How Trauma Treatment at Kindful Body Goes Beyond Talk Therapy: IFS, Somatic Therapy, and EMDR

For decades, traditional talk therapy has been a core pillar of mental health care. In talk therapy, clients work with a therapist who provides a supportive, confidential space to share their inner world, deepen their self-awareness and develop useful coping skills in the hopes of resolving the mental health challenges they’re facing. Research shows that traditional talk therapies can be highly effective in treating various mental health issues, including anxiety, body image issues, eating disorders, low self-esteem, and more. 

Limitations of Talk Therapy for Trauma

However, talk therapy has its limits, especially when it comes to trauma. In fact, some people with trauma have found that solely talking about their traumatic experiences can worsen their trauma symptoms.

Indeed, the impact of trauma extends far beyond someone’s thoughts—they’re also stored in implicit memory, beyond the client’s level of awareness, and in the body and nervous system. For someone with trauma, talk therapy might indeed prove beneficial in helping them understand the source of their distress but do little, regardless of the length of treatment, to resolve the emotional and physiological impacts of trauma, such as chronic nervous system dysregulation and dissociation. 

In other words, someone can thoroughly understand themselves and what happened, and still suffer profoundly.

How Kindful Body Goes Beyond Talk Therapy

At Kindful Body, we’re proud to offer an integrative, evidence-based approach that actually meets the complex needs of people living with unresolved trauma. In tandem with traditional talk therapy modalities, such as CBT, DBT, and ACT, we utilize cutting-edge modalities at the forefront of trauma treatment, including Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, EMDR, and somatic therapy. These trauma-informed approaches go beyond talk therapy by addressing the subconscious and physiological aspects of trauma, helping clients process experiences that may not be fully accessible through conversation alone. 

In this blog post, we’ll provide an overview of each of these cutting-edge modalities and talk about how we integrate them into trauma treatment at Kindful Body.

Internal Family Systems (IFS)

IFS is a transformative, non-pathologizing therapeutic model based on the assumption that the human mind is made up of different subpersonalities, or “parts.” Parts may take on extreme, and often polarized roles in response to trauma, attachment injuries, or devaluing life experiences. However, IFS holds that every part ultimately has a positive intention for the person, even if its strategies are disruptive or even destructive.

Parts fall into three categories:

• Exiles are the parts of us that carry burdens of pain, fear, and shame from childhood. Often isolated from the system by the other parts, the Exiles may resort to extreme, desperate behaviors in a bid to be witnessed and cared for. The popular term “inner child” can be understood as an Exile in the IFS Model.
• Managers are the parts of us that guide and organize our daily lives. Through protective strategies like people-pleasing, perfectionism, and self-criticism, they work proactively to maintain a sense of control and prevent the Exiles’ pain from surfacing.
• Firefighters are the parts of us that use impulsive, numbing strategies like substance abuse, self-harm, and binge-eating in an attempt to “extinguish” Exiles’ suffering. They often step in when Managers’ strategies aren’t effective.

In IFS, every person not only has parts but also a Self—their core, undamaged essence. The Self is characterized by what IFS calls the 8 Cs: confidence, calm, compassion, courage, creativity, clarity, curiosity, and connectedness. 

How Kindful Body Uses IFS to Treat Trauma

As an IFS-informed practice, we understand extreme behaviors not as “wrong” or “maladaptive” but as expressions of parts’ deep burdens—unexpressed emotions, burdened beliefs, or energies parts took on in order to adapt to and survive traumatic experiences. We honor these parts’ protective intentions, no matter how harmful their actions may be, and meet them with compassion, curiosity, and nonjudgmental openness.

Not only are there “no bad parts,” as the common IFS expression goes, but all parts hold tremendous gifts, which can be reclaimed through the transformative process of unburdening. The goal of IFS is not to suppress or eliminate parts but to help them release their burdens and return to their natural, positive roles. Guided by the Self’s compassionate, curious leadership, the process of unburdening restores harmony within the internal system and the parts’ trust in the Self, creating space for the Self to lead.

EMDR

EMDR is an evidence-based, eight-phased therapy based on the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model, developed by EMDR founder Dr. Francine Shapiro. According to the AIP model, trauma disrupts the brain’s usual ability to process and integrate memories, which can cause memories of traumatic events to become “stuck” in the nervous system. As a result, these memories can become easily triggered, spurring intense feelings of panic, helplessness, anger, shame, or dread as if the event were happening now.

To help clients process and integrate these memories, EMDR uses bilateral stimulation, the process of alternatively stimulating the left and right sides of the brain through rhythmic eye movements, taps on the body, or sounds. When successful, EMDR therapy takes the [word] out of these memories, allowing them to be stored as past events rather than ongoing threats.

How Kindful Body Uses IFS to Treat Trauma

We know it’s often impossible to put words to what happened. As Dr. Bessel van Der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, puts it, “The nature of traumatic experience is that it often leaves people speechless. The words fail, and with them, the possibility of sharing the story.” 

At Kindful Body, we use EMDR to help clients process and integrate trauma that is inaccessible through conversation alone, especially when other therapy methods have not been effective. EMDR allows clients to revisit memories of traumatic events while staying grounded in the safety of the present moment—all without needing to talk about the trauma at length. 

According to a 2018 systematic narrative review, EMDR was shown to be more effective than other trauma therapies at reducing PTSD and other trauma-related symptoms—a finding that aligns with our own experience as clinicians. We’ve witnessed EMDR produce rapid, enduring changes in the lives of many of our clients, cementing it as an invaluable tool in trauma treatment. 

Somatic Therapy

There are two key ways we process information: top-down and bottom-up. Most traditional therapy models rely on top-down processing, focusing on the influence of our thoughts on our emotions and behaviors. Somatic therapy, on the other hand, takes a bottom-up approach, recognizing that trauma lives in the body and nervous system, often beyond conscious awareness, and that our mind and body are not separate entities but intimately interconnected. For lasting trauma recovery, we often need to address the body first before turning to the mind.

As psychiatrist and trauma specialist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score, “Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. . . . In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them.” Somatic therapy uses a variety of body-based interventions—such as grounding exercises, resourcing, breathwork, and mindful movement—to help clients do just that.