Rewiring Trauma: How Psychedelics and Somatic Therapy Heal the Mind and Body

Educational Overview: Healing Trauma through Psychedelics and Somatic Therapy

Insights from Bessel van der Kolk, Psychedelic Science, June 17, 2025

The Brain and Trauma

Trauma doesn’t just affect emotions—it leaves an imprint on the brain, especially in the amygdala, brainstem, and limbic system. These brain structures control vital functions such as sleep, appetite, digestion, and breathing, which can become dysregulated in trauma survivors.

• Sensory Experience: Trauma is stored in sensory and emotional experiences within the brain. The body’s physiological responses (heart rate, sweating, tense muscles) often mirror these experiences. Trauma makes it difficult for people to feel safe and present in their own bodies.

How Trauma Affects the Body

• The Limbic System: This system, especially during the first five years of life, forms a predictive map of the world. Severe abuse or neglect in childhood alters this map, creating beliefs such as “I will be hurt,” or “I am a bad person.”
• Physical Symptoms: Trauma often leads to dissociation from the body, and individuals may experience physical symptoms such as tight muscles, poor digestion, and sleep issues.

The Role of Psychedelics in Healing Trauma

Psychedelics can re-imprint the brain by allowing individuals to access deeper emotional states, working to heal trauma at a sensory level.

• Emotional Release: Psychedelics help clients process trauma through sensory experiences (what they see, hear, feel, and sense), which bypasses the language areas of the brain, particularly the left temporal lobe, which shuts down during trauma. This allows people to reconnect to the raw sensations and emotions that trauma is stored in.
• Reconnection to Self: Psychedelics facilitate a shift in perspective, allowing clients to view their past with compassion, seeing their younger self as a vulnerable child, not as a failure.

The Importance of Safety in Trauma Healing

• Therapist’s Role: The role of the therapist or guide is crucial in creating a safe container for clients. Somatic therapy, grounded practices like yoga, touch, and embodied awareness are essential for helping individuals reconnect to their bodies. The therapist’s presence reassures clients that they are not alone on their journey of healing.

Flashbacks and Sensory Trauma Processing

• Flashbacks: When trauma occurs, the brain switches into its “right temporal lobe” (spatial and sensory) and shuts down the left brain, which handles language. This is why trauma is often difficult to articulate—it is felt in raw, sensory forms (heart-racing, muscle tightness, heat).
  • Re-imprinting Flashbacks: Working with clients to relive sensory details (e.g., “What did you see, hear, and feel when this happened?”) helps re-activate and process the traumatic event. Psychedelics support this re-imprinting process, allowing for the release of trauma sensations and emotional charge.

The Integration of Psychedelics and Somatic Therapies

• EMDR vs. Psychedelics:
  • EMDR is highly effective for adult-onset PTSD (memory-based trauma) but is less effective for complex PTSD (CPTSD), which typically involves childhood trauma and layers of unresolved emotional states.
  • For CPTSD, psychedelics are preferred because they help reprogram the limbic system, re-imprinting not just memories but also core emotional states, sense of self, and social perceptions.

Therapeutic Approaches to Trauma Healing:

1. Somatic Therapy: The key message of somatic therapy is, “I am here, I am by your side.” It involves grounding techniques, body awareness, touch, and connection to help clients feel safe in their bodies.
2. Yoga: One of the most effective methods for trauma recovery, yoga can help individuals reconnect with their bodies, regulate their nervous system, and experience a sense of presence. Bessel van der Kolk conducted three studies showing how yoga helps individuals re-regulate their limbic system.

Therapeutic Practices and Modalities for Trauma Healing

• Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy: Psychedelics open critical periods in the brain, allowing trauma that has been deeply imprinted to be reprocessed and healed. This is not just about memories but about self-regulation, neuroplasticity, and self-compassion.
• Somatic Therapies: Techniques like touch, humming, fist-bumping, and energy awareness allow for physical and emotional release.
• Psychodrama: Reenacting scenes with a parent figure can help process unresolved trauma. For example, saying to the traumatized individual, “If I were your parent, I would have listened to you, held you, and reassured you.” This helps create emotional resolution.

