Healing boundary ruptures is crucial in trauma recovery. It’s one of the first things I address, with all my STR clients. We do specific exercises with physical and verbal boundaries, to take the charge out of making a boundary and to reestablish safety in the body.

You would be surprised at just how much charge there can be on making a boundary.
Sometimes it’s so much as to cause physical shaking while releasing it. Not to worry though, shaking is a good thing if we can just allow it. It shows us just how much energy was bound up in the system and feels like such a relief when we’ve been able to gently discharge the held energy through the body.

Where does this intense energy come from? There are several ways for our boundaries to become high jacked. For example, a truncated or frozen fight/ flight response. What that means is maybe there was a time when you felt threatened or overwhelmed and needed to push someone or something away but didn’t. Or you wanted to run but couldn’t. The reason you didn’t run or fight back, was because you were either physically too small and/or it wouldn’t have been safe, or you would have gotten in trouble, or you were so frightened you simply couldn’t move. When we don’t get to complete the action the body wanted to do in the moment, often times the impulse to do so is still lodged somewhere in our system. This can translate into stress, anxiety, and a myriad of symptoms.

Luckily, we can let it go in a gentle safe manner; and we don’t even have to know where it is or what it stems from. When awakening these impulses through some simple boundary exercises, the body will show us what it wants to release and how it wants to do it. When we work with boundaries by physically pushing and tracking the sensations that come up, the discharge process begins. One may experience tingling or heat or chills, sweating and yes, sometimes shaking. These are all clues that let us know that the body has started to let go of this excess adrenic energy that it’s been holding, because now it’s safe enough to do so.

Working with verbal boundaries is just as important. You’d be surprised how much power there is behind stating a verbal boundary, and how difficult it is for some people to even imagine saying the word “NO”. Because of past experience, sometimes there isn’t permission to have a boundary or make a limit. What I’m talking about is not coming from the logical part of the brain. It’s not because someone wants to be wishy washy that they can’t say no. It’s because at some point in the past it was perceived as unsafe, and the body’s job is to do what’s necessary to help us survive.

For anyone who would like to experience having more freedom to express your boundaries I encourage you to try a few sessions of this work. You’ll be surprise at what your body has been holding back, and how great it feels to release it.