TRE: Self-Applied Vibrational Release Technique To Release Tension & Increase Energy

David Berceli, PhD

Thank you Tom This is wonderful. I like everything you guys stand for and everything you do So I’m delighted to be here.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. So let’s talk about your work and I know you’ve you do so many different things. You’ve had three books published in or translated into 15 different languages. You’ve got PhD’s, you’ve got three master’s degrees, your massage therapist, bio energetic therapist in your work. What we want to talk about today is something called T. R. E. So can you just give us a quick little description of what T. R. E. Stands for and then we’ll start diving into the work?

David Berceli, PhD

Yeah, it’s very simple. T. R. E. Simply stands for tension and trauma releasing exercise is simply a form of simple exercise that you do to release chronic stress or trauma from the body.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. And I remember talking with you before where you said you discovered or you would be in places like the Middle East and you know, something traumatic would happen and and you know, people would be on the streets and you know, I don’t know exactly what would happen. Maybe a bomb or something like that, but but you would notice that you know, some people would just freeze and then other people like Children would have a treme oring action and then they would be able to walk right off almost as if nothing had happened. So tell us kind of the discovery or when you first started discovery, discover T. R. E.

David Berceli, PhD

Yeah that’s basically it. I was living in the Middle East. I lived there for 12 years in multiple countries. Some of those countries were experiencing political violence or even outright war. And during shootings or bombings which were terrifying. And we would either be in a basement or a bomb shelter or whatever sometimes even outside. But what happened was is that I experienced that tremor in which we all experience in fear. We commonly understand that. But I would observe other people. What I observed was that Children were the fastest to just tremor organically automatically. Whereas when they got to be about about 10 11 or 12 years old and they’re starting to go through puberty and they’re going from childhood to more adulthood. I could see that they would start to tremor but they would try to hold it and then adults were completely frozen. They wouldn’t tremor at all. And so when I noticed this age difference, I asked the adults do ever tremor the way chill Children do and they said no we don’t want the Children to think we’re afraid. But it was the perfect answer Tom because what they were telling me as we’ve learned how to control this behavior whereas Children are still organically impulsively allowing their body to stay alive which allows that tremor mechanism to stimulate automatically

Tom McCarthy

When Dr. Eric Robbins. The person that introduced me to you know again he had 2030 maybe even 40 years of chronic fatigue. He said that meditations helped him part of the way. But the biggest thing he credited for being able to overcome that was this T. R. E. Technology that you taught him. And he said it was just like unleashing a little bit every day, A little bit every day and now he’s like got his full energy back. He said somebody had told him an energy expert at the time when he went to them that he was only, his energy level is only like at 3% of what it should have been. Now it’s 100% and he gave what you do so much credit. He said that was the biggest thing that he used to actually get out of chronic fatigue. How does treme oring help us release that tension and recover our energy and release deep embedded trauma?

David Berceli, PhD

Okay first of all we have to reframe our narrative that the brain and the body are one, there’s no such thing as just the brain operating and the body functioning differently. They’re definitely connected. So what the treme oring does is it activates a mechanism starting from the body through an exercise routine and it actually circumvents the ego meaning it goes past the ego. So it’s not ego controlled, It actually activates the nervous system in the body. So think of this all these years Tom that you and I and everybody else have developed tension patterns throughout our entire structure in places that we don’t even know from innocent things, like sitting on a desk for eight hours a day to car accidents, to sports accidents, to abuse as a child. All of those things are creating patterns of tension throughout the body. 

That’s both fashion and muscle. The tremor mechanism because it’s not ego directed and this is what’s really invaluable about it is it starts to activate itself and it starts traveling through the structure and it finds these tight spots in the body and it slowly starts to release things. Now imagine this to hold a muscle tight, You have to use your energy. That means it’s not available for outside. It’s all going inside. So you’re still creating a lot of energy. It’s just all stuck in the tissue of the structure the tremor mechanism releases. That stuck nous. And as it does, it softens the tissue. An energetic flow can happen. And now you can feel an energetic movement inside the structure because it’s available to you now. Whereas before it was not available because it was either frozen or numb.

