The Latest from our Blog
We Touch Whole People, Not Parts of People
When it comes to working with people’s pain and trauma, it turns out that feeling safe and exploring someone’s stories; their hopes, dreams and fears is key to healing. I trained as a chiropractor where we often only treat part of the body. One of the central ideas...
How to soothe your inner guard dog – four approaches to working with trauma
When people think of trauma, they often think of psychological problems. The radical shift we’ve made through studying trauma is understanding that trauma is primarily about physiology. When we experience trauma, we get stuck in protective reflexes - gestures of...
Why safe touch feels amazing and bad touch feels awful
Lockdown has been a massive experiment in non-touching. The stories of people isolated in hospital with only a screen to communicate to loved ones or the images of people on either side of plastic barriers, are heartbreaking. The past 12 months have reinforced the...
Why is embodiment key to healing trauma?
If it is hard to feel, it is hard to heal. Our feeling states are often hidden, rarely simple, and sometimes scary. Embodiment tools can help us develop our capacity to feel, which is incredibly useful in resolving pain, anxiety and trauma. We’re all hardwired to...
Touch Is Really Strange – New April 2021
About Touch Is Really Strange When did you start working on the book? The idea for a book on touch has been in my head since 2019, but definitely a lockdown project. The Really Strange series has been huge fun and continues to get heartwarming feedback. There have...
Exploring Body Centred Countertransference
Overview Connection to the body is the foundation of connection to self, connection to others, and connection to the natural world. Transference is when feelings, attitudes, associations originally experienced with important people from the past are transferred onto...
The Brain Can Make Mistakes When it Comes to Pain
When I teach that “pain involves the brain,” people often feel that I’m saying that it’s their fault. That’s really not what I am saying. I like to talk about the mind, the brain, and the body. The mind is our consciousness, our awareness, our sense of self. The brain...
How to recognise fight, flight or freeze
The understanding of trauma is fundamental to health. We’re all hardwired to respond to overwhelming experiences in the same way. We contract away from danger, we run, jump fight or shutdown. The control mechanisms (nervous, hormonal and immune) take us immediately...
Links between pain and trauma
Links between pain and trauma Polyvagal theory developed by Dr Stephen Porges is very influential in the trauma world. The essence of polyvagal theory is that feeling safe is the fundamental drive for humans. If there is the perception of danger ('neuroception' is the...
Can feeling your body lessen anxiety?
Understanding how anxiety is created by our nervous system trying to protect us, and how our fight-or-flight mechanisms can get stuck, can significantly lessen the fear experienced during anxiety attacks. I’m deeply curious about how minds and bodies interact. I am...
How does changing the body change how we think, feel and remember?
From my mid-20s onwards, the question ‘how do we feel?’ has been a fascination for me. How do we construct our experience? What are our beliefs and how does that affect our experience of our bodies? Volunteering with people with learning difficulties and then working...
Pain, Perception, Trauma and Safety
Why is it that two people can experience the same stressful event, but have very different outcomes? I recently joined Avni Trivedi on the Speak From the Body podcast to talk about deepening feeling, changing the narrative and addressing stress, pain and trauma. We...
Pain Is Really Strange: Slides from Embodiment and Pain Day 2020-06-13
Slides from Steve Haines talk on pain at 'Embodiment and Pain Day' 13 Jun 2020, hosted by The Embodiment Conference. https://embodiedfacilitator.com/pain-day/ Parts 1 and 2 of slide show [pdfjs-viewer...
Touch and Trauma: Slides from Embodiment Conference 2020-05-30
Steve Haines presentation slides @ Trauma Education for Facilitators 30 May 2020.https://embodiedfacilitator.com/trauma-education-day On the panel with Dr Stephen Porges Part 1 Why Touch [pdfjs-viewer...
How to Find Safety During the Pandemic
The amount you’re affected by an unprecedented event like this current pandemic depends on your resources and your relationship to health. We all do the best we can, given our history and current circumstances. Many of our responses are rooted in primitive reflexes...
