Article

Somatic Art Therapy for Trauma Support and CPTSD Recovery

Charles J. Wolf on How Art and Peer Support Can Help Survivors of Relational Abuse Reclaim Safety and Agency

An Interview with Charles J. Wolf
Independent Researcher in Trauma, Attention, and Systems-Level Cognition | Therapeutic Arts Facilitator

First, when you think about your own experience working with people recovering from abuse, what have you actually observed art doing that ordinary conversation, talking, or verbal processing sometimes could not do?

“We’re not trying to recover from abuse, technically. We are trying to recover from the trauma that the abuse created.”

Charles J. Wolf: To start, I would say that the abuse is over. If you left that situation, it is over. We are not trying to recover from abuse, technically. We’re trying to recover from the trauma that the abuse created, if that makes sense.

When we address it that way, what we are trying to peel back with trauma is what is considered a top-down versus a bottom-up practice. Top-down processing basically means your brain is the top, and your mouth is down in talk therapy, for example. You have to run things from your brain out your mouth to talk about it. It is not that it is impossible, it is just that we are using different parts of our brain to do the cognition, the thinking about the events, and so on. Then we have to find words for them. In a lot of cases, there are no real ready words.

People often say the verbal centers shut down, but shunted is a better word for it. They are turned down, they are not shut off. People don’t experience it as an inability to speak. Our verbal centers are not offline, but thinking, cognition, verbal processing, and articulation are dialed down.

Talking about abuse is very difficult to begin with. People won’t self-identify with having trouble talking at all because they talk all the time. It is not that. It is that you are processing something in a different, higher thinking region of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, and then that has to come down to your throat, basically, and back out your mouth. It is top-down to get that out.

Somatic processing is bottom-up. The bottom is really the subcortical region of the brain, the lower brainstem versus the prefrontal cortex. That lower brainstem and the nervous system below it is where trauma resides, they say.

Art therapy allows information to be expressed without having to be processed in the prefrontal cortex at the top of your mind first. It comes from a lower portion of your brain, the subcortical area where your body meets the brainstem, and moves directly out through the hands. What we are left with after escaping an abusive situation is Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and that bottom-up expression is exactly where art therapy comes in.

How do you understand the trauma-related “blocks” that survivors experience, and how does art therapy address them?

Wolf: Trauma is not a block. It can be considered that, but it’s not like there is some type of breakthrough. It’s not like a repressed memory that we’re trying to get through to say, “Oh yeah, now I remember my mother beat me as a child,” or “My father was never available.” We are not trying to get to some type of revelation and pass some type of block. Though your brain simply doesn’t function very well. In the bigger scheme of things, a block could be said to be between your limbic system, the lower subcortical reaches of your brain stem, and your higher functions (thinking). Control has gone down below. 

The survival brain is not just an operational "survival mode". It is a survival brain, which I describe as a second brain. It really is. It's an independent region. It is not where we experience conscious thinking and cognition, which belongs to the prefrontal cortex. The subcortical brain is reactive, instinctive, and reflexive. It does not process things in an order of past, present, future, or consequences. It simply stops whatever is the threat.

Think of it like a baseball flying at your head. Your hand reaches up and grabs that ball. It doesn’t happen because your eyes sight it, your brain thinks about it, and you decide to lift your hand. That process does not happen. It is click, reflex, and then your brain realizes, “Oh, I just caught a ball flying at my head.” Your ego says, “I did that,” but that was your limbic system. That was survival.

Survival brain drives the show in trauma. You have got a survival takeover, and it doesn’t allow the you, the you with the human will, to take control. This is dealing with the organism and keeping the organism safe. It has tons of benefits. It regulates your body temperature, your digestion, and a hundred metabolic processes without you thinking about it. When you have trauma, you get a survival override, and safety becomes the absolute key.

Because of this, removing a blockage is not the language I would use to address how we treat trauma. Instead, I suggest asking how do we dial up safety.

Safety is the direct antithesis of threat and danger. The limbic brain, the survival brain, is completely locked into focusing on danger. The physical threat has moved, but the survivor is still living with highly threatening ideas and past events that feel current. Your thinking brain can look at your surroundings and go, “Yeah, I know. I know I’m completely safe.” So why are you still in trauma? Because your limbic brain is not experiencing that safety. That is what we are really trying to get at.

Our first priority is figuring out how to create environments where a survivor can actively navigate different spaces and successfully reach a sense of safety on a neurological level.