Tom McCarthy

That’s a great description. I really love that. That’s so awesome. And I think as we go through, you know, as we go through our days, we are tensing up and holding on to energy just like you said. Or I mean, it doesn’t traumas don’t have to always be big, huge things that can be little micro traumas that we then just keeping our body and when we keep those in you know, often not only do we feel tension but can lead to chronic disease and things like that. So this is probably just a good thing for everybody to do every day. Or maybe not, you know, every day, but at least three or 45 times a week. Right?

David Berceli, PhD

Well, what I try to help people understand, it’s not a good thing to do. It’s truly a natural thing to do because once you activate this mechanism throughout the day, when your body starts to contract, it will organically activate tremor in. But we’ll stop it c but it will keep trying to do that because to the body this is only necessary for the moment that it’s feeling some sort of threat. Either, like you said, a big threat or little threat, but it’s feeling a threat, so it starts to contract. But once the threat is gone, it will automatically start to tremor because it wants to release the type because it knows that’s not healthy to live in that state. So our organism is constantly pulsated. So it’s actually natural if we allowed ourselves to do it throughout the day, we would discover that even getting up from your chair as an example from a one hour interview, your body can automatically begin to tremor because it’s saying, okay, the interview is over, I want to relax my neck and my shoulders and my back now.

Tom McCarthy

I like that. Especially since I have two more two more one hour interviews later today too. That’d be good. So as you start doing TRN we’ll explain what it is a little bit later. But as you start doing it through time does it start to activate that natural tremor mechanism? Even when we’re not doing the exercise then does that start to happen more naturally in us?

David Berceli, PhD

Yeah. What will happen is usually just before you fall asleep at night or just as you’re waking up, your body is free of the egos control. And so the nervous system can activate and restore pulsation again. So after a long day when you lay down and you finally let go that’s the key you let go if your body is available to the tremor mechanism because you’ve trained it how to use it and you’re available to letting it activate. Rather than being afraid of it. It will organically start to tremor just as you’re falling asleep and it’ll tremor just as you’re waking up.

Tom McCarthy

That’s interesting because I have noticed that more on waking up with all kind of just like you know you stretch my body and it won’t get a little tremor. But I didn’t realize that’s what was happening. That’s really really cool. So why did medicine miss this? Why? Why are you the one? You know trying to stand on the mountain to let everybody know about this? It’s such a natural thing. Why do not why do more people not know about this?

David Berceli, PhD

What’s kind of interesting if you break our medical field down into three different categories. So the field of neurology they haven’t missed it but they only study trembling in the body as a result of some type of dysfunction or malfunction of the nervous system. So you’ve got Parkinson’s tremors, postural tremors etcetera. They’ve studied tremors extensively but only in the sense of when they occur as a dysfunction of the nervous system. So that’s their focus was why do people tremor in a dysfunctional manner. Then the field of psychology also recognizes this because in the D. S. M. Five which is a diagnostic manual for clinical psychologist, it mentions tremors in there and it even mentions tremors as a result of trauma. But they saw the tremors as part of the pathology of the trauma. And so they medicate people literally to stop trembling. Whereas the tremor mechanism isn’t part of the pathology, it’s the attempt of the body to actually come out of the pathological expression of the trauma

Tom McCarthy

Medicating people to stop treasuring when it should be what they allow us to do right?

David Berceli, PhD

The body is desperately trying to treme and that puts the organism and the person in a conflict. It wants to tremor and they medicate it sort of anesta sized it from trembling. So it never gets its organic relief. So it creates a cycle where it lives in a state of trauma actually.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah.

David Berceli, PhD

And one other place that told where we have an avenue into this is the field of physiology. Now they’ve studied tremor ring but they call it vibration. And this was studied way back in the 60s, vibrating platforms in a day Jim you’re vibrating baby carriages, you’re vibrating chairs at an airport because the frequency of the vibration actually relaxes muscle tissue. So they have a positive understanding of vibrating and vibrating at a certain frequency and a certain amplitude, but they do it by machines. And I’m trying to demonstrate the body organically knows that and it can shift its own vibrational frequency according to the tension pattern that it’s hitting when it’s traveling through the struck. So if it’s a light tension pattern it will travel more gently. If it’s a tighter tension pattern, you can actually see the structure moving as the tremor mechanism tries to open up the tightness in the physical structure.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. So yeah, the vibration plates and the, you know, the vibration guns, they become very, very popular but the brain, the mind and the body is much more elegant in that it knows where to go. Like it presents whatever whatever it is and sometimes it’s subtle. So it’s not as dynamically felt as, you know, a gun that’s just vibrating there, but it’s much more elegant and it’s truly getting in and releasing, not just coming from the outside, Right?

