts with the brain, and bottom-up starts with the body.
In a top-down approach, you engage your prefrontal cortex to reason, plan, and problem solve to make conscious decisions about what to do next or how to interpret something.
Most mental health treatment uses a top-down approach - the most popular being cognitive behavior therapy (CBT).
But trauma responses happen before the prefrontal cortex can even register what’s happening.
Your body has already sent the signal that you are unsafe before you can even cognitively process what’s happened.
This reaction is why many people can only get so far in trauma treatment if only a top-down approach is being used.
You’re only talking to the brain, not the body.
So in order to treat trauma effectively, you have to treat it where it starts.
The trauma response starts by picking up sensory information from your environment.
That information is processed by your limbic system in your brain, not your prefrontal cortex.
Your limbic system is the earliest part of your brain to develop its job is to instinctively respond to threats.
This means that fight, flight, freeze, and fawn kick in before your cognitive brain really understands what is happening.
Bottom-up treatment approaches focus on creating sensations and movements that help the body determine it’s safe.
These therapies typically put the limbic system at ease. As a result, they can help to disarm a trauma response.
When people are locked in a trauma response and can’t process it cognitively, it gets stored internally - in the fascia, in the organs, in all kinds of places.
Examples of bottom-up therapies are acupuncture, EMDR, yoga, art therapy, sound baths, equine-assisted psychotherapy, craniosacral therapy or visceral manipulation, massage, lifespan integration work, family constellations, hypnotherapy, and more. Really anything that starts by supporting the body or that works with the subconscious mind.
Bottom-up trauma treatment uses the wisdom of the body to access the unconscious aspects of trauma.
There are several advantages to this approach for acupuncturists in that bodywork remains the focus and is often the key to people feeling better.
With this approach you don’t need to have a direct conversation about your patient’s trauma and help them reason through it.
That kind of conversation takes a lot of skill and practitioners can inadvertently create shame or activate denial if they push a boundary for their patients too soon.
And finally, using a bottom up approach makes it less likely that you’ll feel burned out because you’re focusing on skills that you’re comfortable with or at least familiar with.
Keeping your trauma support focused on bodywork and a little bit of lifestyle counseling and emotional support can really help you feel less stressed.
And honestly, it’s usually the most helpful route for your patient because it supports them in a new non-talk therapy way, which they may have tried before without achieving much results.
In conclusion, you don’t necessarily have to have a ton of specific training around trauma in order to support your patients.
You just need to know how to help people access and process their trauma through bodywork. In my practice I do this in 3 ways:
- Creating a soothing physical environment (you’d be surprised how much work your treatment room can do for you!)
- Cultivate my own spirit (aka doing my own personal work) so I can show up in the best way possible for my patients
- Using 5 element acupuncture in addition to my TCM training
5 element acupuncture is built to address trauma! Its strengths are treating mental, emotional, and spirit-based issues.
After adding 5E to my practice I felt so much more confident supporting people through life transitions, extreme stress and anxiety, depression, addiction, obsession, identity issues, and more.
And my patient retention increased and people had better, longer lasting results.
If you’re interested in learning more about 5 element acupuncture and possibly adding it to your practice, check out my free 5 day email course about how 5E can help you be a more effective acupuncturist.