EMDR vs. Psychedelic Therapies

• EMDR: Effective for adult trauma, focusing on memory-based issues (e.g., car accidents or singular traumatic events).
• Psychedelics: More effective for CPTSD (childhood trauma, developmental neglect, attachment issues) as they work on core beliefs, identity, and emotional processing.

Neuroplasticity and Self-Compassion

Trauma healing through psychedelics offers measurable outcomes such as:

• Self-compassion: The ability to be kind to oneself in the face of past trauma.
• Alexithymia: The ability to label and describe one’s emotions (a common deficit in trauma survivors).
• Self-regulation: The capacity to stay grounded and connected in the face of overwhelming emotions.
• Neuroplasticity: The brain’s ability to rewire itself after trauma, particularly in critical developmental periods that were once thought to be closed.

Book Comparison: “How the Body Does Not Keep the Score” vs. “The Body Keeps the Score”

• Bessel’s “The Body Keeps the Score” explains how trauma is stored in the body, affecting the nervous system and emotional responses.
• “How the Body Does Not Keep the Score” offers a different perspective, suggesting that the body does not always retain trauma physically but instead emphasizes the psychological aspects. Bessel found this fascinating because it contrasts his own views, emphasizing how trauma memory is not just physical but also deeply emotional.

Social Connection and Healing

Bessel emphasized the importance of human connection in the therapeutic process. Healing happens in relationships—whether it’s the therapist-client relationship or within the community. The retreat model (where individuals disconnect from distractions like screens and engage deeply with others) has shown promising results in psychedelic-assisted healing.

Conclusion: Integrating Psychedelic Therapy into Trauma Recovery

1. Reconnect with the Body: Healing begins by re-establishing a connection to the body through somatic therapies, yoga, and mindfulness.
2. Healing the Brain: Psychedelics help re-imprint trauma at the neural level, allowing for the transformation of sensory and emotional memories.
3. Compassion: The most important shift in trauma recovery is the ability to develop self-compassion and compassion for others, even those involved in the trauma.
4. Therapist’s Role: The presence of a therapist or guide is crucial to creating a safe container for the client, fostering the emotional release needed for healing.

This comprehensive overview outlines how trauma is stored in the body and mind, and how different therapeutic modalities, including psychedelic-assisted therapy, somatic practices, and EMDR, can support the healing process.

Clinical studies with psilocybin are now taking place at MD Anderson in Houston. Go to https://www.ClinicalTrials.gov to learn more. Psilocybin-Assisted Psychotherapy in Patients With Advanced Cancer on Maintenance Therapy

TRIPS – Treatment to Improve Depression and/or Anxiety Using Psilocybin-assisted Psychotherapy in Cancer Survivors

Upcoming Studies include Psilocybin in the use of Chemo-Neuropathy and Psilocybin in the use of Smoking Cessation.

