Trauma inducing professions are careers that deliberately put the individual is situations of high stress, anxiety, danger and potential trauma. Professions such as police force, firefighters, emergency medical teams, first responders, etc., are potentially trauma inducing professions. The experiences encountered in these careers often do not allow the professional to recover from one stressful, traumatic or dangerous episode before they are confronted with another. These repeated and prolonged experiences of stress and trauma can exhaust the physical and psychic reservoirs of the individual. Over extended periods of time this process disrupts the chemicals created in the body that help the individual survive dangerous episodes. Eventually, the body begins to produce these chemicals (adrenaline and other chemicals) in greater quantities which creates a new biological baseline. This causes these individuals to stay at highly active and alert states even when there is no longer a need for hypervigalence. At a certain point, the individual will become chemically exhausted and their body forces them into a state of recuperation usually manifesting in some form of physical illness.

Due to high adrenal, cortisol and opioid levels, people exposed to multiple traumas for prolonged periods will often experience a loss of neuromodulation.  This is the experience of having an exaggerated response to simple everyday stressors.  What occurs is that trauma and stress have become a state of preoccupation for the mind instead of a passing experience.  The individual’s response to daily events becomes tainted with an unconscious life or death threat.  Thus, their responses to minor stressors have an exaggerated reaction as though it is life threatening.  A simple example of this is an outburst of rage over a simple and non-threatening event or comment during a meeting.

Organizational trauma is common within trauma inducing professions. Trauma behavior, much the same as alcoholic behavior, becomes embedded in the relationship patterns of the organization or institution.  There are numerous manifestations of these relational patterns that are unconsciously designed to keep the institution running but through abeyance of rules and regulations rather than personal collegial relationships.

Traditional stress reduction techniques and general exercises are largely ineffective for people in trauma inducing professions.  This is because general physical stress reduction techniques only resolve surface or superficial tensions in the body but are not able to dissolve deep chronic tension patterns created under prolonged stress.  Likewise, medication or mind concentration methods of stress reduction are largely ineffective because a traumatic state of preoccupation prevents the mind from relaxing its control for fear that danger may be just on the horizon.

As muscle tension increases, the capacity for muscular sensation and feeling decreases.  This lack of sensation or peripheral input causes a low level anxiety in the individual because the brain relies on this somato-sensory input for safety.  Unconsciously, the individual attempts to restore these feelings through any immediate means available such as: substance abuse, sugar, caffeine, sexual exploitation, consumerism and destructive or violent acts. All of these help to restore an immediate sense of feeling but lack the long term stimulation necessary to alleviate the underlying anxiety.

The solution to the restoration of feeling, inner safety and relaxation is through deep chronic tension release. This is particularly appealing to professionals who are used to keeping their bodies physically fit to perform their jobs proficiently.  The techniques and awareness taught in this program guarantees the participant tangible results of physical sensation and relaxation at the deepest level of muscle tension in the body.