David Berceli, PhD

Yeah, that’s really key here. That the tremor mechanism when you activated in the body, it will release layers of tension patterns in the structure. So it might release a layer of a sports injury three years ago. But then the next layer is a car accident that happened last week. So there are multiple, many tremors inside the structure, or many tension patterns inside the structure of the body. And so what’s good is it’s not the ego knowing which layer needs to release next. So when you do these external manipulations, although very valuable. And I support them completely, you’re doing it from an ego direction on my shoulders type. So, I’m gonna put that gun up here. It could be your hip that’s really tight, that’s pulling on the shoulder. So you’re gonna have to re release the hip to get rid of the shoulder tension pattern and that’s what the tremor mechanism organically knows how to do. And we wouldn’t consciously know this.

Tom McCarthy

I love that. Yeah, there’s such an elegance in the way that we function that this goes to where it really needs to go to versus you said where the pain is. So this is a but it is a great tool to relieve stress and tension, but also trauma. How does it get to trauma and what’s going on with trauma and the body.

David Berceli, PhD

Okay, so you have to understand we have trauma which called trauma with a big T. And trauma with a little T. You know, you let you fall down, you hurt your knee or something like that is a small trauma, but to the structure, that’s a pretty serious one. So you might think it’s small in the ego way, but the body says, wow, that that I’ve got to readjust now. Okay. And so but then you have things like long term trauma that may have happened from childhood as an example and you’ve been holding that pattern of protection way into adulthood that you no longer need. But you don’t even know it’s there, that’s what creates chronic tension atoms. Okay, trauma to the body is no different than tension trauma means the body contracts the more threat threatening the traumatic event, the tighter and longer it will hold to survive, the less threatening the contraction will still occur, but it’s not as severe so it can release more easily. So just think of the body is constantly pulsating, but in traumatic events, severe ones, it really contract, then it holds this. And if I held my fists like this for a while, they’ll go numb my muscles and fashion will still be tight. I’ll still be holding a fist, but I’ll no longer feel it. And that basically is what childhood generational trauma is about holding things for so long that we don’t even know they’re there anymore.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, that’s amazing. Well, you know, my dad was killed in Vietnam when I was three and it’s very traumatic for my family and and you know, for years, I mean, I was very functional and You know, had lots of good things happen. But I didn’t realize until probably 2,015 when I got chronic fatigue, that I was really tense. Like my body was, you know, not as not as able to move in patterns that other people, other people could. And I thought, you know, I had aches and pains. I just thought that was normal. I was an athlete college football player. But then I really realized, you know, when I started to go in, I could really start to feel that tension. And I’ve been carrying that probably since age three with me and boy, what a wake up call that was especially when I got chronic fatigue when I had no energy and had to overcome that. But this technology can help people and you know, go back and you’re not necessarily going back in your mind, but the body is releasing tensions and traumas from 30, 40, 50 years ago. Right?

David Berceli, PhD

That’s a great example. Think of this. So, your father was killed in the war, the child that’s a terrible threat. It’s a psycho emotional threat. But like I said, neurophysiology, they’re connected. So your body held a pattern of sadness, anger, fear, all of that. And like you said you kind of frozen and then years later you have chronic fatigue. Well that’s because you’re living like this inside your structure with no knowledge of it. See and so you carry that for years now. This is the value of this thing for the tremor mechanism in the human body. It only knows the present moment. It doesn’t know that that is from the past. It only knows I have it now because the body can only live in the present moment. So it starts to release it with no interest or even knowledge at times that this is from 30 years ago to the body. It’s the present moment tension pattern and it wants to release it.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. Now you will sometimes feel, because I know you work with lots of veterans and people that have had some pretty horrific things happen in their life. There will potentially be some release of emotion also as they tremor correct?

