Coaching practices for How Trauma is Stored in the Body
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How Trauma is Stored in the Body, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- My head says I’ve dealt with it, but my body didn’t get the message
- I’ve told the story plenty of times
- The moment a body scan asks me to bring attention to my chest or belly, something locks up and floods
- Something will trip a memory and suddenly my body reacts like the old thing is happening all over again, right now
- The memory itself still feels like it’s happening right now, not something that’s over
Practices that may help
- Body Scan and Session Closure
Sweep attention through the body after processing to catch residual tension before closing the session.
EMDR: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing - Work the four channels of traumatic memory: sense, emotion, cognition, meaning
NET explicitly addresses all four channels in which trauma is encoded — not just thought.
Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET): Weaving Trauma Into a Coherent Life Story - Choose body areas to attend to with care
Start body attention from the periphery (hands, feet) and only move toward the core if peripheral areas feel safe.
Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness, Made Practical - Ground in the present when the past intrudes
Use the senses and the room to signal "that was then, this is now" when memory floods the body.
The Body Keeps the Score, Honestly Explained - Understand imaginal exposure: revisiting the traumatic memory deliberately
Imaginal exposure has the person revisit the traumatic memory in detail to allow the brain to process it as a past event.
Prolonged Exposure Therapy: Principles, Practices, and the Evidence - The Body Keeps the Score, Honestly Explained
Bessel van der Kolk’s core claim is that overwhelming experience is registered in the body and nervous system — not just as a memory but as ongoing physiological dysregulation — so calming the body ("bottom-up") can be as important as talking ("top-down"). The broad insight that trauma shows up physiologically is well supported; some of the book’s specific claims and favored therapies are more debated than the book’s certainty suggests. These are self-regulation skills, not a substitute for trauma treatment. - Identify your stuck points
Name the specific beliefs about safety, trust, control, esteem, or intimacy that the trauma has frozen.
Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT): Unsticking the Meanings That Maintain PTSD - Identifying and Targeting the Trauma Memory
Pinpoint the specific memory, its worst moment (the "touchstone"), and the negative belief it installed.
EMDR: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing - Bilateral Stimulation During Active Processing
Hold the distressing memory in mind while tracking rhythmic left-right stimulation — and notice what shifts.
EMDR: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing - Examine stuck points across the five disrupted domains
CPT organizes trauma-disrupted beliefs into five domains — Safety, Trust, Power, Esteem, Intimacy — to ensure none are missed.
Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT): Unsticking the Meanings That Maintain PTSD
Related concerns
- Sensory Emotional Cognitive Meaning Trauma
NET explicitly addresses all four channels in which trauma is encoded — not just thought.
Work the four channels of traumatic memory: sense, emotion, cognition, meaning
- Trauma Memory Channels
NET explicitly addresses all four channels in which trauma is encoded — not just thought.
- Trauma Memory Processing
Imaginal exposure has the person revisit the traumatic memory in detail to allow the brain to process it as a past event.
Understand imaginal exposure: revisiting the traumatic memory deliberately
- Working Memory Trauma
Hold the distressing memory in mind while tracking rhythmic left-right stimulation — and notice what shifts.
Bilateral Stimulation During Active Processing
- Can Trauma Cause Depression
CPT organizes trauma-disrupted beliefs into five domains — Safety, Trust, Power, Esteem, Intimacy — to ensure none are missed.
Examine stuck points across the five disrupted domains
- Discharging Trauma Activation
Somatic Experiencing, developed by Peter Levine, proposes that overwhelming experience leaves incomplete survival energy "stuck" in the body, and that gently completing and discharging that activation — in small, titrated doses, moving between activation and calm (pendulation) — helps the nervous system settle. The body-awareness skills it teaches are low-risk and increasingly studied, but the evidence base is still emerging and the "stored energy" model is a clinical theory, not established physiology. These are self-regulation skills; trauma work belongs with a trained professional.
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