The psoas muscle and gut tension
Contents:
1. On the psoas and our inner flow
2. Polyvagal theory, a quick overview
3. The psoas, tension and trauma
4. Herbs for muscle tension/ trauma/ psoas releasings
5. Exercises and systems that help
6. Further reading/ various sources
1. On the psoas and our inner flow
The psoas is the deepest muscle in the body. A stabilisation muscle, it runs from the front of the spine at the bottom of your ribs, to the front of the upper thigh, it cuts directly through the middle of the body, and links our upper and lower sections. It's one of the areas of our body that reacts the most swiftly to stress, as it is incredibly sensitive: it is full of nerves. When the psoas reacts to stress, it tenses, and as a result of that tension there are a cascade of things that can happen in the body as a result.
Things like:
back pain
hip pain
intestinal issues
restricted breathing
anxiety
stagnant digestion
lymphatic stagnation
For years, the psoas felt like this mysterious, esoteric thing to me. Something I couldn't grasp understanding of but that (in my mind) held the key to a lot of the body's mysteries. This all changed for me a few years ago when I took Katy Bowman's psoas course, and learned to relax it for the first time in my life. If you're anything like me-- that is, prone to anxiety and muscle tension-- you'll probably find it to be as life-changing an experience as I did. For the first time in my life I could feel my insides moving. Which I know, sounds weird, but it happened anyway. I started to notice that when I was relaxed, I could feel that movement in my body, and when tense, the movement would stop. I started gauging my days based on how much I could keep that inner movement flowing (work in progress says the perfectionist over-worker).
But it turns out that I could feel movement for a reason: when the psoas tenses up our entire mid-section gets locked into place. We don't breathe as deeply; our lymph doesn't flow; our organs, which function based on getting enough blood flow, don't function as well. With a constantly contracting psoas, our intestines don't have the room to move (nor to they get the constant massage that they would if the psoas were contracting and relaxing with our movements), which can lead to digestive stagnation or even intestinal inflammation. With a tense psoas, the diaphragm doesn't have as much room to maneuver when we inhale, which can in turn lead to lymphatic stagnation, and a lack of blood flow in some of the major areas of our body.
All that tensing in the middle, in the belly, restricts blood and lymph flow. It also leads to what in Chinese medicine is called 'liver qi stagnation' which I personally translate to, well, emotional stagnation. Frustration, irritability, crying fits, anger outbursts. If this sounds like a bad case of PMS to you, it is! This is SO tied in with the stagnation of lymph and the tension in the middle of the body, and I've found that releasing one will lead to an unraveling of the others too (as an aside, the combination of ocotillo and rose is one of my favourite formulas for this liver stagnation/ PMS pattern).
One of the things that I'm learning is that the psoas is the muscle of trust. When you feel safe in your body and trust your environment, the psoas can relax; and when the psoas relaxes you in turn feel safe in your body. For people who have spent their lives feeling unsafe in their own bodies, feeling terrified by how big the world out there is, and how small we are, learning how to relax the psoas (or having someone else help with that) can be a life-changing experience. To feel, instead of fear deep in the belly, trust, open-ness, inquisitiveness and little bubbles of joy radiating up from the hips to the ribs. To feel safe in one's body is to feel safe in the world around you-- a part of the greater flow of things, and able to surrender to that flow that guides us and moves through us all.
All of this can come from learning to relax the psoas.
One of the reasons that the psoas becomes tight, however, is as a result of stress and trauma. And in order to truly be able to relax and release this tension, it’s necessary to understand the roots of it more deeply. In order to do that, we need to understand the autonomic nervous system in a little more detail, and how stress and trauma can affect our deep core muscles in the long-term.
2. Polyvagal theory. A quick overview.
In school we learn that the Autonomic nervous system has two branches: sympathetic and parasympathetic, and that they are like train tracks on a switchboard— only one can be functioning at a time, so we are either in ‘fight or flight’ or ‘rest and digest’. Steven Porges’ Polyvagal theory is a different way of looking at trauma and the nervous system, and is quite revolutionary, and makes a lot more sense.
