Steve Haines – Shake Free of Trauma With TRE® 2023

Shaking is a simple, safe tool to help you feel more connected and alive.

Developed by Dr. David Berceli, Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE), trigger a natural shaking reflex.

In this opening module, Steve will take you through the history of shaking, a lost practice in many healing traditions. He’ll share insights from ethology — the study of animal behavior — and explain how shaking is a mammalian reflex for discharging stress.

This module will be all about finding safety in the body and the essentials of embodied approaches to working with overwhelm. To heal trauma, you don’t need to understand or to remember. You also don’t need to talk about your most difficult experiences!

You’ll begin working with Steve’s bottom-up approach, where you’ll heal trauma by reconnecting to your body. When you switch off protective reflexes of fight-or-flight or freeze, you free yourself from intrusive thoughts, pain, and stuck emotions.

TRE teaches how to be with intense feelings — without becoming overwhelmed. Shaking is a powerful stimulus to help you release chronic stress and tension. As you’ll discover, shaking helps you wake up your body.

In this module, you’ll:

• Explore the importance of feeling safe, being playful, and being curious
• Learn how to turn on, pay attention to, and turn off tremors
• Discover the TRE ritual of 7 exercises that trigger your natural tremor mechanism
• Learn about Dr. David Berceli and the history of TRE
• Understand core principles from the latest science of trauma
• Start to identify when primitive reflexes begin to hijack your mind and body

There is a hidden response to traumatic events.

Nearly everyone knows about the stress response of speeding up to survive…

… but not enough people know about the shutdown response, in which we slow down to survive.

In this module, Steve will explain how shutdown is also known as freeze, dissociation, collapse, and playing dead. Shutdown’s essence is a gesture of immobilizing and switching off so you can survive.

Dissociation is the essence of trauma. For many survivors, it’s the hidden mystery at the heart of trauma. It’s a very confusing state, where you can feel numb, disconnected, and empty. Frequently, you feel stuck, unable to think or act. Often, it feels horrible and scary.

Sometimes, however, dissociation can feel safe, floaty, and expansive, as though you’re no longer bound by your body.

The main chemicals of dissociation are endorphins — your body’s natural painkillers. For many of us, there is a seductive, cozy quality to dissociation. It can seem easier to not feel and to tune out, rather than to remain present.

The opposite of dissociation is being grounded — a beautiful, earthy word that describes being present and connected. As you’ll discover, groundedness is a state in which you’re at home in your body and observant of the space around you.

In this module, you’ll:

• Learn how to feel safe in your body
• Practice simple tools for being grounded
• Discover when daydreaming becomes too much
• Understand the barriers that make it hard to connect to the body
• Discover the power of moving slowly with intense feelings

Modern trauma therapists focus on teaching how to regulate intense feelings. It’s now well understood that going slow is actually the quickest way to heal trauma.

Feeling is difficult, yet it’s a skill that can be taught. Often you’ll need support and community to help you co-regulate before you can self-regulate.

If things are feeling too strange, too quick, too much, or too floaty during the tremor process — you can learn to put the brakes on and stop.

By learning to regulate the tremors of TRE, you can learn to regulate all feeling states.

You’ll develop your skills and strength to help you build a strong, resilient container to hold your trauma.

In this module, you’ll discover:

• How to practice going slow as the quickest way to heal trauma
• Ways to recognize the reliable early signs of distress, including signs that show when you’re more activated than you realize
• Principles for self-regulation: OMG, not as in Oh My God, but as in Orient-Move-Ground
• The power of avoiding freezing, flooding, and dissociating
• A guided practice to intervene and contain your feelings when you’re triggered into a fight-or-flight response or intense reaction

Steve will perform a live demonstration of a TRE intervention on students so you can learn the technique in practice. Tension has a habit of creeping up on us. If we’re not careful, we become a bag of contractions, holding on tightly each and every day in order to survive.

When you’re braced against life and you’re stuck trying to protect yourself, it’s hard work.

With TRE, you can shake it off. You can let go and allow natural tremors to free your body from the inside — a wonderful feeling.

