Pain and Trauma: A Physical Therapist’s Perspective

Pain and trauma impact our daily lives.  DCT can help you address and hopefully fix that permanently. Since I am not a psychologist, I will keep it more physically based instead of getting esoteric or going into a psychological explanation. I’m a physical therapist, so I’m not an authority on psychology.  The body stores trauma.  , but the experience itself.  Your body also stores the trauma’s emotions.

When approaching any injury, dysfunctional movement pattern, or compensation pattern in the body, we have to be open to the fact that the person could be exhibiting or experiencing that pain.   The pain shows in the movement pattern; this is a result of the event’s trauma, which the tissue of the body still holds.

Job’s Body is a great book about body language.  The book talks about different body positions and what they mean. An example from the book is; someone with really rounded shoulders and slouched tend to have a masochistic or very defensive personality. They are waiting for something to come in and get them. The book goes through many different body positions. It can be fascinating when you start looking around and seeing how people carry themselves and associating that with either a physical injury or a trauma. So it can be one and the same.

I was very careful when creating and communicating the DCT system. We can treat somebody with an injury or a trauma and never have to speak to them about any emotions relating to the accident or the problem. We can simply teach them how to help them feel better in their bodies if they prefer. By doing that, we can remove the trauma. Often, when we correct the dysfunction at the physical level, we help repair the dysfunction at the emotional or mental level.

We make adjustments as part of an integrative medical team.  The clinic in which I work is an integrative medical facility where we have a neurologist, orthopedic surgeons, and acupuncturists right down the hall. We have doctors from all different disciplines.  If someone comes in and I’m bumping into a wall of trauma I’m not able to address; I can refer that person immediately to someone who can help them with the correct tool.

Getting better and being well is about being able to identify which tools you need and when to eliminate your pain and trauma. I pride myself in creating a technique that gets to the bottom of whether or not DCT is the right tool for you. Within one session, I can typically tell somebody we can start or if they should pursue something else. I can make a recommendation and usually point them in the right direction. The reason is DCT is communication, listening, and outcome-based. If I take someone with Pain and Trauma through a DCT session, and they listen and do what I say, but the outcome is not there, I know there’s some other aspect of their healing process to be addressed first. Sometimes I can tell what it is. Other times I sit the person down and have an honest conversation with them and help them figure it out.

DCT is incorporated and used in a professional environment when it comes to pain and trauma. I don’t train people to try and use DCT as the only tool. DCT is a powerful tool that does a lot for the body that other techniques in the same genre don’t do.