David Berceli, PhD

Yeah. This is what’s interesting about this. So if I’m working with a soldier as an example and they’ll start to tremor and I will see something in their hip as an example. So your left hips moving different than your right hip, does this make sense to you? You don’t have to tell me a story. I just making an observation and they’ll say no I don’t understand why. But usually after the tightness releases, I don’t know why this happens but after it releases then it kicks in neurologically and they say I know what that’s from. Then. They’ll tell me the story of an I. E. D. Going off an explosive device going off and sometimes they’ll cry in the memory of that experience. But they’re now doing it in the present moment. It doesn’t take them to the past them in the present moment. Let them release the cry today of an experience in the past And they don’t have they don’t have such a strong hold that their past is still controlling them because they just release the physiological pathway to the neurological memory.

Tom McCarthy

That’s beautiful. Yeah. Well I mean ideally that’s what should be happening in a trauma. We should feel it and let it pass through but we’re freezing up and holding onto it and then getting into you know fight or flight protective state and then staying in that you know when it’s not appropriate when everything’s fine. Right? Feeling that way. Yeah.

David Berceli, PhD

Yeah. Almost globally at this point we could say most people are living in a fight or flight response or freeze response because of what’s going on and all that stuff. But what’s really valuable about what you’re hitting on Tom is that when the tremor mechanism is activated. Somebody might have an emotional release of fear or anger or sadness or whatever but all it is is completing the discharge of the psycho emotional physical cycle that’s going on. So I just tell them, okay, well you just cry because in about one minute of crying it’s just gonna stop because it’s simply a discharge and release and it’s connected to the tremor mechanism. So just as the tremor mechanism in about a minute is going to release this pattern and a new one will reveal itself, it will also release the emotion along with it. So you can see how organically we’re connected psycho, emotionally and physiologically. And if we activate that full connected capacity of the human organism, the whole thing research stores itself quite easily actually back into a liveness.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, I think you were the one that showed me a video where a bear was tranquilized or something like that, you know, which was pretty traumatic. Like you get shot with a dart, you’re tranquilized, you’re still probably conscious, right? So you see all these people, you’re a bear, right? You see all these people around you. But then when the bear came back out of the, you know, being tranquilized it tremor could and then it, you know, walked right off like, okay, that’s done with no trauma. Same thing happened with cats. You see a cat gets scared. You see them, you know, shake it off and then they just go about their merry way. You know, as human beings, you’ve given us a way to do that. I want you to talk through how to do it just a minute. But how often because I hope everybody learns this technology everybody listening should have this in your toolkit to relieve stress and trauma. How often should somebody do the T. R. E. Exercise?

David Berceli, PhD

Well I tell people to do the full exercise routine, there’s seven exercises. I tell them to do that about twice. Because once you do that and you activate the tremor mechanism you don’t generally need the rest of the exercise. You have to do the last one which is the one where you lay on the floor and the butterfly position. Okay so that’s all you have to do. But I tell people at the end of every day when you lay down and bed and your day is complete just put your feet in the butterfly position, let your knees fall open. You don’t even have to pick your pelvis up. But if you just slightly close the knees it’ll activate immediately. You can tremor for about five minutes and you feel the whole body starting to let go of the day.

Tom McCarthy

And that helps you sleep too. Right?

David Berceli, PhD

Oh very much so yeah because it activates that parasympathetic nervous system which causes the columnists and relaxation.

Tom McCarthy

So literally I mean I often do it more than that. I didn’t know you could do it in bed. I’ve always done it on a hard surface. So you just taught me something new. But once you get it up and going and you really can activate that tremor mechanism easily five minutes before you go to bed.

David Berceli, PhD

That’s exactly or if they work in an office or something like that, once you learn, once your body knows that you are free to access the tremor mechanism, you can literally do it sitting in a chair at your office desk if you get a phone call that’s disturbing or upsetting for some some reason or you’re just fatigued because you’ve been working for hours at a time. You can actually activate it just sitting in a chair. It’s almost simple to activate. Once the ego let’s go and allows for this organic mechanism to be available. You can do it very easily in many different ways throughout the day.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. So you talked us through a little bit. I’m gonna ask you to give us a link of where to go to classes, your books and things like that. But the exercises basically are setting you up to be able to go into a butterfly position. So, heels together, knees going out to the side and then through the groin muscles, right? Then that starts to create you know, you’ll you’ll feel and it’s crazy like you did a session with me on zoom and you have me in different positions than just that one too because I know there’s some advanced things that that you can teach people through your courses and through your, your people that you’ve trained to do. But I mean, the body just starts, you know, shaking uncontrollably and it’s like, you’re not even like, what the heck is going on? And but at the end you feel so loose and free. It’s truly amazing. Where can people find out, you know, videos, courses, books, trainers, how can they truly learn this? Because it’s such a powerful technology.