In this module, you’ll explore the key metaphor of releasing tension and trauma. You’ll encourage the tremors to meet the stuck parts of your body.

Steve will share plenty of tips and tricks to help the tremors move seamlessly through your whole body. He’ll help you understand the basic structure of the body so you can appreciate where and why tremors can get stuck.

In this module, you’ll:

• Witness an actual demonstration performed by Steve
• Learn how to shake it off
• Discover the living matrix of fascia in your body
• Learn about your diaphragm and slow, gentle breathing
• Come out of stuck patterns to new creative possibilities
• Practice techniques to support tremors in your hips, spine, and shoulders

How do the mind and body connect? This is a very old problem. Shaking is an amazing training in mind-body connection.

At the heart of TRE is profound trust in the wisdom of the body. Trauma is seen as primarily a physiological response rather than a psychological problem.

To heal trauma, you don’t need to understand or remember. The goal is to turn down the dial on protective reflexes that are trying to speed you up or shut you down so you can survive.

This a radical paradigm shift away from thinking and understanding as the key elements of healing.

In this module, you’ll learn how emotions are rooted in the body’s sensations. Steve will guide you to notice and label feelings — and have feelings, rather than become them.

In this module, you’ll:

• Deepen your understanding of trauma theory
• Discover how emotions are related to sensations
• Find new ways of describing and inhabiting your body
• Understand that trauma is about physiology, not psychology
• Learn that you don’t always need to talk about the past to heal in the present
• Practice new feeling states

This module is a deeper dive into how the nervous, hormone, and immune systems are involved in trauma, and Steve will perform another live demonstration with students from the class.

Many people are surprised to learn they’re not mad, bad, or broken. When you truly comprehend that protective reflexes are normal reactions to extraordinary events, you take a massive step forward in your healing.

Steve will introduce you to Dr. Stephen Porges’ research — as you’ll discover, it’s full of influential scientific discoveries about primitive survival reflexes. Steve will make Dr. Porges’ polyvagal theory simple and relevant to your daily life.

He’ll explain how, as your perception of a threat increases, you might default to your older reflexes to survive. It’s your neurobiology responding to perceived danger, and Dr. Porges outlines this process in the stages of Orientation, Mobilization, and Immobilization.

In this session, Steve will also review the literature on stress and highlight the insights you can use in ordinary life.

In this module, you’ll:

• Witness another live TRE intervention
• Develop your understanding of stress
• Briefly touch on the complexity of trauma and its wider models in psychology
• Learn about polyvagal theory and your core survival gestures of moving from safe and social to fight-or-flight to freeze
• Deepen your appreciation of the diverse and complex range of psychological behaviors you exhibit when you’re overwhelmed
• Return to the simplicity of finding safety in your body via shaking

This final module is a chance to rediscover being playful with the tremor process.

After you’ve moved through the previous sessions, there may be all sorts of change happening within you.

You’ll explore classic tools and interventions in TRE to help find coherence, variety, and fluidity in your shaking process.

Building confidence in the strength and power of your body and the tremors can take time. Steve will give you a framework for how tremors commonly progress — and how to develop a sustained TRE practice.

TRE is about you healing yourself. It’s a powerful tool to support your ongoing healing journey.

There are times to develop your strength and resilience as you learn to let go. Other times, you’ll want to go gently, slowly building your capacity to feel.

In this module, you’ll:

• Discover how to build resilience
• Develop your skills to trust the tremors
• Learn how to pace yourself and create an ongoing practice for self-healing
• Recognize when to speed your practice up and when to calm things down
• Understand the power of being curious and playful

The Power of Touch
PDF Guide From Steve Haines

Touch is an underappreciated tool for promoting health. It’s not just touching other people and other things that helps. Using your hands to touch your own body can reinforce your sense of self. This article, which covers the latest science on slow touch — a type of touch that promotes compassion and feeling alive — explores how to use self-touch tools in a TRE session to move tremors through your body. Explore how to use brushing and squeezing techniques to stimulate an inner sense of connection, and discover the importance of relational touch in promoting safe social bonding.