According to Porges, there are actually three branches to the automonic nervous system, and they developed at different periods in human evolution. there’s a newer, sleeker social engagement system, an older action system (sympathetic) and an even older still shut-down system (parasympathetic). The sympathetic system is that which drives us to action, and, when there’s a threat, it triggers the adrenaline response which puts us into fight or flight. When this response is even overwhelmed by the threat level, or if action (fight or flight) isn’t possible, then the older dorsal vagal response kicks in, and we freeze: shut down, tune out the world, go into a deep disassociative freeze state.
There are lots of things about this that are important: one of them is that the freeze is a physiological response to overwhelming trauma. It is real and valid and is a deeper parasympathetic response. When people say ‘I just froze’ and hate themselves for it, it’s not that they could have done anything. It means that their body perceived the threat level as so great so they literally could. Not. Move. This is also important when it comes to empathy: you can eliminate ‘but why didn’t you [insert action]?’ from your vocabulary, because you can now understand that said action was likely impossible. In fact, freezing is an indicator as to the level of trauma to the person who froze.
Another reason that polyvagal theory is important is that social engagement system. As creatures who form communities, our interactions with other humans is really important to us, and it turns out that it has a massive effect on our nervous systems too. Porges gives the example that if someone knocks you over, then your body’s sympathetic nervous system kicks in, and you are driven to want to fight the asshole, but if they turn around, apologise, say they didn’t see you, hold out their hand to help you up, look into your eyes and smile, and you read honesty and openness in their face, then your social engagement system, the newest part of your autonomic nervous system, will totally override the stress response. This is a huge deal, because it shows us how important touch and community can be for our sense of well being. The social engagement system has override capabilities for all the other branches of the nervous system. To put it most basically: a hug and a smile really can make a massive difference. And if people read ‘friendliness’ in your face, then they are automatically going to feel safer with you.
Now, how does this tie in to the psoas and muscle tension? Read on for an example!
3. The psoas, tension and trauma.
The psoas, and the deep front line, is one of the areas where we hold our traumas. Our emotional state and our physical bodies are deeply intertwined, and often trigger responses in each other. For example: a feeling can make your body take on a certain position, but sitting in a certain position can make you feel a certain way.
For those of us who do have chronic tension, or chronic anxiety, this could actually be the result of trauma being held in the body. If you’ve ever wondered why herbs alone don’t always simply ‘remove’ anxiety— they can help in the moment, but it doesn’t go away forever— it’s because when fear is stored in the body itself, we often need to let it out through the body. Some herbs do actually do this (think, herbs that induce shuddering (acrid herbs), herbs that make us vomit due to parasympathetic nervous system stimulation (lobelia, certain species of skullcap)), but for the most part, simply ‘calming’ isn’t always going to undo the deep fear held in the body in the long-term (though of course they’re still helpful and often indispensable). Herbs can, however, really help, with the tension and the trauma. We’ll get to that in a bit.
First, I want to explain how fear gets trapped in the body, and what this actually means. Most of this information is compiled from various sources, and I’ll try to list the ones I can remember at the bottom of this newsletter under ‘further reading’ (sorry, this isn’t a research project, just me rambling :) ).
1. We perceive something that we see as threatening. For the record, this can be different for everyone. For some people, a threat is an armed gunman; for others a threat can be an overstimulating environment. It doesn’t matter what the external or objective perception of the environment is, it matters what the body/ psyche feels.
2. In response to said threatening environment, the body starts to tense in preparation to fight or flee. When this happens, 3 things can occur:
3a. The threat is diffused: whatever it is, turns out to be not so bad. If its a person who looks threatening, they can make eye contact, smile, shake hands, apologise for being aggressive, and our state returns to relaxed.
3b. The threat accelerates and we take action, either jumping in to fight, or running like hell.
3c. The threat is not diffused, and we do not take action (many different reasons: maybe its impolite, or maybe we don’t recognise it as a threat, or maybe we feel like we cannot for some reason).
3d. The threat becomes so overwhelming that we shut down, freeze, curl up in a ball, or disassociate. When this happens, our systems slow down, and shut down, to protect us from the pain of what is happening.
Now, each of these branches out into a different long-term scenario.
With 3a. The situation is resolved and the person carries on going about their day, probably forgetting that it ever happened.
With 3b, if the situation is resolved in a manner that feels empowering to the person, then the nervous system will calm down after the event.
In 3c, our bodies have been flooded with adrenaline energy that had nowhere to go. The deep muscles of our front line: the psoas, hip flexors, inner thighs, are all prepared to run, fight, or curl up and hide, and now that energy is there, it has nowhere to go.