“Our first priority is figuring out how to create environments where a survivor can actively navigate different spaces and successfully reach a sense of safety on a neurological level.”

How do you create a safe environment for trauma recovery without making a client feel trapped?

Wolf: Like I said, your thinking brain knows you are safe, but your limbic brain doesn’t experience it. So how do we create safe environments? Well, first, nothing is permanent. You can’t just cage yourself into a box and say, “Now I’m safe.” That’s actually one of the most dangerous, threatening things to do. Think about claustrophobia and how bad that is, locking yourself into a jail cell. Yeah, you’re completely safe, but you’re completely isolated, and isolation is a huge threat to a human organism.

So it’s about being able to navigate different environments with a sense of safety, or cultivating the ability to reach a sense of safety. It doesn’t have to be this pervasive, permanent state of, “Oh, now I’m safe, and from now on I will always be safe.” That’s a nice goal to work toward, but real trauma recovery is just about the ability to reach safety, period, even if only momentarily.

If we can get just one minute out of an hour session where a client goes, “Wow, for a moment, I was in a completely safe space, and I felt safe,” that is a massive victory. That is your limbic system releasing the steering wheel and giving your other brain, the real you, a moment of relief. If we can expand that from one minute to two minutes, from two minutes to four minutes, and get days to turn into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years, that becomes your state. That is the condition we are dealing with.

What personal philosophy or theoretical framework do you draw from when you design your art therapy sessions for trauma survivors?

Wolf: The core framework is embodied externalization. It is the embodied externalization of trauma. What that really involves is having an artifact outside of the body so that the trauma can be placed into it and examined.

This doesn’t have to be up close and microscopic. We don’t have to get into the fields and fields of it. We just have to say this thing represents the trauma. We all know what it is. We didn’t come here by accident. This is not like traditional psychoanalysis where we’re really trying to get to the root of our neurosis. That’s not the problem.

The problem is that the reality you were inhabiting turns out not to have been what you fundamentally believed it was. Perhaps the person you trusted most, your intimate partner, whom you believed was benevolent and safe, turns out to be a threat, intent to do you harm. The relationship you believed was a source of safety and care becomes the source of danger. Your judgment of reality was not simply wrong. It was inverted. That can lead to an ontological collapse.

 An ontological collapse means reality is no longer what you believed it was. It’s not that you’re out of touch with reality, it’s that the actual reality of your life has been pulled out from underneath you like a rug. There is no floor, and that is a massive issue. We know what those issues are.

By using art, we’re trying to put that into an external sense on the outside. Once it’s on the outside, we can gain some distance from it. Step number one is simply getting it out of the body.

Now, this is not a complete purging, where you draw a smiley face on a piece of paper and say, “Well, there’s my trauma.” However, that is exactly the nature of the process. That drawing is it, and that is where it now sits. And having it sit on a page is a completely different place than having it live 100% within you.

The second thing I’m going to say is that we’re going to sandwich that externalized object between the experiencer and a witness. In doing that, there is a collapse of isolation. It’s not magical, it is simply shared. It operates similar to the idea of just being able to get it off your chest and share whatever it is. We’ve all had that experience.

The witness doesn’t necessarily have to experience your entire lived trauma, but we materialize it. It is representational. This is not simply ritual, but psychological. There the trauma rests in an external state, the embodied representation, and a third-party witness observes it.

That is the scaffolding that the witness, the counselor, or the practitioner is able to serve, being able to hold that trauma now between the experiencer and the witness. The witness creates relational space. The witness is observer to the artefact and the space. Ultimately, the “space” that the witness has between them and the artefact becomes what the survivor also becomes the observer of. That space becomes as undeniable a reality as the artefact. That observable space becomes a reality not just between the witness and the artefact, but between the survivor and the artefact.

To diagram the dynamic, we have Witness space Artefact space Survivor. If you circle the space between Artefact and Survivor, that is the critical component we create. My client does not leave with a new piece of artwork. They leave with that space. That space is the regulatory scaffold we develop. It is otherwise full immersion without co-witness. You exist in trauma and trauma exists in you. Full stop. As the observer or co-witness has space, the containment for both observers becomes an undeniable reality. To be clear, if the artefact is a page of paper, the paper is not the container. The space around it is.

That’s kind of the power of it. I have a full research paper on it and a couple of articles tracking exactly why art therapy and its embodied externalization directly addresses affect regulation. This is the framework I have developed around embodied externalization and co-witnessing. It is grounded in neuroscience, and it’s not arts and crafts.

