Each month our editorial team sifts through hundreds of papers and curates notable findings—for practitioners and informed readers who want to stay current with the evidence. Subscribe to the monthly Research Digest for expert analysis and concise summaries of key papers.
This paper explains Somatic Experiencing (SE), a form of trauma therapy that focuses on guiding a person's attention to internal body sensations (like heartbeat, breathing, muscle feeling) instead of mainly talking about thoughts or memories. The authors describe how SE claims these bodily sensations can help complete interrupted defensive responses…
This review paper suggests that problems in body-based senses — especially the vestibular system (balance/motion) and the somatosensory system (touch and body position) — may help explain many symptoms of trauma-related disorders. The authors propose that trauma can disrupt low-level, brainstem sensory processing and that this disruption can cascade into…
This review looks at research on emotional awareness, awareness of bodily signals (interoception), and the body's autonomic homeostatic processes. The authors say limbic brain systems link these processes, that measures of autonomic activity and stress reactivity relate to both kinds of awareness, and that problems in autonomic function may be…
This review compares three recent brain-based ideas for pathological fatigue and the evidence for them. One idea, the sensory attenuation model (SAF), says poor suppression of self-generated sensory signals makes movements feel harder and so raises perceived effort; a study found that long-term (trait) fatigue, but not day-to-day (state) fatigue,…
This review describes the Community Resiliency Model (CRM), a low-intensity, body-based self-care approach that teaches six core skills to help people notice sensations in their bodies (interoceptive awareness). The paper summarizes existing studies, program evaluations, and anecdotes, links CRM to the neurobiology of trauma and concepts like neural synchrony, and…
