Bridges between pain and trauma

What is the link between pain and trauma? What can pain science teach the world of trauma therapy? Can pain specialists benefit from insights gleaned from working with people who have been through overwhelming experiences? A definition of pain is that it is a protective feeling when there is the perception, conscious or unconscious, that something is unsafe. Trauma is also all about how we respond to danger messages. In trauma we get stuck in protective reflexes of ‘fight-or-flight' or ‘freeze’. Pain is a parallel protective output from our threat detection systems. Helping people find safety is the key to healing in both pain and trauma. This talk will look at the theory and practice about how we can build our capacity and skill to be with intense feelings, how we can learn to wake up our body and come out of subtle dissociative states and how movement can be a force for good in both pain and trauma. We can reframe habitually scary feelings to find agency and safety via embodiment.