Trauma Therapy Doesn’t Have To Be Traumatic
Estimated reading time: 4-5 minutes
940 words
By Forrest Call, CSW, LMSW
This post originally appeared on Forrest | Therapy September 5, 2024.
is Trauma therapy traumatizing?
I remember the feeling when I left my first trauma therapy session. I felt like I’d just walked out of psychological surgery—I felt dazed, raw, open, and vulnerable, like I didn’t have both feet on the ground. Years later a dear friend told me that she booked a massage after her trauma sessions and suggested that I try that. While that was not always an easy thing to do, I tried to book cheap massages with students needing practice hours for after my trauma therapy sessions and it did help. A lot, in fact!
On my journey to becoming a therapist I sought out firsthand experience with several different trauma processing therapies. I wanted more than academic knowledge, I wanted to know what it felt like so I could facilitate the best experience for my clients.
In the process I ended up learning a lot about different modalities for trauma therapy. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), brainspotting, yoga nidra, exposure therapy, therapeutic guided imagery, rapid eye therapy (RET), expressive art therapy, somatic experiencing, and a few more I wish I could say I just picked the best one and studied and practiced that, but I didn’t. Instead, over the course of almost a decade between starting undergraduate, working in the field, and then completing my masters degree and getting licensed—I studied and certified in several different modalities.
When I finally got licensed to work as a therapist I knew that I wanted to provide a special kind of trauma therapy that combined elements of my favorite modalities. The bilateral stimulation of EMDR, the deep and regenerative rest of yoga nidra, with a holistic je ne se quoi that would tie everything together beautifully. And I wanted a format that is repeatable, reliable, and left people feeling better than they were when they started.
This blog post is an attempt to explain what I do and also an invitation to have an experience.
What is it?
I call it yoga nidra for trauma relief, but its official name is Quantified Therapeutic Meditation: Yoga Nidra.
Quantified Therapeutic Meditation (“Quan.TM,” pronounced “Quantum”) is the synergistic brainchild of holistic guru, yoga teacher-trainer, and founder of Bodhi Yoga, Syl Carson, with the late Rex Cocherhans (LCSW/LMFT), a therapist who specialized in trauma and dissociative identity disorder (DID), and lastly a hypnotherapist (who asked to remain anonymous) that found joy and purpose in helping folks who were resistant to other forms of therapy. They pooled their expertise together and collaborated to create something that all of them could use in their respective sessions. (Footnote 1)
Experiencing and facilitating Quan.TM has taught me that trauma therapy can be gentle. I learned that our bodies have a psychological digestive system that works as automatically as my physical one! When I give my body the support it needs it can digest an experience as effectively as it can digest a meal. And when a traumatic experience is digested and processed, it’s gone. And when it’s gone, it’s gone for good. What’s left behind is often called post-traumatic wisdom, or post-traumatic growth.
How does it feel?
When I come out of a Quan.TM session I feel amazing. I feel like I just slept for a decade on a feather cloud in the ocean. Other people report feeling rested and calm. One client said, “I am shocked by how good I feel! I feel really, really good!”
How do I know if I’m ready?
There’s no surefire way to prepare for trauma therapy. If you feel called to do your work, you’re ready! Any qualified clinician can help you take your next steps to healing. However, I have noticed that people who have done guided meditations or respond well to the sivasana meditation at the end of a yoga class tend to respond well to yoga nidra for trauma processing.
If you feel like you’d like to try quantified therapeutic meditation then I’d invite you to reach out to me through my Psychology Today profile to setup a free consultation where we can talk about what you’re looking for and how I can help.
Footnote 1: For those wondering, the Quan.TM facilitator training is a niche training offered exclusively by Bodhi Yoga in Provo, Utah and taught exclusively by Syl Carson to therapists and yoga teachers pursuing their 500-1,000 hour teacher certifications with Bodhi Yoga. So! If you’re curious for more information you can book a session with me or Syl Carson, or check out Part 2, whenever I can sneak off to write it.