David Berceli, PhD

Okay, so there’s a number of different resources. So, first of all, if they want to find a class or course and many of them are free online, they can go to traumaprevention.com

Tom McCarthy

traumaprevention.com. Courses, some of them are even free. So, great place to go. You know,

David Berceli, PhD

Some of them are done like every week, you sign up for like three weeks to get a full experience of it. If you want to just see a lot of videos. So, you understand visually what this might look like in many different people, because as you know, Tom it’s different for everybody. Go to my Youtube channel, which is simply David Berceli.

Tom McCarthy

Okay. B-E-R-C-E-L-I Davidberceli.com on Youtube.

David Berceli, PhD

On Youtube. Okay. And what the value of that is is I’ve got about 200 videos of people all over the world in multiple language and cultures and for different reasons. They tremor and they describe what this feels like, you get to see what it looks like. Now. You can also go, if you just want one minute videos, go to my instagram channel, which also is David Berceli and you can short one minute videos of that.

Tom McCarthy

I think I did watch the videos and they were very helpful. But then having you having an expert kind of guide me through, took it to another level and how can people access. So the classes would be a way to have an expert leading you through it with probably another group of people over a virtual environment. And then you have people that are trained as facilitators of this too.

David Berceli, PhD

Yeah, we have people that we call providers. So when you go to traumaprevention.com, right on the top, find a provider, you click on that and then you can put in the state or the country or whatever you want to and click and do a search and you’ll find providers all over the world.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. Yeah. I can’t recommend highly enough your work, David and you know, for people that have low energy for people that know they have had trauma that they’re holding onto. But probably people just, you know, for maintenance and longevity and and and also obviously people that are having that have some chronic disease where if they stay in that fight or flight pattern, like it’s hard for the body to heal and the immune system to work when you’re fighting a tiger all day. Right? So this is just a great way of augmenting any other therapy that you’re doing to truly heal pretty much from anything.

David Berceli, PhD

Well, the way I think about it and you talked about animals that tremor naturally and animals in the wild don’t suffer actually from pa post traumatic stress disorder because of that very reason they go through trauma, they tremor it out and they move on their way. Well that’s a mammalian quality in us still. And so the treme oring isn’t a nice thing to do. I actually think it’s a way of living in our human body for our whole life. And so just as animals have it available for their stressors, we do as well. So to me it’s nothing but part of the organic pulsation of being human.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah, and it’s so interesting, I was talking with fourth generation intuitive that, you know, her belief is that because four generations of her family have been intuitive like, but her belief is that Children are born with that ability, but then you get talked out of it, you know, your imaginary friend, you don’t, there’s no such thing as an imaginary friend, forget that. And then we were born with this ability to tremor and release trauma and we get talked out of, you know, be tough, you know, stop crying, you know, you know, don’t be afraid, all these different things versus if we just use this stuff that we were innately born with, we have far less suffering, probably far less disease and and and much happier lives

David Berceli, PhD

I think, which is sad to say, but we don’t know how to live in our human body still. And you’re right because we train ourselves to control roll the very impulses that bring us to life. So you don’t cry, you don’t get angry, you sit in a chair, you control yourself and we’ve done nothing but train Children from the very early age to learn how to freeze and not follow the pulsating organism in which the ego is living.

Tom McCarthy

Yeah. So this is not only a great tool to learn for you, all of you listening, but if you have Children, you get to teach it to your kids. You get to teach it to your friends, your spouse, your community. You’ve got another tool to help people get rid of the stress and traumas. David, you’ve been amazing as always, thank you so much for being with us again. Your work is truly life changing and you are a gift to the world. Thank you so much.

David Berceli, PhD

Thank you Tom, that’s very kind. I appreciate the invitation to talk with you about it.

Tom McCarthy

Make sure you check out David’s work again. The website is give us a website again

David Berceli, PhD

Traumaprevention.com.

Tom McCarthy

traumaprevention.com. Beautiful. Alright, thanks again. We’ll see everybody on the next interview.