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July 16, 2017
Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.
order to experience this restorative faculty, we must develop the capacity to face certain uncomfortable and frightening physical sensations and feelings without becoming overwhelmed by them. This book is about how we develop that capacity.
In the words of the ancient Chinese text, the I Ching, The fear and trembling engendered by shock comes to an individual at first in such a way that he sees himself placed at a disadvantage … this is only transitory. When the ordeal is over, he experiences relief, and thus the very terror he had to endure at the outset brings good fortune in the long run.4
Therapists must learn, from their own successful encounters with their own traumas, to stay present with their clients. This is the reason healing trauma must necessarily engage the awareness of the living, sensing, “knowing” body in both client and therapist. “Perhaps the most striking evidence of successful empathy,” says the analyst Leston Havens, “is the occurrence in our bodies of sensations that the patient has described in his or hers.”
Habitual postures tell us what paths need to be retraced and resolved. In order to facilitate bottom-up processing, therapists need to have a precise feel for the instinctual imperative that was thwarted in their client at a moment of overwhelming fright. The traumatized body-mind was, in other words, poised in readiness but failed to fully orchestrate its meaningful course of action. As in my accident (Chapter 1) we have to help clients discover just where in her body she readied for action, and which action had been blocked in its execution.
Aka - act of completion!
Therapeutic approaches that neglect the body, focusing mainly on thoughts (top-down processing), will consequently be limited. I propose instead that, in the initial stages of restorative work, bottom-up processing needs to be standard operating procedure. In other words, addressing a client’s “bodyspeak” first and then, gradually, enlisting his or her emotion, perception
A good quote for explaing my strategy with clients.
This difference suggests a clear rationale for a trauma therapy model that separates fear and other strong negative affects from the (normally time-limited) biological immobility response. Separating the two components breaks the feedback loop that rekindles the trauma response. This, I am convinced, is the philosopher’s stone of informed trauma therapy.
Successful trauma therapy helps people resolve trauma symptoms. The feedback loop is broken by uncoupling fear from immobility (see Figures 4.1a and 4.1b). Effective therapy breaks, or depotentiates, this trauma-fear feedback loop by helping a person safely learn to “contain” his or her powerful sensations, emotions and impulses without becoming overwhelmed. Thus, the immobility response is enabled to resolve as it is evolved to do.
As a client learns to experience the physical sensations of the immobility in the absence of fear, trauma’s grip is loosened, and equilibrium is restored.
In the final analysis, I believe that it is the dynamic balance between the most primitive and the most evolved/refined parts of the brain that allows trauma to be resolved and difficult emotions to be integrated and transformed. Effective treatment is a matter of helping individuals keep the “observing” prefrontal cortex online as it simultaneously experiences the raw primitive sensations generated in the archaic portions of the brain (the limbic system, hypothalamus and brain stem;
When working with traumatic reactions, such as states of intense fear, Somatic Experiencing®* provides therapists with nine building blocks.
One surprisingly effective strategy in dealing with difficult sensations involves helping a person find an “opposite” sensation: one located in a particular area of the body, in a particular posture, or in a small movement; or one that is associated with the person’s feeling less frozen, less helpless, more powerful and/or more fluid.
It is an involuntary, internal rocking back and forth between these two polarities. It softens the edge of difficult sensations such as fear and pain. The importance of the human ability to move through “bad” and difficult sensations, opening to those of expansion and “goodness,” cannot be overstated: it is pivotal for the healing of trauma and more generally, the alleviation of suffering. It is vital for a client to know and experience this rhythm. Its steady ebb and flow tell you that, no matter how bad you feel (in the contraction phase), expansion will inevitably follow, bringing with it a
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When this rhythm is experienced, there is, at least, a tolerable balance between the pleasant and the unpleasant. People learn that whatever they are feeling (no matter how horrible it seems), it will last only seconds to minutes. And no matter how bad a particular sensation or feeling may be, knowing that it will change releases us from a sense of doom.