An aside: the connection between our mental state and our physical state is so deeply intertwined that it doesn’t matter, inside our being, whether there is a ‘real’ threat, or whether we are actually feeling something, or just contracting the muscles that coincide with a feeling. When we contract the ‘fear’ muscles, then we start to feel fear. When we feel fear, the fear muscles contract. It’s a system that works both ways. We are taught in society that our feelings are arbitrary and meaningful, but often our feelings are a result of us holding body positions that we have been holding for YEARS.
So when 3c happens, and we are flooded with adrenaline, and our fear muscles contract in preparation, and then we don’t do anything, that energy doesn’t just go away and diffuse on its own.
3d. 3d happens and becomes trauma. To reiterate, it doesn’t matter what the event is. Almost everybody I know has been through terrible traumas, and the worse trauma we experience, the harder it is for us to see ‘lesser’ traumas as valid. If you’ve experienced violence, for example, how can you see a too-noisy environment as traumatic? This in turn shuts off one of the main things to help: empathy, the social response system, caring, touch. To guide a person out of approaching a traumatic state, they need to feel like you are there with them, not judging them (judgement comes across as aggression and feels hostile, which keeps a person in a traumatic state). To meet a person where they are, with your face open, and arms willing to hold them, when a person feels truly heard, their bodies will feel safe. When a body feels safe, it can relax deep inside itself.
With 3d, we also store all of that adrenaline energy inside our bodies. What also comes with that is memory. Trauma happened (this can be anything from mild to severe), and it stays there until we can release it. In order to release it, we need to feel safe. We also need to re-learn the tools to release it.
Have you ever seen an animal shake after a scary situation? I see it all the time with the rabbits around here, and my dog who likes to go running after them. The rabbits often freeze, and as I yank the dog away, the rabbit starts to shake, and then the rabbit goes on with its life. Shaking is a natural reaction to an adrenaline rush, because it diffuses the energy of our muscles being flooded. We, too, have this reflex, but it’s not exactly socially acceptable to shake uncontrollably, and we don’t like to present a face of ‘weakness’ to society, so we repress our own instinct to shake and shudder to diffuse adrenaline energy. And so it stays in our bodies. But the shudder reflex can be learned, as can using various movements to release trauma.
Chronic tension in the neck, shoulders, diaphragm, psoas, hip flexors, inner thighs, is usually a result of the process listed above. And why do SO many of us experience it? Well…
What action contracts our fear muscles? Sitting in chairs. Who sits in chairs most of the time: a lot of us! Combine sitting in chairs with, say, not wanting to be somewhere. Say, for example, you hate your job, and you don’t want to be there. This is a [minor, usually below the mental radar] threat. And you will tense, because your body wants to leave. Think of all the different environments you’ve been in where you’ve felt adrenaline and not been in a position to move it out: sitting in the car in traffic, getting cut off? On a plane with turbulence? At a sports game?
3c. Creates a lot of residual tension in our bodies that we don’t think about. And as a result, it is held there until we can find a way to release it. One of the best ways to release this kind of tension is with aggressive exercise like weight-lifting or boxing, to channel the adrenaline energy into something that feels like a ‘fight’ response, followed by something like a psoas release, to actually let go of it all. Gentle psoas releases help so much: you’ll notice as you do it that your body will twitch a little at times, or you’ll feel spasms, or sighs deep inside your body.
In conjunction with psoas release, I love things like Myofascial release, TRE. Systems that teach you how to move out adrenaline as its happening. These systems are especially useful when the tension is due to old trauma (3d). The process can sometimes be a little uncomfortable as you will often remember traumas, and sometimes your body will find the positions it went into during traumas: I’ve heard of people [almost] re-living giving birth, being born, being in car accidents, being beaten, etc. The good news is that from almost every report I’ve heard (and my own expeirence), the re-living is more cathartic than the initial trauma, and afterwards you feel like a new human being, with a level of relaxation in the body that is almost unimaginable. I think this is because these processes are led by your own body, and the body knows what it can and cannot handle.
The benefit to these systems is that you learn to also release adrenaline as its happening. Granted, you’ll become one of the small percentage of the population who shakes in public after a loud noise, or starts swaying around when irritated, but the benefits of this (not holding adrenaline in your body) are SO worth it.
