Yoga could play an important role in helping girls cope with trauma
For girls in the juvenile justice system, yoga has healing benefits
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Michael Alison Chandler.
As a teenager, Rocsana Enriquez often ran away from home to escape fights with her mother and sexual abuse from her stepfather. She got involved with street gangs and cycled in and out of juvenile detention.
Today, thanks to the yoga lessons she received through the San Mateo County juvenile justice system, she has a new sense of peace and strength.
Recent research shows that yoga could empower other girls to turn their lives around. A new report by the Center on Poverty and Inequality at Georgetown Law School shows that yoga can be particularly effective at helping girls who are incarcerated cope with any effects of trauma that they might have experienced. Yoga and mindfulness programs can promote healthier relationships, increase concentration, and improve self esteem and physical health.
The report shows that while childhood trauma is prevalent among all teenagers at juvenile detention centers, girls experience trauma at especially high rates. Here’s a breakdown of this discovery.
Why do girls and boys experience trauma differently? The answer is in neurological science. In female brains, estrogen activates a larger field of neurons, causing girls to experience stress factors in more precise detail. Also, unlike boys, girls who experience trauma show diminished surface area in the part of the brain that links bodily sensations to emotions.
According to research, yoga can help girls heal these wounds in a way that methods like talk therapy cannot.
The Center on Poverty and Inequality report references more than 40 published studies that have shown benefits of yoga and mindfulness. It also includes includes the results of two pilot programs that offered yoga to girls in residential detention programs in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. These programs led to fewer fights in the ward, fewer requests for medications, fewer medical complaints, and more reports of past sexual violence that had not been shared previously, suggesting that they really do have the potential to make a difference in incarcerated girls’ lives.
The report says that in order for yoga programs to be helpful for incarcerated girls, programs should be especially tailored to their needs as young, female trauma survivors.
With a “trauma-sensitive” approach, instructors would use “invitational language.” In other words, they would ask girls to try different poses or breathing techniques instead of telling them what to do, allowing the girls to have control over their practice. And teachers would not touch any student without asking first.
Women like Enriquez show that yoga really can be a life-changing tool for trauma survivors. When Enriquez got out of juvenile detention, she found herself in a physically abusive relationship with her boyfriend, who would sometimes hold her captive in her apartment. At her lowest points, she looked back on some of the things she had learned in her yoga classes, like mantras and breathing and stretching techniques, to help herself stay calm.
Eventually, Enriquez left her boyfriend and did not come back. Now, she’s majoring in justice at San Jose State University with hopes of becoming a lawyer. She also teaches part-time with the Art of Yoga Project, the organization that she first learned yoga from as a teenager.
“I am very excited for my future and everything I am doing,” she says. “If it wasn’t for yoga, I don’t know if I would be here.”
