Retraumatisation and how to prevent it in biodynamic craniosacral therapy
This is a summary of the diploma thesis I wrote for my certification at the European Centre of Therapy in Wrocław. It answers three questions, what retraumatisation is, how to notice it before it unfolds, and how to prevent it in biodynamic craniosacral therapy. You can read the full text in Polish.
In Peter Levine’s model, trauma is not the event itself but an unfinished response of the nervous system. When fight or flight is impossible, the body freezes, and if the energy it mobilised is never released, it stays trapped. Retraumatisation is that response being switched on again, in a situation where the person once more has no resources to complete it. It happens when a client is pushed outside their window of tolerance, into overwhelm on one side or numbness and dissociation on the other.
Touch-based therapies add risks of their own. The client lies down and hands their body over to someone else, consent is often treated as a formality given once, and few people expect that such gentle contact can stir difficult emotions. Many clients with a history of trauma never mention it in the interview, and some do not connect their symptoms to it at all. Safety therefore has to be built into every session rather than reserved for clients who declare trauma.
Biodynamic craniosacral therapy carries the answer within the method itself. Franklyn Sills describes four pillars, the relational field with negotiated contact (every touch is announced and agreed, and consent is asked again whenever the hands move), the resourced zone (a felt sense of safety established before any difficult material appears), stillpoints, and verbal skills that keep the client present in their body. Charles Ridley, from a different biodynamic lineage, sharpens the warning signs. A system that stops moving the moment it is touched is not settling, it is shutting down.
In the practical part I analyse one of my own sessions, in which a client’s system began to freeze. What brought her back was a resource we had established at the very start, a feeling of warmth in her hands, together with a simple invitation to open her eyes. The thesis ends with the sentence that sums up my work, a client’s system opens only when it feels safe, so caring for safety is the first task of a biodynamic practitioner.