Trauma Work
By Maggie Locke, MFT, CBT

David Berceli is returning in October 9 & 10th to southern California to teach a series of exercises he has developed to release trauma (see details in upcoming events).

Be there if you are a therapist who works with the body. You will learn a powerful method to help undo the emotional damage of trauma in yourself and your clients.

Berceli's work is hardly new to bioenergetic therapists, but his creative formulation is. He combines several basic bioenergetic grounding exercises with a few yoga stretching movements to methodically build a strong energetic charge from the feet into the pelvis.

"Get the pelvis charged, and you're home free," Berceli remarked at his last California workshop in June, attended by several SDIBA members. He was referring to the primary importance of addressing the psoas muscles in loosening the frozen state of trauma in the body.

Berceli's work integrates cutting edge somatic theories of trauma, such as those espoused by Peter Levine, Judith Herman and Liz Koch, with his own bioenergetic training as a licensed social worker and his 20 years of experience working with victims of trauma in hotbeds of violence in the middle east and Africa. A former Maryknoll missionary, his work also incorporates a sense of spirituality in the body, as attested to by those who participate in his workshops.

The thick psoas muscles lies deeply centered in the pelvis between back and front of the body.They connect the muscles of the lower thoracic region and the top of the thigh. Berceli described how humans, like other mammals, strive to protect their underbellies from threat by curling . He demonstrated how that potentially life-saving curl is initiated in the powerful psoas. But unlike other animals, who literally shake their muscles free of trauma after they survive life-threatening danger, humans can remain frozen. Ignoring the body, humans try to work out trauma with their minds. This produces emotional distress that includes flashbacks, nightmares, disassociation, explosiveness and the list of disturbances that qualifies for a diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder.

"That gazelle who escaped the lion doesn't look at that lion five years later and say 'I'm going to get that bastard!' No, it's humans who hold on like that," Berceli said.

Berceli works to teach victims of trauma--and all of us have experienced trauma in one form or another by virtue of being human on earth--how to release it physically. It is not trauma that harms us, Berceli notes, because trauma is a necessary component of human evolution. What harms us is our modern propensity to override the needs of the body in the erroneous belief in the supremacy of the mind.

What a relief to experience the supremacy of the body in his workshop. Twenty or so therapists from throughout southern California stretched, stressed and vibrated for two days. We sobbed, screamed, laughed or became meditative as streamings of aliveness surged through our bodies, bringing up and out hurts held from last week or thirty years ago.

I pictured one of Berceli's workshops in Sudan, where he is now currently based in the center of a massive humanitarian disaster. He forms groups of refugees, or soldiers, men and women with their own gender, who together go through the seven movements, lie beside one together on the ground, pelvises vibrating, the women perhaps talking about their children, the men perhaps complaining of economic hardship. Berceli deliberately developed the exercises in such a way to circumvent need to discuss the psychological, for which his primary clients have no context.

The exercises start at the feet with stimulating the proprioceptors. Three different movements open the feet and secure their connection to the ground. The exercises proceed to stressing the calves. They move up into the thigh by grounding in various positions on one leg at a time. The following exercises stretch the adductors and use the bow to move vibrations upward. This is followed by "sitting" against the wall, stressing the quadriceps to the point of pain, when you move slightly higher up the wall, enough to keep the vibrations but lose the pain. After several minutes wall-sitting, you lie on the floor with soles together and legs forming a diamond shape. The pelvis is further charged by a tension-producing position, after which various positions of the thighs send vibrations that can become strong enough to shake the psoas muscles. The entire series takes about 40 minutes... more

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