What is TIY & TC-TSY?
TCTSY benefits those looking to invite their body into therapy or for those looking to practice Yoga in a safe space with someone who understands what's it's like to live with traumatic body memories.
Whilst there is no specific goal to be achieved in TCTSY, this enquiry can be an interesting way to cultivate self-awareness, deepen your self-compassion and understand some of your habitual stress responses.
TCTSY comes from an understanding that traumatic experiences imprint a sensory memory of surviving in our bodies long after the events have occurred. When the time is right, TCTSY invites that body into your therapeutic journey.
Due to repeated traumas your over-worked nervous system got overwhelmed and now it’s still triggering you, still working hard to keep you safe, to protect you, even when the threat may have gone. Focusing on your body and moving it, noticing how it feels is a way to understand how to live with, overcome and change unwanted feelings that challenge your day-to-day experience of living.
TCTSY is evidence-based approach drawn from research with people who’ve experienced multiple traumatic experiences.
TCTSY may be used as somatic therapy or a somatic interventions in C-PTSD adjunctive to verbal processing therapies / pastoral relationships.
Your body is often where you feel the challenge of surviving life - depression, anxiety or numbness. It's your body that continues to feel the effects of traumatic experiences even if it happened a long time ago or are repeated so often they have started to feel normal. Maybe you sometimes feel panic, suicidal, hopeless or have difficulty controlling emotions? These sessions offer Yoga to people who would like to try it in a safe space understanding of their feelings.
Therapuetic sessions:
TCTSY explores the trauma responses in your body. The sensations you cope with might feel overwhelming, obtrusive, unpredictable or stop you living as you’d like. TCTSY is a safe space to learn about what might be happening in your body, how your body may be invited as part of healing these unwanted experiences and make choices away from surviving and towards thriving.
Classes:
TCTSY can also be a step toward Yoga more generally with a trauma-informed facilitator. Studios and classes can be triggering, unhelpful and intimidating for people who’ve experienced inter-relational traumas eg. domestic abuse, historic childhood abuse, bullying and combat so TCTSY might feel like a more accessible place to start.
Yoga comes from a long tradition of using your body in a contemplative way to regulate your nervous system and develop self-care and awareness. Everyone is different, and yoga is experienced uniquely by each person.
TCTSY facilitators understand that the intolerable events that once happened to you and your body may cause habitual stress responses that you are coping with even when the threat is long passed. Embodied trauma histories might be flashbacks, panic attacks, disassociation, anxiety, hyper-vigilance, fatigue and depression. These coping strategies were ways your body enabled you to survive and there is no shame in remaining in that survival mode. When you are ready, you might choose to explore those feelings and responses and maybe choose to change them.
What happens in a session?
In a TCTSY session, Meriel practices yoga and/or movement invitations alongside you but she will not look at you, touch you or judge you in any way. The Yoga forms and shapes become a way to explore feelings (or not) and moving (or not) and perhaps reflecting on how choice-making feel right now. There are no goals, no competition and no expectations at all. You can stop, start again or stop completely whenever you choose to.
Exploring movement can involve sensory feedback like noticing numbness, hypervigilance, hyper-sensitivity, exhaustion, blocks, unexplained pain and sensory/health anomalies.
Meriel offers 2 types of Yoga - TIY and TCTSY.
TIY is a general group yoga class for people who find regular yoga classes uncomfortable and/or inaccessible. TIY classes are also for anyone who prefers a venue and facilitator who understands things like triggering, panic attacks and dissociative experiences. These are not therapy but they may complement therapy.
TCTSY is 1:1 sessions for those living with complex or developmental trauma sometimes known as Chronic PTSD which refers to living with a history of traumatic experiences that are repeated e.g. ongoing domestic abuse, slavery, sex-trafficking, child abuse, bullying or combative scenarios like war.
Find out more about group classes or 1:1 sessions to choose what feels useful to you right now.
