Chances are TRE can help you, in pretty significant ways. TRE® is a simple technique that uses exercises and neurogenic tremoring (shaking) to release stress or tension from the body that accumulate from short and long term stressors, sudden loss, and traumatic life experiences.

This shaking and tremoring response to trauma is found all across the animal kingdom. David Bercelli, the creator of TRE teamed up with Peter Levine, the creator of Somatic Experiencing, who spent years studying trauma, how it affects our physiology, and how to release it.  Humans have a tendency to suppress the natural mechanism of shaking after stressful events, leading us to “store” trauma in our body. Since trauma directly impacts our nervous system and our bodies physiology, working with the body becomes a direct path to release and have resolution over past difficult experiences.

After learning how to elicit this shaking response in our bodies and regulate that response, we can safely practice TRE on our own. TRE is safe and meant for anyone regardless of gender, sex, age or culture.

Let's Break It Down

1. Heal from short and long term stress and trauma 

Trauma lives in the body as a charge. This is called sympathetic arousal. The Sympathetic Nervous System is the part of your nervous system that activates under stress or perceived threat preparing us for fight or flight. This charge can build up over time in our systems and eventually even smaller stressors can feel big. Getting stuck in SNS activation doesn’t mean we are always throwing punches or running away. This could manifest a wide variety of ways like avoiding someone (flight) or using aggressive language (fight). Tremoring helps the body discharge the pent up charge from our nervous system and primary fight or flight muscles, allowing for our systems to start to regulate and come back into balance and find safety. 

2. Reduce anxiety

Do you find yourself feeling nervous, restless, or tense? Do you feel like something could always go wrong, a sense of panic, or approaching doom? Maybe you just experience sensations such as heart palpitations, muscle pain, headaches, or stomach pain. Essentially, your system is remaining on high alert as if there is a looming threat and you find it difficult to relax. Tremoring can help release the intensity of this charge and allow the body to turn on our Parasympathetic Nervous System, the part of our NS that allows our bodies to relax. 

3. Come out of Freeze

The Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS) provides an alternative response to a threat, which is to freeze. The freeze state comes out of the vagus nerve, specifically the Dorsal Vagal Complex. This response could manifest as inability to focus, numbing, dissociation, disconnection or total shutdown. Normally a freeze would occur in situations where the SNS can not sufficiently resolve the threat. However, some folks are primed to rely on the PNS because of prior trauma especially if they had difficult childhood experiences, such as difficult birth, divorce or an acute illness.

4. Physically release tension from your muscles and fascia

When we are under stress we hold our bodies differently. People tend to report tight upper back and shoulders, painful hips/glutes, headaches, fatigue, general or chronic pain, etc. We can also experience physical tension patterns by habitually holding our bodies in particular ways from working (computer desk work) or habitual motions (doing the same movement over and over). Our phones have provided a whole array of new problems with forward head posture. By using TRE, people can literally shake out the tension pattern that's being held in their musculature and fascia. Tremoring requires 2 things: fatiguing the muscles enough to let go of control, as well as stretching the primary muscles enough to open and allow for fluid and spontaneous movement. The 3rd thing would be us getting out of our own way mentally and allowing this natural reflux to occur. 

5. Have faster athletic recovery

Athletes use TRE as a way to have better overall athletic performance, increase endurance, and recover faster after working out. When our nervous systems are regulated our entire physiology functions better. We can digest our food properly, have adequate sleep, and metabolic cellular recovery increases. Exercise and other physical activity also produce endorphins—chemicals in the brain that act as natural painkillers. Meditation, acupuncture, massage therapy, even breathing deeply can cause your body to produce endorphins. The spontaneous shaking mechanism allows the body to release held tension, relax, and decrease pain.

6. Gain more range of motion and less pain

The preparatory exercises in TRE help stretch and open the primary muscles we use that hold tension, thus helping allow the spontaneous movement of shaking to occur. Since many of us are chronically holding our bodies in rigid and habitual ways, we create a shortening of muscles, less elasticity to occur, and more build up of toxins in tissues. Allowing the musculature and fascia to open naturally, people experience more mobility in their joints and a reduction of pain and hyper vigilance.

7. Feel safer in your body and environment

There is an intelligent reflux in your body that is always looking for safety. The body assesses a threat and has an immediate response to keep us safe. Thank you body! When we haven’t been able to move through a traumatic or stressful event in our bodies then we start to develop mental and physical symptoms. When this response gets overcoupled with everyday annoyances or difficulties our reaction is out of context. But how do we know when we are triggered or when we are having an appropriate survival response? When we learn to embody and move through our hypervigilance, activation, and shallow breathing, and release this charge from our systems, we feel more at ease in our bodies, feel safer in our skin, and are able to genuinely relax in the space and environment we are in. 

8. Feel more embodied and in touch with ones interoceptive experience

Peter Levine, the creator of Somatic Experiencing, states that embodiment is the practice of creating a relationship with our body. This is done by developing awareness of and attuning to our physical sensations and prompts, and connecting to the world through our body in a healthy way. Practicing tuning into our bodies enables us to pick up on physical cues through a process called interoception, the process that allows us to identify what's happening in our bodies. For example, we can attune to our bodies reaction in a stressful event. We notice our heart rate increasing and breath quicken. By practicing awareness of our bodies sensations we can create a gap or pause to notice if the level of activation or charge we are experiencing accurately matches the threat. Without this its hard to have renegotiation around trauma and we tend to get carried away by our physiological responses which end up limiting our choices.

9. Normalize the shaking reflex in the body 

Imagine if the neurogenic shaking response was understood as normal in our everyday life experience? Imagine if people could support and hold space for someone who was experiencing shakiness after a difficult experience like a car accident or before a difficult experience like public speaking. This is a normal biological reflux that is built into our animal bodies. Humans have a tendency to suppress the natural mechanism of shaking after stressful events, primarily because we have been socialized to think it's strange in our culture, leading us to “store” trauma in our body. When we practice allowing our bodies to let go of control in a safe way, with a method to induce the neurogenic shaking, we can familiarize ourselves with the experience for when our bodies naturally and instinctually start to tremor. We can even normalize it so we can use this as a weekly method to destress.

10. Turn on the Social Nervous System

 We can work with our Social Nervous Systems in TRE! Thanks to Steven Porges Polyvagal Theory, we now know that the social nervous system has a big part in how we attune to safety, and why our autonomic nervous system shapes our experiences, perception, and behavior. Being in the presence of a grounded and attuned nervous system (your TRE provider) can help influence your felt sense of safety and connection. Co-regulation occurs when two or more nervous systems come into connection and influence each other’s state of regulation (or state of being). An example would be a mother and child attuning to one another's needs and states. Through experiencing a safe connection with a trauma-informed TRE provider we actively with with coregulation. As you work with actively balancing your autonomic nervous system through trembling in the presence of a safe support over time we begin to develop more trust in our bodies, as well as our relationships with friends and family. We dont have as much charge in our systems to be directed outward towards others, and we have experienced safety in our social nervous system as well, being with a present and attuned therapist.

And let's not forget the BONUS BENEFIT!

This is an extremely practical, easy to do, and inexpensive self care tool that really works. There has been extensive research in the field of trauma and recovery documenting the way the physiological response of shaking can help heal our bodies and minds. Anyone can use this method across gender identities, age, counties, and religion. It is truly a unifying experience that we were all born with innately.