What have you found through your trauma-informed peer support work about what survivors need most after relational trauma?

Wolf: I think the biggest, the best, most heartening, and most rewarding response comes down to how we handle an ontological rupture. When a survivor goes through this, they are pivoted into a world where there is, again, no floor, but there is also no ceiling and no walls. It is the void. It is a very dark space, and it can even be an abyss experience.

It sounds so philosophical, but it’s almost literal in a psychological sense. The past that you were living in completely disintegrates. Everything you believed about your intimate partner, for example, dissolves. You realize it was just a facade and it was not true. So the relationship, your shared reality, the reality that you were living in, evaporates.

Now, the future also evaporates. You can’t be with that person into the future, and the past was a series of imaginings of where this was all going, and that too evaporates. It doesn’t matter if you’ve known somebody for six months or 16 years. The future and the beliefs you had about where things were going and who was going to be in that reality don’t exist. That reality becomes unpopulated. The holidays you were going to take, the vacations, the milestones, all of it disappears. Your daily coffee would be with a person, and presumably this person, and all those hopes and dreams vanish. The future no longer holds those things. The past just disintegrates, and that leaves somebody in a really difficult psychological position that can heavily affect short-term memory.

In that space of blackness, you’re on your own. According to data from the World Health Organization, roughly 95% of the people on the planet will never experience that type of post-traumatic stress disorder, that type of ontological collapse. Most people can get through life avoiding that little checkbox.

Because it is so rare, when you do get there, well-meaning people try to offer their own understanding, saying things like, “Oh, I’ve been divorced,” or “I broke up with somebody,” or “I had a death in the family.” All those things are completely valid, but they do not help a survivor of ontological trauma. The survivor is left thinking, “No, you haven’t experienced this. I need to find somebody who knows what this is, because I don’t even know where I am right now or if I can get out of here.” It is a hole, and it’s a lonely one.

When a survivor finds someone who knows where they are in that exact darkness, that is the difference. You can have 10 degrees from Harvard, but if you have not experienced this, you can’t help them in terms of saying, “I know where you are.” That’s what they need, and providing that lived validation is what I find.

What is something you believe about art therapy and abuse recovery that you think is wrong, oversimplified, or misunderstood by other practitioners or by the public?

Wolf: We all have these general impressions of the creative or expressive nature of art therapy. But that is really not at all what I just described with embodied externalization and co-witnessing.

The role of the observer is a core therapeutic element, and it is difficult to understand from an art standpoint that the observer is not there to observe the art.

For example, I painted for 10 years straight. I would have said it was my therapy. Was it therapeutic? Yes. But was it co-witnessed externalization? No. It was not art therapy in any sense of what we are doing with the elements when collapsing trauma between two observers. When I had a witness, there were those witnessing me paint, or those observing my finished paintings. There was no co-witness to my trauma.

I think one of the biggest surprises that anyone watching my practice will notice is that it’s not that I don’t judge the work, I don’t even care to look at it. I’m not even curious, like I said. If someone watched us, it looks like we are making art together. But surprise, we are not making art.

In fact, I am actually going to have some intentional marks that I want the other person to make. It would be akin to making a circle in each corner of a page, or an X. That is not going to result in art. That is an exercise in micro-contingency loops, which is deeply rooted in the neuroscience of control, overcoming learned helplessness, and building active controllability in the subcortical pathway.

This is an exercise in the immediacy of agency. 

It means you can visually see an instant, physical impact on the outside world. It sounds small, but it is huge. It exercises a track of neuro-involvement running directly from the prefrontal cortex to the circuit breaker in the basement, the subcortical regions. It develops a control pathway in a brain that is otherwise metabolically conserving its energy due to trauma. We can discuss the importance of micro-contingency loops at length later, but the point is that this is simply an action, an exercise. No art is going to come out of that, which can surprise anyone eager to draw flowers.

The misconception doesn’t get much different when it comes to the actual externalization of trauma. The public logic assumes that this is an expressive exercise in emotion where you get your feelings out on a canvas, paper, or beat them into some clay. There may be a place for that, and it could be a result. But if the artifact is just a circle with two dots and a smile, that artifact is as good as a blackened page of expressed rage.

We are really not doing anger management. If there is some expressive offloading, great, but this framework is not about getting in touch with your trauma and putting it on a page. You can do that at home, really, there is nothing wrong with that. We are not creating models or effigies. We are not trying to convert or transmute the trauma. That is a common theme of misconception.

