Why is it Important to Shake it Off ?

#19 in the series: What I Wish I had Known Before Beginning Therapy

Trauma gets trapped in our bodies and needs to be released.
This can take many forms—shaking is one of them.

Photo by BAILEY MAHON on Unsplash

It has been almost ten years since I began therapy and six since I published Brave: Healing Childhood Trauma. Over the years, many men and women have shared their stories with me. During these conversations, brave survivors often apologized for shaking. “Sorry, I can’t seem to stop shaking.” This provided the opportunity for me to share what I understand about shaking—what I wish I had understood before beginning therapy.

We do not experience a traumatic event with our thinking brains; traumatic events are experienced with our mid/lower brains and bodies. The autonomic responses are fight or flight, and when these are not available, the body freezes (shuts down). When we emerge from a freeze response, our body will naturally try to release the trauma—often by shaking. Unless the stress hormones that flood us are released, the residual impact remains in our bodies. I think of it as trapped energy.

When sharing our stories of unresolved trauma, the body once again attempts to release this trapped energy. Shaking during a therapy session often felt uncontrollable and messy. It was exactly what my body needed and yet I apologized. We are culturally programmed to apologize for anything that seems out of control.

Shaking is a somatic (body) reaction to trauma—one of many. A traumatic event becomes embedded trauma because the memory is not resolved. What does that even mean? If we think about animals who freeze when fearing for their lives, we can see that they get up, shake it off, and then run away. This completes what they were unsuccessfully trying to do before their body froze.

The use of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) as part of my therapy allowed me to resolve many of these memories in a safe setting. There was value in realizing that processing the memory would result in shaking—and that was a good thing! Trying to control this would have prevented me from healing.

I needed to go to therapy and release trauma in the safety of therapeutic care. There are so few places where this is possible. There is really nothing any more messy than processing trauma. The following quote describes this problem exquisitely:

“Coming out of freeze brings us right back to fight or flight, and through the discharge of this energy back to a calm, regulated place for our nervous system and latent threat response. Polar bears can do it, bunnies can do it, impalas can do it; we can’t. We seem to have a problem with running around like a wild animal in the throes of self-defence, when we are in fact minding our own business at a bus stop, alone on a wet Wednesday afternoon. That extra piece of our brain, the wonderful verbal meaning-making pr[e]-frontal cortex gets in the way.” (Source)

Yes, exactly. The pre-frontal cortex is all about appearing normal to the rest of the world. Visibly shaking has somehow become not normal when it is in fact, one of the most normal things humans do.

As I reflected on releasing trauma by shaking, I realized that it wasn’t just that my body felt out of control, but that my thinking brain felt unable to continue doing what needed to be done—what happens to those who are trying to tell me their story. It is more than the shaking, it is the inability to think clearly.

It becomes impossible to think because that part of your brain goes offline while experiencing or processing trauma. My therapist who understood that my cognitive-thinking survival strategies were a wall of protection, watched for moments when my emotions began to surface—that is when the real work of releasing trauma could take place. I had to become comfortable with uncomfortable feelings to access healing.

I highly suggest professional care as you begin processing the memories that leave you shaking or disoriented. Without the care of a therapist to ground me after processing a memory, I would have been overwhelmed. Learning to process on my own took time but eventually, it was possible. Shaking is now something I have learned to embrace—often curling up under a weighted blanket, listening to instrumental music, and allowing my body to shake. The more I have leaned into this practice, the less often it is necessary and its intensity has decreased.

I wish I had understood that my body held the clues and the path to healing before beginning therapy. The very things I avoided held the information I needed to heal. The physical responses—triggers—indicated the need to resolve memories of traumatic events. If I had understood this, I would have spent far less time avoiding professional help. I also would have appreciated how my body was attempting to release trauma and not felt like it was necessary to apologize for shaking.

Yes, “shake it off” is so much more than a Taylor Swift song!

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Note: All information and resources presented in these newsletters are drawn from my personal story and do not replace professional psychological care for mental health issues. My legal and ethical advice is always to seek professional help.