A
Body-Based Model of Trauma:
Tools for Times of Terror and Turbulence
Peter
Levine, PhD
May 10, 2002
10:30 am-1:30 pm
New
York University
Main Building - Room 408
100
Washington Square East
This
presentation will explore the implications of how the brain and
body process extreme experiences, suggesting new avenues of effective
therapeutic action. We will see that the trauma response is a
specific defensive bodily reaction that people initially mobilize
in order to protect themselves against feeling the totality of
their horror, helplessness or pain.
However, ultimately, it keeps them frozen and stuck in the past,
unable to be Present in the here and now. Fixed in the defensive
trauma response, the fear, shame, defeat and humiliation, associated
with the original event, replays itself over and over again in
the body-detached from history but experienced in the present.
Traditionally, therapies have attempted to change perceptions
of the world by means of reason and insight, using conditioning,
behavior modification, and medication. However, our perceptions
remain fundamentally unchanged until the internal felt experience
of the body changes. Even after the death of a loved one, physical
injury, rape, assault, exposure to collective terror, people can
learn to have new bodily experiences allowing them to heal and
accept what has happened. These experiences, which directly contradict
those of fear and helplessness, help people move forward to create
new lives and new communities. Case video material from a WTC
survivor will demonstrate simple tools that can help people move
through traumatic states, to completion and resolution.
For more than 35 years, Dr. Peter Levine has studied the human
response to stress and trauma. Dr. Levine has consulted and taught
at hospitals and pain clinics worldwide and worked in areas where
natural disasters, military actions and social dislocation have
taken place. In 1999 he visited the Middle East where he worked
with a group of Palestinian, Turkish and Israeli mental health
workers to focus on the emotional and historical wounds of trauma.
BIO
Peter Levine is a member of the Institute of World Affairs Task
Force of Psychologists for Social Responsibility. He also serves
on the Presidential Initiative on Ethnopolitical Warfare, which
is developing a training and postgraduate curriculum for dealing
with large-scale disaster and ethno-political conflict. Levine
received his PhD in medical biophysics from the University of
California at Berkeley, and also holds a doctorate in psychology
from International University. He is the author of Waking the
Tiger - Healing Trauma, available in eight languages.
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