What we are doing is co-witnessing. That becomes the powerful psychological scaffold that no one would really guess is happening inside art therapy. It’s not desensitization, it is burden sharing, and that is how the trauma gets lighter.

“It’s not desensitization, it is burden sharing, and that is how the trauma gets lighter.”

The trick is you can’t find anyone to hold it with you. The question becomes, “Can you hold this with me?” and the response comes back, “It depends, what is it?” You are left to say, “I don’t know. I have never been here before. I don’t know how to handle it, or if it can even be handled.”

Then, here is what victims literally hear: “Oh, that’s nothing.” The prospective co-witness goes on to name their own breakup or their friend’s bad experience that was supposedly worse than yours. There is no blame there. Again, 95% of the population can’t understand, and you can’t blame them as you had never reached this place before either.

That makes it sound like you have to have lived experience to be a good co-witness in the art therapy process or in trauma scaffolding. You don’t. But when you are in a space few have entered, the scaffolding is one thing, it is a way to hold someone up, shouting in the dark cave that you are aware they are in deep. But navigating out of that cave is a completely different deal. Scaffolding and navigation are different, and it’s hard to find both.

Can you describe one actual session or client situation, without identifying the person, that best illustrates your approach?

Wolf: There is one real, core experience among survivors. It happens when they are psychologically struggling with a terrain that is so far beyond what they, or anyone they know, have ever experienced.

In a session, through art therapy, or during peer support calls, the turning point comes when you describe that terrain back to them in a way that assures them you know exactly where they are.

Before that moment, they are like a lost hiker, alone on a mountainside, or a shipwrecked survivor afloat in a vast sea. When you articulate their reality, they see that you see them. They know they can be reached. Period.

Some people never get that validation. Most often, when they do, it is just from a fellow survivor who has no more tools or control than they do, passing by and saying, “Hang on.” That dispels the abject isolation and loneliness, but only fleetingly.

Sitting in the darkness together with a practitioner who possesses not only the willingness but the actual ability to burden-share means safety is not only available, but accessible.

What do you want someone who has experienced abuse to understand or feel differently about themselves after reading this article?

Wolf: Hope. But I am not selling hope. That is too simple to offer a starving audience. I mean hope as the absolute antithesis of hopelessness.

I don’t expect people to feel empowered. Empowered is way too much to expect. If you read this and don’t feel empowered, that is not expected at all. But if hope is possibility, and empowerment is just an ability to navigate toward it, then looking toward hope is fundamentally a different direction.

When hope and agency are lost, that is the end. In complex trauma, we have all reached that end. It’s not a matter of whether you reach it or not, we are there. We have reached an irretrievable end. When you are sitting in that place, whether it is temporary or permanent is entirely unknowable. You just feel that it is all over. That is the literal reality of trauma, and really it is not even trauma, trauma we all survive. It is CPTSD and PTSD, where you exist in that permanent end-state without any real knowing of whether it is survivable. For some, it is not. That is why hope is my first answer, and empowerment is a far second.

This is a brink. Once you pass it, it is a completely different world. I would not try to convince anyone this article is empowering. Rather, and it may seem strange, I want them to see that there is hope even within powerlessness.

I want them to see that there is hope even within powerlessness.

That is what being stranded in the middle of the ocean is. Hope doesn’t need to be a permanent state. It can be a brief flash from a beacon just a few times a day, or once a week. Knowing there is an edge, knowing this is all a tunnel, not a final destination, is the navigational part that is invaluable to a survivor.

Where does your approach fit within the broader landscape of trauma support?

Wolf: This is a great question, but there are honestly not that many options out there. Off the top of my head, EMDR comes to mind as a dominant post-trauma healing modality. It is probably more aggressive than my work, and in some ways, it can be even more immediately effective for symptom relief, desensitization, and restoring basic function during a collapse. I might even recommend a client try EMDR first.

But here is the fundamental difference, desensitization to a stimulus, or even a complex stack of trauma stimuli, is like having cockroaches in your house and choosing a solution where you train yourself not to be bothered by the cockroaches. That is a terrible analogy, but there is nothing wrong with that approach; we would all love to not be bothered by our triggers. It allows us to function because we can do nothing about the environment. It is a somatic, body-based modality, but it is a dial-it-down method.

Specifically, my method of embodied externalization, co-witnessing, and neurological micro-contingency looping is a dial-it-up method. 

It dials up safety and agency.

