Trauma Healing in the Yoga Zone by Joann Lutz;

Author:Joann Lutz;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Handspring Publishing Limited
Published: 2021-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

Bringing NITYA into the therapy session

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The client, a beginning yoga practitioner, is looking forward to her first yoga-oriented therapy session. She has been frustrated by a cognitive focus in psychotherapy, which seemed to ignore the many messages she gets from her body. Enthusiastic about life in general, she is in therapy because she deals with anxiety and with an unusual amount of physical tension. This tension isn’t relieved by exercise and hasn’t been addressed by the professionals she has seen.

Applying the defense cascade model to NITYA therapy

One could look at the first four branches of Raja Yoga as having been developed in order to support the regulation of the ANS, rather than seeing regulation as a beneficial, but unintended, result. (I see the fifth branch, pratyahara, as a bridge between embodied practices and those which are primarily energetic and internal.) This chapter presents some NITYA interventions drawn from these branches, and tied to ANS states, which can support trauma healing. It can be helpful to apply knowledge of the defense cascade to the current state of the client’s ANS, then choose the most effective interventions for that state, administered with skill and care. See the Treatment Planning Form (Appendix 1) and the Assessment Tool (Appendix 2), which can guide this process.

The NITYA approach to therapy

The application of NITYA to nervous system regulation in a therapy session is based on ways that yoga supports an embodied approach to trauma healing. This approach emphasizes the importance of the client’s moment-to-moment somatic experience, which can provide a clear basis for choosing interventions.

This approach is most allied with a “functional/developmental” style of body-centered therapy, which supports the client in discovering their somatic and behavioral patterns, observed in the present moment (Marlock et al., 2015).

Focusing on the content of the client’s distress, and their personal and cultural context, are important also. Soliciting information on the client’s life, including their personal history, current dilemmas, physiological state, and socioeconomic markers such as race, age, and marital status, can help the therapist understand the client’s situation. This is particularly true since therapists are now recognizing that the experience of oppression, and the resulting trauma, are compounded by microaggressions inflicted on minority populations by anyone who has not examined their social conditioning (see section on microaggressions, Chapter 5).

At the same time, biographical narratives offer the therapist a story about the client which can be interpreted by the therapist’s life experience and values, and can change with shifting diagnoses and cultural norms. There are many examples of these shifting norms, such as the removal from the DSM of the diagnosis of Hysteria in 1980, or the depathologizing of homosexuality in 1973. My hope is that working with a client’s actual somatic experience is less likely to be influenced by the therapist’s subjective stories and/or the profession’s current hypotheses. (In writing this, I hear echoes of Freud’s misinterpretation of his client Dora’s symptoms as jealousy and repressed sexual desire, rather than the product of sexual abuse (Freud, 1905, in Gay, 1995).)

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