My notes for this article were based on” I have more notes to put in. Therapy makes it safe for people to know what they know and feel what they feel, and it re-imprints the limbic system. What changes in the brain as a result of trauma? Number one, speechless terror. I don’t have the rest of the numbers. Perhaps you could find them in some of his literature. Back to the notes. How do you bring back flashbacks of trauma? You talk about sensations. What did you see? What did you hear? What did you feel like when he slapped you? Because when trauma’s happening, you go into your right temporal lobe, the oh shit part of your brain. It’s spatial and it’s sensory. It is not language. Matter of fact, your left brain goes offline. Part of that disappears when you experience trauma, and that’s the part that has the language area. Trauma is lived out in heartbreaking and gut-wracking sensations in your body. So we have to get the person back there to release and to re-imprint.You’ve seen photos of an activated body, a body that’s hijacked by the past, where the amygdala is activated. Psychedelics are extremely helpful for that. The prefrontal language talk therapy helps you to know how and why you got there, but it doesn’t resolve the problem. The part of the brain where the resolution has to take place is in the amygdala. So it has to be a sensory experience. Now that feeling sensory experience can be a big, huge release while in a journey, or it can be smaller releases while in integration or on psycholytic doses of a psychedelic. It can be released through other modalities that re-imprint the brain, such as EMDR or tapping or toning or frequency, et cetera. Bessel spoke about mindfulness meditation, saying that traumatized people cannot do it because they have all these demons inside. But if they have a person, a therapist, a guide there to help them feel safe, they can begin a practice, a little at a time, of mindfulness meditation. He showed a Rorschach card and stated that trauma dominates how you see the world, and that through trauma, when people look at Rorschach, they relive their trauma or they imprint their trauma on top of the Rorschach to where the Rorschach will look to them like their buddy’s brains spilled out on the ground or a ravaged vagina for a rape victim. Rape victim, whereas a normal obviation of the Rorschach would be that there are two people sitting nose to nose, for example. He stated he would love to do some therapy where he showed traumatized people Rorschach cards before, during, and after their journeys. He stated that EMDR was his gateway drug to psychedelics. He saw a lady who had been in a car accident, who was reliving her trauma in a very charged manner, as if it were happening to her in that moment. After EMDR, she was able to talk about the car accident with hardly any charge to it at all. He stated that child versus adult trauma, EMDR did excellent with adult-onset trauma, because you’re talking about memory. But with complex PTSD, childhood trauma, one layered upon another, psychedelics are better, because they get into the brain, re-imprinting the brain. He said that our organism is meant to be in sync with others, and that should be a source of pleasure to us. When you’ve been traumatized, you live in a very narrow reality of fear and danger. It’s difficult to allow new and novel things into your life. The brain doesn’t update itself. It keeps doing the same old shit, and nothing changes. The person becomes stuck. Some of the outcome measures he talked about were self-compassion, a rise in self-compassion, alexithymia, self-regulation, and neuroplasticity. He stated there are therapeutic windows, critical periods of brain development that we never thought we could go back to and heal. But with psychedelics, all psychedelics open up windows of critical periods in the brain. The other presenter was Licia Sky, a somatic therapist. Licia stated that the message that you want to give in a journey is, I am here, I am by your side. She stated that preparation involves really taking the time to get people in their bodies, to get grounded, to get awareness of their energy around them, the touch of their own body to their own body, elbow hugs with your arms, standing shoulder to shoulder, saying and partaking, giving out the message, I am here, I am by your side. Pressing your own hands, their own hands together to center and ground, then turning the hands over and doing a slow fist bump, then pushing my fist to their fist and feeling the core tighten and the pushing into the feet. Allow grounding to take place. Move very slowly, then move to pressing a palm to palm, if okay with them, then holding thumb to thumb, fist holding, pushing and pulling both ways, and ask, How was that for them? Using your voice for humming as an answer or for a regulation. It’s about stepping outside of our cultural paradigm, about personal space, touch, body awareness, and self-experience. Coming fully into your being as much as possible, while I come fully into my being as deeply as possible, listening with you. People come to you who have so much trapped down, they don’t even know. It’s a sacred journey between heaven and hell for the person to travel with the other person. And you don’t really need high doses; it can be dangerous to blast people with depression, anxiety, CPTSD, and PTSD out there into the stratosphere. But fully intending, going internal, having embodied awareness, noticing what they are experiencing deeply. Again, CPTSD versus PTSD and EMDR and psychedelics. Adult PTSD has a better outcome with EMDR because it’s a memory problem. Complex PTSD does not, psychedelics are better. CPTSD is not a memory problem; it’s how you live and move through the world. Your image and feeling of yourself. It’s a feeling slash personality issue. Psychedelics open up those critical periods that can be re-imprinted and change the personality.Someone wrote a book called How the Body Does Not Keep the Score, and Bessel found it fascinating. Could you put a little paragraph in here about that book and how it contrasts with Bessel’s The Body Keeps the Score book? He went on to say how we relate socially in situations where people are having emergent experiences of themselves, and you can’t get that from ChatGPT. That’s what’s so important about the therapist-participant relationship. He stated the retreat model is great, where you go away, you have no screens, and you’re going to be with people. There was a question about psychedelics. Can they affect physical health as much as mental health? He stated he didn’t know, but he had a friend with metastatic prostate cancer, suffering and actually dying, who went to Hopkins for the end-of-life psilocybin study, and 50 years later, he’s still alive, and he said that that was the single most thing that was so impactful in his health. Bessel also stated that psychodrama is great, so you could have someone there acting as your parent and say to the traumatized person, if I were your parent, I would have listened to you. I would have held you. I would have reassured you. Now, please give me a synopsis of everything that I fed into you in a format that I can hand out or share with my clients.