Rethinking Movement After Trauma

What Does “Just Move More” Mean After Trauma?

This year, Multicultural Health Week (31 August–6 September) makes a simple, well-evidenced case: moving the body supports mental health at every age, better sleep, more energy, calmer minds, sharper focus. For most people, that’s an easy case to accept. Go for a walk. Try a class. Stretch before bed.

For someone whose body has lived through violence, displacement, prolonged fear or years of watching for danger, “just move more” can land differently. A raised heart rate can feel like a warning, not a workout. Rest can feel like the only safe option, or, just as often, like something a person has forgotten how to do.

STARTTS’s Body Focus Team works inside that gap. Two of its programs take this year’s Multicultural Health Week theme seriously without pretending trauma isn’t in the room.

REGEN-SEEDS is a five-session, trauma-informed activation program built on regulation before performance, connecting movement with sleep, food, education and social connection, offered in seated, standing or supported forms. It’s still early in its formal evaluation, but it has already been shaped twice: by a Khmer women’s group in Fairfield in 2025, and by a Spanish-speaking group of older women in Cabramatta in 2026.

Trauma-Sensitive Yoga and Psychoeducation takes a longer view: an eight-week program, run twice in sequence, delivered since 2023 and now reaching 255 women across STARTTS offices and community sites from Lakemba to Ryde. It pairs movement and breath with plain-language psychoeducation about the nervous system, with participants reporting improvements in areas such as sleep, calm, body awareness, self-compassion and connection.

Different programs, same starting point: choice before compliance, safety before performance, and culture shaping the delivery, not translated on top of it afterwards.

Over the next two pieces, we’re telling both stories properly: what happened, what the Body Focus Team did in response, and what each program can, and can’t yet, claim about the difference it’s making.

If this is support you or someone you know needs, here’s how to reach STARTTS: startts.org.au/services/how-startts-helps-clients