What is Trauma-Informed Breathwork?
What Does it Mean to Say Trauma-Informed Breathwork?
You can’t search for breathwork on the web without encountering this term, so we thought we had better tackle the subject for our clients and readers. Hell, you’re going to see it all over our site and we’ll tell you why below.
SAMHSA says “A program, organization, or system that is trauma-informed realizes the widespread impact of trauma and understands potential paths for recovery; recognizes the signs and symptoms of trauma in clients, families, staff, and others involved with the system; and responds by fully integrating knowledge about trauma into policies, procedures, and practices, and seeks to actively resist re-traumatization.”
The National Center for Trauma-Informed Care further explains: “Maxine Harris and Roger Fallot first made the distinction between “trauma-specific services” (clinical treatments) and the culture change referred to as “trauma-informed care.” Trauma-informed care is a powerful framework because it provides hope that there is a better way to handle some of our most pressing social problems. And it is potentially unifying because it can be applied in any setting. The basic premise is that everyone can benefit from learning about trauma. Staff learn new ways to interact with the people they serve, and everyday citizens respond differently when they encounter the results of trauma.”
It’s important that we understand the roots of the term, and how it's been applied to services, and more specifically breathwork services. We are all for practitioners of every kind learning more about how trauma impacts their clients, and we personally feel that one shouldn’t be doing or teaching this work without first becoming trauma-informed, but we are vehemently opposed to practitioners just labeling their services as trauma-informed because it’s a great marketing gimmick, or because of SEO, or because they don’t want to get called in for not being trauma-informed.
Trauma-informed care gets almost 20k searches per month. The term breathwork alone (not including breathwork certification, training, etc.) gets 8k. This is a hugely marketable term, and marketers are capitalizing it. Trauma-informed breathwork is vital and it’s important that more and more organizations, programs, and facilitators are becoming trauma-informed.
What to Watch Out for with Practitioners Throwing the Trauma Term Around
So, how do you tell who is trauma-informed and who isn’t in the wild west of breathwork? You can never really know who a person is, but reading their content can help you detirmine. It’s important to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff here, and we want to assist.
Here are some general tips to help you out:
Their website truly describes what makes them trauma-informed, not just labels it as such.
This is the tell-tale sign really. Does it say trauma-informed and that’s it, or does it tell you how their practice is trauma-informed? Becoming trauma-informed is not a weekend workshop you can one and done, then add it to your resume. It is a lifelong practice that must be cultivated over time. It’s not as simple as “say this, not that” or just reading The Body Keeps the Score. Your entire practice has to shift as a result of being trauma-informed. You have to extirpate everything from your practice that is not in alignment with a thorough understanding of trauma, and then build a practice with a solid understanding of how the practice you perform interacts with traumatic experiences in the body, and the responses to this trauma. This includes systemic issues caused by the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Trauma-informed care is every bit as much about social justice as it is about healing.
Oh, shit it’s getting complex here, huh? That’s because it is.
2. Do they use words like “clear” “delete” “feel” “cure” “remove” “release” etc. to describe what breathwork does?
Pretty much any language on a site/post/marketing email that uses these terms (ESL writers excluded here) to describe what breathwork does and does not do conveys a complete lack of knowledge about what trauma is, and what traumatic events do to us. Simple. Avoid these practitioners. Being able to integrate trauma is one of the most profound components to a breathwork session, but your provider must be qualified to do so, and if they are, they provide trauma-specific services, not trauma-informed ones. If they are on one hand, claiming they can help you heal trauma, and on the other, claiming to be trauma-informed, that tells you that they might not understand the distinction and therefore do not understand trauma-informed care. If their training claims to be trauma-informed and they’re teaching you a trauma integration technique, they’re training is trauma-specific. Their program can be trauma-informed and trauma-informed care integrates trauma-specific services, but there is a lot of redundancy there that inauthentic trauma practitioners don’t understand. It’s a marketing ploy. This is a simple test which you can try out on your own! Ask them how they help you heal from trauma with their service. Ask them the difference between trauma-informed care and trauma-specific services. Ask them if they even know who SAMHSA is! If they don’t know these things, they don’t understand trauma-informed care.
One doesn’t simply walk into Mordor, you know?
3. Are their practices rooted in equity and justice?
If so, then great! This is the beginning of a trauma-informed practice. If not, then they are not truly trauma-informed. Systemic issues are the core of traumatic events, and ignoring them means practitioners are approaching healing from a hyperindividualist neo-liberal capitalist lens which places the responsibility for healing solely on the one experiencing the trauma. It doesn’t get more fucked up than blaming the victim for their pain, or lack of ability to heal, except when of course you are the cause of that pain, then point the finger. This contributes to these systems of oppression traumatizing us all, but disabled folks, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ folks especially. Then we get into access and resources to access and all of a sudden this blog becomes a rant about resisting tyranny and oppression instead of trauma-informed and trauma-focused breathwork teacher training course. A key to knowing where they stand on this issue is if they offer scholarships, discounted or sliding scale rates, or free services for those in need. This isn’t always a guaranteed way to discern the helpful from the frauds, but if they’re taking pictures on their private jet or bragging about how they work with celebrity clients, chances are they don’t give a flying fuck about these issues.
4. What are their credentials?
This gets tricky because there are many Indigenous healers helping folks integrate traumatic experiences and they may not have any credentials whatsoever, and still provide stellar care. While Indigenous healers provide valuable care without formal credentials, their expertise is recognized and supported by their communities. It's important to distinguish between community-vetted healers and individuals who lack proper training or authentic lineage. For those seeking certifications or training in breathwork coaching, therapy, or teacher courses, options are available, including programs that offer breathwork coach certification, breathwork therapy certification, and breathwork teacher training courses. Local breathwork training opportunities can be found nearby. Pranayama techniques and breathwork sessions can contribute to physical and mental health. Additionally, kids’ yoga teacher training focuses on specialized education for teaching yoga to children. An integrative approach to well-being considers various modalities and individual needs. These days, every asshole going on a DMT trip with the white “spiritual” couple in Malibu is claiming they’ve been awakened to this path, then appropriates the healing modality and rebrands it as their own. Healers who have been pushed into it by the community they belong to will have a lineage to speak to, and I promise you it won’t have its origins from a few LSD trips in Sedona and subsequent appropriation.
In summary, being trauma-informed is not a hip fun label anyone can adopt to make themselves seen as more knowledgeable or professional. It takes training, experience, and a devotion to a continuing understanding of how trauma impacts us.
If practitioners are claiming to help you address trauma, they are trauma-specific, not trauma-informed and thus do not need to label themselves as such. Their program can be trauma-informed, or their services, but there are big differences between trauma-informed care and trauma-specific services.
We label ourselves as trauma-informed in certain parts of this site in order to help educate the public about this enormously problematic issue, and to drive traffic to this site in hopes that clients searching these terms actually get trained professionals, not marketers. Our services are trauma-specific, and our organization is trauma-informed.
Sources:
https://www.nasmhpd.org/
https://ncsacw.acf.hhs.gov/
https://www.samhsa.gov/