Bodywork for PTSD: Intensive with Matthew Howe

What You'll Learn

Bodywork for PTSD is a training for massage and bodywork professionals focused on what we can responsibly and skillfully do when working with nervous systems impacted by trauma or shaped through stress. Rather than centering on stories or diagnoses, this work examines how alarm shows up in tone, rhythm, and tissue—and how touch, including craniosacral and other bodywork techniques, can support homeostatic recovery without force, fixing, or retraumatization. The emphasis is on listening, pacing, and integration: learning how to work with the body’s responses in real time while weaving that awareness into the sessions you already offer, including the thoughtful use of craniosacral techniques. This is not a modality or protocol-based course, but a way of working that supports clarity, safety, and sustainability for both practitioner and client. Our goal is simple: to help the helpers work more effectively, ethically, and with greater confidence in their touch and decision-making.

Course Overview

Bodywork for PTSD

This course explores how stress and trauma organize themselves in the body—and how skilled bodywork can support regulation without force, retraumatization, or protocol dependence. Rather than teaching another modality, the emphasis is on clinical decision-making, nervous-system awareness, and real-world
integration.

Participants in Bodywork for PTSD 1 & 2 will learn how to:
• Understand how stress and trauma influence autonomic function, perception, tone, and tissue response
• Recognize states of alarm, adaptation, and settling through breath, rhythm, and palpatory cues
• Assess clients without an agenda, diagnosis, or needing the story
• Establish healthy touch through pacing, presence, communication, and clear professional boundaries
• Distinguish between restriction and resistance and respond appropriately without force
• Apply non-invasive, trauma-informed approaches from micro to macro—locally,
regionally, or globally—without direct contact with sensitive or charged areas
• Support homeostatic recovery by working with the body’s self-corrective processes rather than attempting to “fix” symptoms
• Integrate nervous-system awareness into existing massage and bodywork sessions
• Maintain ethical scope of practice with complex nervous-system presentations
• Develop sustainable practitioner habits that support longevity, clarity, and confidence

Instructor

Matthew Howe- Touch Education

Matthew Howe, LMT, is the founder of Touch Education and co-founder of Massage Cincy, a multi-location therapeutic massage practice in the Cincinnati metro area. Practicing since 2000, Matthew brings over two decades of experience across clinical, spa, and private-practice settings, including 17 years as an instructor at the Central Florida School of Massage Therapy and 5 years at the Costa Rica School of Massage Therapy.

His work lives at the intersection of practice and teaching, where real-world sessions inform thoughtful, outcome-aware education that honors both craft and curiosity—equal parts art and science, shaped by what shows up on the table and in the classroom. In 2012, Matthew created Bodywork for PTSD, an educational series that equips bodyworkers to work skillfully with stress and trauma through healthy, neutral, supportive touch, observation, and nervous-system awareness—without diagnosis or force. His approach reframes the practitioner’s role from fixer to facilitator of change and educator in selfobservation, emphasizing clarity,