Severe trauma, especially trauma involving physical violation, can leave someone unable to tolerate ordinary physical sensation or touch — a bodily dysregulation that exists somewhat independently of conscious, narratable memory, and which talk therapy alone, focused on verbal processing, often can't fully address. Body-based approaches like yoga work directly on this physical dimension, gradually rebuilding a person's capacity to tolerate and even feel safe within their own physical sensations.
Controlled research on this approach has found it isn't just subjectively helpful — it produces measurable improvements specifically in arousal regulation and body awareness, distinct from and complementary to what verbal therapy addresses, which is part of why trauma treatment increasingly combines both rather than treating them as competing alternatives.
Van der Kolk describes a special-needs teacher, Annie, severely abused by both parents in early childhood, who presented as frozen and terrified, prone to self-harm when overwhelmed, and initially unable to tolerate even benign physical touch. Years of body-based work, followed by yoga classes — despite yoga itself being initially triggering for her — gradually restored her ability to tolerate touch, articulate her trauma verbally, and eventually become physically intimate with her husband. Separately, a controlled Trauma Center pilot study randomized severely traumatized women to either yoga or dialectical behavior therapy and found yoga significantly improved arousal regulation and body awareness in ways DBT alone did not; a related brain-imaging study of women practicing yoga for twenty weeks showed increased activation in brain regions tied to interoception (sensing one's own internal bodily state) and self-regulation.