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Abstract
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Adults and children accessing services with the Women's Resource Center safehouse have experienced deeply personal, complex, and often intersectional trauma. Displaced by domestic violence, many families participating in the emergency housing program have an Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) score of four or more, based on the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. Anecdotal evidence suggests that body-based, resiliency focused interventions with participating families can help mitigate the impact of ACEs.
Body - and movement-oriented interventions can be defined as those in which physical activity and corporeality are the central themes and core focus of the intervention; they are characterized by their use of movement activities and focus on bodily experiences (1).
It is our privilege as advocates to first support survivors to stabilize from their figurative “critical condition,” to then begin to address the multiple compounding fractures underneath the presenting event of intimate partner violence. Deeply rooted trauma and the resulting biological and emotional responses can flatten capacity. This decreased ability to respond to daily demands sets a painful cycle of disappointment and self-mistrust in motion. Survivors often experience reduced capacity, or inability to act in their own best interests, as a personal failing rather than a response to trauma and ACEs.
Survivors may operate in survival mode even when danger is not looming. Survival responses impact emotion and behavior in ways that challenge participants' ability to plan and attend to tasks that support stability and wellbeing over the long term. Ironically, operating in survival mode can slow or stop actions that transform surviving to thriving.
During the months they call the safehouse home, families and advocates work together to begin reconstructing the foundation for safe and stable lives. Essential building blocks include employment, childcare, housing, and transportation. These depend on a gradually strengthening foundation of physical, mental, and emotional health for greater stability over the long-term. Families continue this process for many more months as they access transition support. Resiliency-focused interventions can help survivors better relate to and manage the experience of somatic distress,1 thus increasing capacity to attend to activities of daily living that bolster stability. ...
Language: en |