From Fight or Flight, Freeze or Faint, to “Flow”: Identifying a Concept to Express a Positive Embodied Outcome of Trauma Recovery

Abstract

Further deductive or inductive work to validate the concept would be useful as a step toward instrument development, followed by validation of its utility as a self-report proxy endpoint for patient centered health outcomes research. Qualitative research could be useful to elucidate the process of attaining "posttraumatic flow."

Refugees, asylum seekers, and practitioners’ perspectives of embodied trauma: A comprehensive scoping review.

“…A clinical vocabulary gap still exists, which struggles to settle on a key term to encapsulate these subjective phenomenological lived experiences of trauma manifested in the body (Seng & CAsCAid Group, 2019). This comprehensive scoping review therefore proposes the use of the term “embodied trauma” to capture these combined physiological states and psychosomatic symptoms of trauma collectively.…”

“…Having noted throughout this review the methodological, bio-psycho-social-spiritual, political, cultural, therapeutic, semantic, and medicalized limitations of the existing literature (Butler, 2021; Cesko, 2020; Davidson, 2016; Fox, 2018; Murphy et al, 2021; Schaeffer & Cornelius-White, 2021; Seng & CAsCAid Group, 2019), noting additionally the limitation of international sources, we advocate on behalf of the critical need for a conceptualization or formulation of trauma which includes a widely international, holistic understanding of the individual, including their cultural presentations of trauma and its embodiment. This is particularly important when working with individuals seeking refuge and asylum who descend from a vast array of countries and cultures, and present with a diverse range of complex psychological distress and trauma experiences.…”

Healing from adverse childhood experiences through therapeutic powers of play: “I can do it with my hands”.

“…Trauma-informed care argues for principles and practices that attend to posttraumatic sequelae to improve physical and mental health across the life span (Seng & the members of the CAsCAid, 2018). Trauma-informed care practices include innovative, alternative, and somatic therapy approaches to achieve bottom-up intervention for trauma recovery (Perry, 2006).…”

How Trauma Informed Care Will Revolutionalize Health Care

“…To move the patient from the freeze state to the flow state, create a safe environment and build a healing relationship [7]. With cultural sensitivity and humility, the health care professional must seek to understand the impact of the trauma and work with the patient to create healthy coping mechanisms.…”