4. Herbs for muscle tension/ trauma/ psoas releasings.
Pedicularis spp // Pedicularis
Pedicularis is one of my favourite herbs of all time, and one that I'm studying intensely right now, for the latest surprise box that I'm doing. It was this herb that inspired this train of thought for this newsletter, because I was noticing such profound effects in my body from working with it daily, while carrying on with my daily movement and TRE practice!
I first read about pedicularis as yin tonic in Thomas Avery Garran's book 'Western Herbs in Chinese Medicine'. In it he talked about one of my local pedicularis species (p. semibarbata) as a yin tonic, which got me thinking about WHY it'd be a yin tonic. You see pedicularis is a muscle relaxant. It works phenomenally well, and affects the mind too, putting you in a really lovely relaxed, chilled-out, happy, jello-like frame of mind but not stupid or hungry or paranoid (I may have a canna-bias). It's not really available commercially anywhere but ask a wildcrafting western herbalist what their favourite chill-out herb is and they'll likely tell you it's pedicularis (or kava). Because it's not available commercially and is, from what I read, impossible to grow, it's not the kind of thing that any of us herbies really want to become super popular out there, but I do feel it's worth writing about here just in case you do find your own local stand and want to try a little.
So anyway, pedularis as yin tonic is something I hadn't thought about before Thomas' book, but it got me thinking because, in a way, it makes sense. In terms of the systemic yin (as opposed to say, straight up body fluids, or the yin aspects of different organs or systems), pedicularis puts you in a really relaxed, easy frame of mind. If you're the type of person who has a nervous system freak-out every time you have to do something, or need to get into HYPERSTRESS MODE (TM) in order to function, then pedicularis can be a guide to a better (read: more sustainable) way of doing things. A half-dropper of the tincture and you're definitely, definitely feeling more chilled out, but at the same time, still have energy. I think it's the perfect herb to teach us how to function in the world in a 'yin' state. That is, to not have to drive ourselves forward at a hundred miles an hour, but still to move forwards, just at a pace where our bodies are able to regenerate their own reserves at the same time.
Read more: 7song's article
Found in: Pedicularis tincture, sports bath, the Ebb & Flow surprise box
Kava kava // Piper methysticum
One of the reasons I love kava kava is that, when used in context with the polyvagal theory above, kava is a *social* relaxant: it makes [most people] enjoy human interaction more. It makes us more touchy-feely (though not as much as damiana, below), as it relaxes our muscles, and our minds.
I think, what kava does is unwind whatever tension there is that's holding us back from our creativity, our sensuality, our exuberant enjoyment of life. So many of us would be much more creative and carefree if not for the giant stress loads we carry around. Kava doesn't take the things away (it doesn't put you in a bubble like, say, cannabis does) but it does relieve your tension so that you can shine through regardless of the stress load.
This 'easing' of tension applies to other areas too. Anxiety for example. Anxiety, the way I see it, is fear energy getting stuck somewhere (and often for long periods of time). What I mean by that is, fear is a reaction to a stimulus that's supposed to get us moving. We release adrenaline, we get ready to run, or fight. For many of us, life is so stressful that we're constantly in a place where we experience fear and yet we're stuck in place and have nothing to fight against except ourselves. That energy that gets released to get us moving gets trapped in the body, often in the chest, and that's when we start to feel anxious. If we do this over long periods of time (or say we have a trauma or series of traumas in life that cause us to continuously experience lots of fear and we don't know how to, or don't have the option to express it), then it builds and builds until the tiniest trigger can cause a cascade of fear-reactions which in most peoples' language get translated to anxiety, panic attacks, etc.
Kava can really help with this. By relaxing the tension that's holding all that old fear in place, you can start to move the fear out. It'll stop anxiety in the moment, of course (I'll never forget my first class EVER, where I was so scared, I took way too much kava, and the first, incredibly high words out my mouth in public were 'ah f**k I took too much kava'), but over the long-term, using it to help relax and release old fear can be really magic.
Read more: jim's article
Found in: Deep roots soak, kava & Cardamom body oil, Kava hot cocoa, kava and coconut elixir
(pic stolen from Rosalee, I think)
Damiana // Turnera diffusa
When discussing the social engagement system and trauma, and relaxation of our muscles, it'd be impossible to leave out Damiana. Damiana slowly, gently, melts through the layers of 'freeze' that we accumulate due to trauma (small or big), and helps us to reemerge and re-engage with the world, and with our own bodies. Damiana is often referred to as an aphrodisiac herb, and in many ways it is (though it's SO much more than that), but it is only because it makes us enjoy the erotic aspect of touch again.
