As it is, more and more researchers studying the healing power of rhythmic movement on people who’ve experienced trauma from Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), such as abuse, neglect, or parental mental illness or substance abuse issues.
Among these researchers is Dr. Bruce Perry, a psychiatrist and senior fellow at the Child Trauma Academy in Houston who advocates dance, drumming, walking and other rhythm-based movements to help kids with trauma.
In a book about trauma and the power of play, Perry explains that kids with developmental trauma can lose their ability to think when they feel threatened. This is because their fight-flight alarm goes off, he says, and stress chemicals quickly shut down their thinking brain (frontal cortex) as well as their emotional brain (limbic brain).
All that’s left working is the primitive brain. Fortunately, it responds well to rhythm.
Repetitive rhythmic activity “elicits a sensation of safety,” Perry writes. “Rhythm is regulating. All cultures have some form of patterned, repetitive rhythmic activity as part of their healing and mourning rituals – dancing, drumming, and swaying.”
“The only way to move from these super-high anxiety states to calmer, more cognitive states, is rhythm,” he concludes.
Click HERE to read more.
Comments (0)