An abstract look at trauma recovery might suggest putting you in charge of your own safety. But if you fundamentally lack agency, meaning you are currently powerless, you are a terrible choice to be in charge of your own security. That is not hyperbole; that is literally the role of the survival brain to detect and compensate for. Restoring safety with a powerless agent is like handing a weapon to a tied-up security guard. The threat remains, so survival must stay on the sentry point.

“Restoring agency is what unties the hands of the security guard.”

Restoring agency is what unties the hands of the security guard. That is an active process of unknotting and cutting free. You become active in that process, rather than someone doing therapy to you. When an outside practitioner fixes you, the agency lies with the other person, versus coming into your own agency. That is a subtle yet fundamental difference.

But it’s like being rescued by a helicopter, a seaplane, or a boat when you are stranded and adrift, really, whatever you have access to is the best thing. I would only interject that process-based art therapy, not recreational arts and crafts, might be more comfortable for a fragile nervous system. Desensitization modalities are exposure therapies; they are closer to probing.

The process in my efforts is surprisingly not exposure-based. Imagine a survivor as a vessel filled with toxins, a swollen, tightly bound bag of liquids. The traditional clinical method to remove those toxins is to probe and poke holes all around the container. The liquids may flow out, but imagine what it feels like to be the bag while it’s being poked.

If you ask me how to get the toxins out safely, I say: unbind the agency. Unbind the knot tying the top of the bag. Once you restore the survivor’s power, allowing them to safely pour it out on their own terms becomes a much more comfortable, dignified proposition. Micro-contingency loops are not about dulling your sensations or numbing your pain. They are about restoring the neurological power to hold your own security and your own safety.

What is the one thing you most want the reader to take away about whether art therapy can help with abuse recovery, and what would you want them to do next if they recognize themselves in what you’ve described?

Wolf: This requires a huge qualifier that not all art therapy is equal. Some is designed to be arts and crafts. And that is great for psychiatric mental patients, for example. It is good for children as expressive therapy. There are plenty of adult practitioners doing creative expression as therapy for trauma.

And really, there is a spectrum. Which is a really great advantage of holistic approaches, there is a wide variety and spectrum of approaches. Not all of them are neuroscience-based or as intentional; some, it is just working because it is working and it feels better than feeling bad. Pharmacological doses are more uniform. EMDR is more uniform, it should be the same in Arizona as in Alaska, in terms of base method and tools.

So the answer is probably some are a lot more effective than others. I don’t want to say no one is offering what I am offering. There is probably better and definitely worse. It is just that I am operating within a process that I see in a way I understand it, so even replicating my process based on my research, someone else may approach it differently. So the approach and the process are really separate. To use the pun, I wouldn’t want to paint the process with a broad brush. As an industry or practice, in the hands of someone with no abuse experience, it may be worthless. So that is one answer.

A medium-width answer is: can therapy of any sort help with trauma from abuse? And there, the answers mainly point to somatic or body-based modalities. Of the body-based modalities, it could be dance to Qigong, but art therapy has found a natural place in the lead of somatic therapies. So again, the bottom-up, somatic-based therapy is really checking boxes of what the science confirms.

 In a philosophical way, the healing power of art is an ancient concept as old as mankind.

 So there may be far more to it that we are just now able to quantify, that is, it may have been working for centuries without us being able to say why.

As far as abuse recovery and CPTSD recovery, it’s not a super clear field of prognosis. It is not a break in an arm bone that is going to heal in six weeks whether we set it correctly or not. CPTSD and ontological trauma don’t simply require behavioral adjustments, or follow formulas. Experiencers can tell you that is an understatement. Like, what is broken? Everything! Where does it hurt? Everywhere! And that really broad and fluctuating spectrum is characteristic of the problem. That says a lot about treatments that exist on a really broad and varied spectrum. So the approach really does fit the contour of the issue: broad-spectrum condition, broad-spectrum approach. Process may really be secondary to approach.

“broad-spectrum condition, broad-spectrum approach.”

What to do next if they recognize what I have described?: I should say connect with me for a session and see if it’s a fit. It’s not a plug for my process; I can just tell you how private practice works versus getting a referral to a psychologist.

And there are plenty of licensed art therapists who are psychologists in the system. But the system is slow, and it tracks you, and it labels you, and you enter the system. Diagnosis is made, it has to be, for billing. That follows you into court, legally, professionally, and so on. Even if the therapy doesn’t stick, the diagnosis does. The system requires a case number, case notes, and reporting. Your doctor is going to refer you to a specialist. It may be weeks or months before you are seen, and intake is a series of questions you may not have the energy to answer. Getting seen in that system can be retraumatising or too lengthy, invasive, or risky for someone in survival.

