How Chinese Medicine Understands Trauma

Last week, I reached out to a dearly wise friend and mentor to wish him a happy birthday, and what began as a simple greeting opened into a wonderful conversation.

He is a deeply experienced psychotherapist, and he shared with me his growing interest in Chinese medicine — particularly in how it understands and treats trauma. In his own work, he has been exploring how trauma experienced in utero, and in the prenatal and postnatal periods, can shape a person throughout their life. As a longtime recipient of acupuncture himself, he was curious to learn more about the Shen-Hammer and Jeffrey Yuen lineages.

In our conversation, he mentioned Heart Shock — a book of more than four hundred pages written by Ross Rosen, a student of Dr. Leon Hammer who also studied with Jeffrey Yuen. Dr. Hammer, a psychiatrist who turned to Chinese medicine, studied with Dr. John Shen in his later years and carried forward Dr. Shen's pulse diagnosis. Together, their work evolved into a remarkably powerful pulse reading system — one that allows the practitioner to diagnose and treat psychoemotional disorders with real precision.

The conversation brought me back to my own studies. During my doctorate, I trained in the Shen-Hammer style by Brandt Stickley, and its pulse diagnosis always reminds me of another dear mentor of mine, Robert Levine, and his extraordinary pulse reading skills.

Then, right before the five wonderful days of camping in Yosemite last week, I downloaded Heart Shock and read half of it under the trees during the trip.

One afternoon, sitting by a creek in Tuolumne Meadows, I found myself contemplating the Daoist masters who lived thousands of years ago. They were keen observers of nature — watching how water flows through channels, streams, and canals — and they drew on these observations to describe the acupuncture channels of the human body. The language of the medicine was born from the landscape itself.

Back then, they did not have diagnoses like psychosis, bipolar disorder etc. But they had their own vivid terms for these experiences. "Running piglet qi," for example, describes a rushing sensation surging from the abdomen up toward the heart, accompanied by chest tightness, palpitations, and anxiety — a picture any modern reader would recognize.

Classical Chinese medicine also speaks of the eight extraordinary channels, which hold a special place in the treatment of trauma. The Chong Mai, for instance, has five trajectories, and its first trajectory addresses birth trauma and significant events in the first seven to eight years of life — the first life cycle — when experiences such as physical or sexual abuse can leave a person with deep issues around safety. The Ren Mai, or Conception Vessel, when imbalanced, relates to that same early cycle but in a different way: when a child did not receive enough nourishment from their primary caregiver — often the mother, through breastfeeding and early nurturing — they may grow up with attachment difficulties, trouble bonding, challenges forming healthy emotional connections, or excessive neediness. These, too, can be treated through the Ren Mai.

To a layperson, this kind of diagnosis might sound mysterious, even magical. But having spent years in the presence of Robert Levine as his intern, having studied the Shen-Hammer style, and now practicing within Jeffrey Yuen's lineage, I can say that with experience and real listening, it is not magical at all. It becomes possible to perceive, through the pulse, when a trauma occurred in a patient's life — and whether they had the resources to meet it or not.

Now more than ever, I feel acutely and passionately drawn to working with psychoemotional issues through Chinese medicine — whether through acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, or lifestyle guidance.

I will be back from maternity leave in September. If you would like to work with me, you can book your appointments here. I look forward to seeing you then.