What is TRE?

The founder of TRE, Dr. David Berceli, was a psychologist who would travel to countries during war and help the trauma victims. While he was in the basement of a building being hit by bomb after bomb, he noticed that each explosion would send everyone in the basement to the ground. Like it was choreographed, they all ended up in the fetal position shaking. From this experience and others mimicking it, TRE was born.

The body has a process it must complete. There is a natural tendency to shake and to curl into a ball. This process is not something that exists in humans only, but goes much deeper. It extends to almost all mammals. You can see many examples of this. A famous one is when an animal escapes almost certain death, like in this video where an impala in the freeze response escapes from a cheetah and shakes out the tension, and goes on with its trauma-free life.

As humans we do not always do this for a variety of reasons. For one thing, stress can build up over a long period of time and lead to PTSD symptoms. It is not always an example of immediate physical danger. At times when there is physical danger, we may find it inappropriate to shake and stop ourselves from engaging in this natural process. We may think there is something wrong with us for shaking or not wanting to appear weak by entering into the fetal position even though our body instinctively pulls us there. The problem with that is that we never release the trauma. It becomes trapped there in our muscles, particularly the psoas muscle which is responsible for putting us in the fetal position. As you do TRE, the shaking and release of that long held tension will release the energy and emotion that was trapped there at the time of trauma.

In Dr. Bercelli’s book “Shake it off Naturally”, he discusses a study done with mice to show the importance of this shaking. Two groups of mice are put into a stressful situation where they must keep themselves from drowning. Afterwards, one group is allowed to shake directly after while the others are held firmly to prevent this response. The resilience in the mice that were prevented from shaking were markedly decreased.