Finding Safety: Trauma and the Body, Steve Haines, Somatic Movement Summit 2020
Finding Safety: Trauma and the Body What is trauma? When your physiology is stuck, you are stuck. Trauma can be defined as being stuck in protective reflexes. Dissociation is a protective reflex most people are unaware of. In my experience, most people dissociate most...
10 Ways to Work with Anxiety in Times of Crisis
Many people are experiencing more anxiety than usual in the face of the global pandemic. Whether you’d like some guidance for your own anxiety, or you’re working with people who need extra support, I hope these ten approaches help you to feel more freedom and ease....
Five Ways to Prevent Injury (or Recover More Easily)
One: Too much load can lead to injury Not sleeping, not being able to rest and managing lots of stress are all extra loads on our system. Being emotionally out of balance, having poor nutrition and feeling isolated are all extra loads. The more load we are carrying...
TRE featured on www.patient.info
Can shaking exercises improve stress and PTSD? Great article on TRE on www.patient.infoSteve Haines is a leading TRE provider, teaching in locations worldwide. He says what makes TRE special is that it focuses on relieving stress and trauma by triggering a natural...
Anxiety is Really Strange, Isn’t It?
Anxiety is most commonly framed as a psychological problem. My clinical experience for over 20 years has been that by safely connecting to the body, people become less anxious.
Embodiment Podcast – Steve Haines on Bodywork, Trauma and Feelings, Dec 2019
Here is podcast of me being interviewed by Mark Walsh. At the start there is some framing of how I believe cranial work works, the importance of feeling and the limits of energy models. For TRE folks at 00:34:30 we discuss TRE, including some responses to critiques of...
My favorite Books About the Body, Mind and Health
If you’re looking for something interesting to read over the Winter break, I can recommend the following books, as well as my own series; Pain, Trauma and Anxiety are Really Strange. Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey-Smith...
Shake It All About – TRE in Metro, London 2019-11-28
TRE, the new exercise craze born out of a war zone I’M lying on my back with my knees bent and slightly apart, and my legs are twitching uncontrollably. For some reason, rather than making me anxious this strikes me as utterly hilarious — I just have a mental picture...
Webinar: Working with Trauma via Relational Touch 2019-10-29, Steve Haines
This webinar was designed to explore how 'Relational Touch' supports embodiment and grounding to heal trauma. When our physiology is stuck, we are stuck. Understanding the protective reflexes of 'fight-or-flight' or 'freeze' is a key piece in working with trauma....
Webinar: Relational Touch 2019-09-26, Steve Haines
https://vimeo.com/manage/362675753/general “Touch, my studies show, is the primary language of compassion, love, and gratitude - emotions at the heart of trust and cooperation.” -Keltner, D. (2009) Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life. 1st Ed, W. W....
Floating is Not Necessarily Good
As a young child, one of my clients learnt to dissociate when her parents were arguing. When I first started treating her, and did not understand the dissociation model I now work with, we both thought the sessions were productive because she consistently reported a...
Being Sensitive May Be How We Can Become Less Sensitive!
When we’re looking to reduce pain and anxiety, developing skills and words about how to interact with the feeling states inside you is really important. In this blog, I’m going to explore feeling, and how we can get better at learning how to manage intense feelings....
Too fidgety to meditate? Try TRE – TRE® article in The Times
The new tension-release techniqueThe latest relaxation technique is perfect for people who can’t sit still 'If you have no patience for mindfulness and you’re too fidgety to meditate, a new approach to tackling stress has just reached the UK’s most...
How to Create Safety in Trauma Healing?
The very nature of trauma is that it is overwhelming - it’s more than the organism can cope with. Trauma shatters our worldview and rules of fairness and justice no longer seem to apply. Trauma often leads to a spiritual crisis and a profound re-evaluation of meaning....
Anything Can Work Some of the Time. Nothing Works All of the Time.
Anything can work some of the time. Nothing works all of the time. This phrase works really well to illustrate the complexity of working with pain. Pain is dependant on multiple, diverse, interacting variables. Pain is a perception due to the interplay of biological,...