Sensuality and sexuality are often treated as if they’re the same thing, but this is a misconception. Sexuality is of course, the fundamental basis of why we’re all here: without sex, no creation happens, and nobody is born, and life grinds to a halt. Sensuality, on the other hand, is our ability to feel pleasure through our senses. It is so much bigger than sex (and sex is already big) because sensuality is the basis of our physicality.
Andreas Weber, in his book “Matter and Desire” says: “The Eros of reality begins with touch. There is no life without contact. Without touch there is no desire, no fulfillment— and no mind. When a light wave changes the structure of my retina, when I stroke the skin of my beloved, or when a nerve cell sends out an electrical impulse by spilling calcium ions, this is always an act of physical seizure.”
All of our senses are heightened by touch, and touch is the way we interpret the world. It is through FEELING that we become aware, our perception of the world various interpretations of our ability to touch and be touched.
We are taught, for the most part in society, to restrain both our sensuality and our sexuality. Sexuality is seen as lewd, promiscuous, and dangerous (or a sign of one’s virility and celebrated); and sensuality is seen as a representation of our capacity for sexuality. Thus, if a person is naturally sensual they are often treated as though they are being overtly sexual, and have to deal with the judgements and advances that come along with that.
So we tend to restrain our natural sensuality as much as we do sexuality. And while I don’t agree with either, and think we’d be a lot happier as a society if we didn’t have so much shame tied into sex, I think that restraining our natural ability to feel pleasure in our senses is very dangerous indeed, for two main reasons:
1. Our senses are how we interact with the world around us, so restricting our ability to use them is restricting our ability to interact with the world.
2. Pleasure isn’t this wicked, immoral thing— feeling pleasure doesn’t mean that the world is going to shit and everyone is going to stop working and we’re two steps from devolving into apes who do nothing but sit around and eat and live in one giant orgy all day while the kids go hungry and society crumbles around us.
Really the worst thing that happens when you feel pleasure is that you start to interact with your own body, and start to experience the world around you, and maybe start to feel good about yourself. Feeling pleasure connects you with your own sense of joy: because pleasure reverberates through the body, like one happy, wiggling cell passing on its joy to another.
In order to feel pleasure, one has to *allow* pleasure. In the same way as we have more muscles in place to close our eyes than to open them, our energy has the same thing: we have more muscles in place to protect ourselves than we do to open ourselves up: it’s the ancient game of survival and we *need* these protections. But sometimes we learn these protections really young and they’re for no reason: sometimes its simply because to be a sensual child scares adults, because sensuality AND sexuality, especially in Western culture, are not freely expressed (see above about world falling apart). So maybe a small child starts playing with their own genitalia or maybe they just exhibit their natural sensual inclinations in other ways, and maybe they aren’t even told not to, but they feel something change in their parents, because so much of what we learn is through the most subtle cues: a tiny bit of tension, a small frown. Energy changes when we disapprove, and its through disapproval that we learn how not to act. Maybe what so many of us learn earlier than we can even think it through rationally, is that to be sensual means we won’t receive the love we need (or think that it is this part of ourselves that makes us receive unwanted attention). So we stop it. It’s self-protection.
And then we carry on doing this, because everyone else in society is doing it too.
Learning to allow pleasure is a rebellious act.
Believing that you deserve pleasure is an act of self-love so great that it shatters barriers.
Believing that you deserve pleasure, and allowing yourself to feel it, teaches other people that they are worthy of it too.
What does any of this have to do with damiana, and with muscle tension? Because when we block ourselves from allowing kindness, love, and pleasure, we do that with a resistance that is quite firm, that often can be seen and felt in the physical muscles, and it’s something that can only be softened from the inside. Damiana helps, so gently with that softening, and it does so from within, in an empowering, and beautiful way.
Read more: Herb Rally
Found in: Sensorium smoke blend
Wild rose // Rosa spp.
Rose helps us to soften and let the world in. As a result, it makes it *easier* for us to engage in the social, touch-based, empathy based behaviours that help to return our nervous systems to a place where we feel safe.