I don’t say all of that to bash on the medical system or licensed practitioners, especially those working in art therapy. I say that to excuse anyone who gave up at the thought of seeking trauma treatment of any kind. Especially men. They are already less likely to ask for directions or seek therapy. Plus, there is an additional real risk when a diagnosis can become a liability.

So I also want to contrast that with private practice. Non-licensed means there is no reporting within the system. You cannot seek help anonymously in the system, and although there is doctor-patient confidentiality, that does not relieve practitioners’ duty from reporting. Diagnosis is mandatory; the protection of the practitioner far exceeds the protection of the patient’s privacy and anonymity. If you need all that for court or for meds, you have to deal with it.

Private practice, again, not all are alike, but you can get peer support from me anonymously, if you wish. There is no reporting, no case numbers, no diagnosis, no notes. This becomes really important to parents who have had the system weaponised against them. There is no wait time of months and months. Unless I am fully booked, but that is a matter of scale, not of system gridlock.  

The overarch is you can get in soon, maybe this week, and have no diagnosis, no history or intake. No risk of reporting. No notes. And for my unique practice, you never get stuck in a room with a closed door. No office, no clinical waiting room. And this is bottom-up, not top-down.

 So you do not come in as a patient with someone above you in control.

 There are huge implications to trauma and survival with traps and boxes, and being under control, lacking agency, that the system has fundamentally backwards when it comes to even getting seen for complex trauma. And it is no wonder only the most incapacitating cases seek any relief at all, because there is no relief in it.

Again, not bashing the system, it has to be that way. But if you imagine never even having to go into a closed-door room and be the patient below the practitioner, you are imagining a fundamentally reversed process than what exists in public care. If we can do it outdoors, we do it outdoors every chance we get.

Now, that is on my end, a lot of it is unique, but when you can sign up and try it, “it” being anything in the realm of therapeutic support, my advice is to try it. Try EMDR, try art therapy, try magnetic stimulation, or TMS, or EFT tapping, try anything that you can get plugged into without major commitment or wait times. And it is not because it all works and anything is as good as another. I totally say that based on neuroscience. It’s based on taking action, and those moves all signal agency and control. That you are taking action.

“those moves all signal agency and control”

Yes, re-traumatisation is a buzzword and a risk, but the greatest risk is becoming agentless, unempowered in a CPTSD brain in rupture. It is about agency and safety. You may not even find clinicians that know that, much less practice that. But try practitioners. Ninety-five percent cannot offer true peer support, so don’t hold out for that, but if you find it, you already know the value.

So my advice is to take an active role, and that means attempt, try, take action. It signals agency to survival, which has assumed an evolutionary protocol that it is in control, not you. So I’m sensitive to systems or processes that further take control. And therapeutically, trying, taking action, is a strong signal to move the dial, increasing agency and increasing safety.

If you have the mentality that you have one avenue available, like see your GP, hope to get a referral, hope to get in in months, hope it works, that is so limiting. Know that you have option after option after option, especially in the private spaces. That takes so much pressure off of a CPTSD brain in rupture already under pressure past the brink.

Bottom line: if one doesn’t work out, try the next place, seriously. If you just picture a whole broad line of us people out there willing to help, it is a lot different than hoping you fit into a system that will control you and, when they don’t heal you, blame you for not healing right. There is no right way to do this; there are better ways and worse ways. Attempt to try.

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About the Author

Charles J. Wolf is an independent researcher, writer, and private art dealer based near Copenhagen, originally from Los Angeles. 

An active contributor to open scholarship across North American and European networks, his work focuses on the neurobiology of trauma, attention, and systems-level cognition. 

His ongoing research on somatic recovery, embodied externalization, co-witnessing, and controllability is hosted open-access on SSRN, OSF, and Zenodo.

For the research on tangible boundaries, embodied externalization, and co-witnessing, see:

Wolf, Charles, Tangible Boundaries: Embodied Externalization for Affect Regulation in Trauma. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6358439 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6358439)

For the research on micro-contingency loops, controllability, and increased agency, see:

Wolf, Charles, The Neurobiology of Controllability: Reorienting Clinical Interventions Beyond the Default State of Learned Helplessness. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6843844 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6843844