Gerry Pyves
Trauma is not an illness.
It is our nervous system
doing exactly what
it is meant to do.
I didn't know much about trauma in 1984.
This is when I changed careers from teaching history to working as a massage therapist. Possibly not the most obvious choice for an Oxford history graduate!
However my own trauma had manifested itself as a debilitating illness for 18 months. As it was massage that got me up and about again, I was determined to find out as much as I could about the role that touch could play in healing trauma.
When I trained as a psychotherapist, a few years later, our knowledge of how trauma impacted the human nervous system was still pretty basic back then. Thirty-eight years and over 40,000 client sessions later, it all looks rather simple to me now.
This was too important to keep to myself...
Over all these years l have learned one thing: almost all of our health problems, whether physical or mental, come down to the amount of trauma we are carrying in our nervous system. This is a silent trauma that sits in our nervous system like a shadow.
Hardly anyone is writing about this silent and residual trauma. It can wait years before it reveals itself - suddenly triggering us into the classic nervous system states of fight, flight or freeze.
Of course we are each unique and we manifest these states in a variety of different ways. But whatever form our trauma takes, I found that the three moves of Primal Touch (described in my book) reduced this ambient trauma loading. This means we hardly ever get triggered.
When I discovered that I could teach people to do this at home, I knew my life would never be the same again.
Professional Recognition
I am a registered Transactional Analysis Psychotherapist and TSTA (Training and Supervising Transactional Analyst) in New Zealand (and formerly in the United Kingdom). I am endorsed by the governing bodies for Transactional Analysis worldwide to both teach and supervise Psychotherapists.
I am also the founder and creator of No Hands® Massage where I trained thousands of massage therapists how to reduce the ambient trauma levels being carried in the bodies of their clients.
For a list of PsychoTactile Psychotherapists I have trained in the UK, click h.