Wild rose softens the areas that we tense to protect ourselves, unraveling emotional tension patterns that get locked in the body. Rose naturally works in places where 'flow' is impeded. The roses I gather grow along the sides of mountain streams, so I love to picture this: their roots tapping into that which flows steadily, this water which is utterly free flowing. The roses (in my mind) somehow imprint this expression because it's what they're exposed to. Or maybe they grow by the water because that's what they are drawn to in the first place. Who knows how these magics work. Regardless, that's what rose brings to the body: a softness, a flow. And with that softness, the world, held at bay by all that tension and all that protection, can finally flow in-- we can interact with the world around us, experience it through our senses.
Of course, one of the things that often happens when we soften our hard bits is that we start to feel the things that made us want to harden ourselves in the first place. It’s not that wild rose makes people cry, or makes them angry, its that if you’ve been protecting yourself from a deep well of grief, or a deep well of anger, then rose, in softening that protection, will bring to the surface what was there all along. So keep in mind that a person has to WANT to experience this-- its not our place to force feed wild roses to everyone who’s a bit thorny...
Wild rose excels at moving stuck anger. Imagine how you feel if you’re angry about something but don’t express it.Anger as an energy is that of boundaries and of forwards movement: you get angry because something violates your boundaries, and then anger has you moving TOWARDS that which violated you. Except even in situations where we are actually safe to express our anger, we live in a society where very few people are actually raised and taught to do so healthily, so we don’t express it. And then it festers, digs deeper, becomes something different, darker, less mutable. Anger that’s held inside and not expressed becomes a hard lump over time. But it’s the same with anything that’s meant to be moving and can’t: it has to go somewhere, and when locked in the body it turns into a festering stagnation.
Similarly, when you have a stress reaction, your body is flooded with adrenaline, and the purpose of that adrenaline is to give you the energy to MOVE (away from the tiger, away from the source of stress; towards the tiger to fight, because you’re a badass). Except, in modern life, the source of stress is not always something we can run away from or fight. Stuck in traffic, we get stressed because we want to be somewhere: we might be late, we might have ice cream melting in the shopping bag. We are flooded with the adrenaline to make us move and then we have to sit still. This happens at work, when you have a deadline and you’re aware of this ticking clock behind you metering out the time that is running out (in fact, just thinking about time running out at all makes me start to feel this tension rise up, which is one of the reasons I cover the clock on my computer!). This movement energy has nowhere to go and so we hold it in our bodies, and it makes us feel like we’re going to explode.
Rose unwinds the stuck-ness that is often rooted in old grief, old trauma. These are things that get locked in our body when they happen, because we don't know how to process them, or are unable to process them: feeling pain is rotten; why wouldn’t we block it off to hold it at bay? Every time these patterns are triggered, however, we live them out, again and again. I've seen rose help with this so many times: to slowly and gently start to ease the tension holding these traumas in place.
With trauma, we grow up not really able to trust the world around us, and not really able to trust ourselves either. This creates a deep underlying sense of fear that comes out in lots of ways (panic attacks, anxiety, depression being the most common). It doesn’t even need to be the kinds of trauma that most people think of as deep trauma. Losing our favourite teddy bear at just the right age for it to damage you can damage you, and our own traumas are our own. But when we do, you create this low-level underlying tension, like we’re constantly bracing for the next blow. This tension makes us alert, but at a cost, because it uses a LOT of energy and we end up feeling unsafe all the time. And rose, gently, patiently, softens it. At its core, rose is a medicine of deep trust, deep vulnerability and deep softening—allowing us to deeply trust ourselves and our bodies, and to trust the world around us. As a result, we can reach out and touch the world around us, but even more importantly, let it in to touch us back.
Read more: The comforts of rose
Found in: Ocotillo + Rose Heart Center Elixir, rose & sandalwood body oil, rose & sandalwood bath soak, wild rose elixir, rose & geranium facial mist, smoky rose anointing oil, silk road bitters
5. Exercises and systems that can help.
My favourite psoas release
(read part 1, too!)
DIY Trauma release at home
TRE (can be done alone, see video above)
Somatic therapies like The Grinberg Method or The Pantarei Approach
6. Further reading/ various sources:
The Polyvagal Theory
The Trauma Release Process
In an Unspoken Voice
The Body Keeps the Score