The Trauma Resiliency Model: An Innovative Therapeutic Approach to Trauma

In recent years, new research has informed a change in the understanding of current literature on the lifelong impact of childhood trauma, as well as the neurobiology of trauma and resilience. Inventive “body-based” approaches are slowly gaining momentum and seem to make intuitive sense for trauma survivors who live with intrinsic body memories of trauma, not unlike those seen in complex developmental trauma or posttraumatic stress disorder. The scarcity of research in these approaches in psychotherapy can be explained through several reasons: (a) there is lack of acknowledgment of the long-term impact of adverse childhood experiences, (b) persons with complex presentations of trauma are often excluded from research studies, and (c) evidence-based therapies are preferentially funded over novel interventions. However, there is strong neuroscientific evidence for the cultivation of somatic awareness in order to develop resilience, suggesting that body-based processing therapy is a plausible approach to trauma.

The Trauma Resilience Model (TRM) is an innovative somatically-based psychotherapy that takes advantage of the body’s natural propensity to self-regulate using the biological stabilization skills of tracking internal sensations of well-being, which not only makes it relevant to disaster/shock trauma, but to long-term, developmental, complex, and cumulative trauma as well. It consists of a set of nine skills; the first six help an individual develop self-regulation skills that increase resilience and the ability to function under stress while the last three are utilized in the reprocessing of traumatic experiences.

When encountering a traumatic situation, highly emotionally charged negative experiences create memory fragments that can throw trauma survivors into distress and dysregulation, impairing their ability to live in a healthy, vital manner. However, the mindful awareness cultivated in TRM or other body-based models creates new, more resilient neural pathways for clients to access. In conclusion, although evidence-based cognitive models provide critical new understandings of the self and past experiences, somatic therapy models are valuable because they address the deep-seated and long-term physiological responses of trauma.

---

Source:

• http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1078390317745133