Moving through trauma

During my current radiotherapy treatment for breast cancer, I need to lie very still.  I am placed into position by a team of two to three radiology assistants who arrange my body in a very precise way in order for the radiation to target specific areas of my body.

This could be very traumatising and triggering for me if I did not have the awareness of how much being paralysed or having to stay still played a part in my the traumatic stress and was a key symptom I suffered for so many years.  These feelings are a huge part of what it feels like to be a trauma survivor, subject to forces we had to freeze in the face off, cutting off huge chunks of our vital life and spirit.

Peter Levine’s work with healing from trauma shows how important movement of stress and tension within the body is and how important tremors and other involuntary muscle movements are to the release of PTSD and the energy which remains locked up in our body stored as vibration which reverberates.  Requiring those who have been traumatised to keep this energy locked up is severely damaging and has terrible consequences.

Levine writes :

If frightening sensations… are not given the time and attention needed to move through the body and resolve/dissolve (as in trembling and shaking) the individual will continue to be gripped by fear and other negative emotions.  The stage is set for a trajectory of mercurial symptoms.  Tension in the neck, shoulders and back will likely evolve over time into the syndrome of fibromyalgia.  Migraines are also common somatic expression of unresolved stress.  Knots in the gut may mutate to common conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, severe PMS or other gastrointestinal problems such as spastic colitis.  These conditions deplete the energy resources of the sufferer and may take the form of chronic fatigue syndrome.  These sufferers are most often the patients with cascading symptoms who visit doctor after doctor in search of relief, and generally find little help which aids them.

Trauma is the great masquerader and participant in many maladies and “diseases” that afflict sufferers.  It can perhaps be conjectured that unresolved trauma is responsible for a majority of the illnesses of modern mankind.

Moreover, he explains, healing does not necessarily result through a catharsis or constant reliving of traumatic imprints and memories which can just lead to further trauma and painful emotions without resolving them and leading the sufferer back to a sense of trust and faith in life and his or her own badly traumatised body.

What helps is to enable the sufferer to explore the symptoms locked in the body (and often even frozen out of awareness) in tandem with a re-grounding in feelings of pleasure and movement associated with non traumatic memories and experiences which provide the patient with a way out of the repetitive cycles of re-traumatisation and collapse into feelings of never ending pain, sadness, hopelessness and fear.

In his therapeutic practice and sessions (as explained in his ground breaking book In An Unspoken Voice : How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness), Levine assists his patients in the experience of body sensations of pain contained within a larger process of sensation that allow for feelings of warmth and safety which allow the patient a feeling of power (and may I say even, love).  Essential to this treatment is an awareness that they can move into and out of the frozen trapped state of trauma to feel again, to move again, to risk loving again even when this process involves feelings of vulnerability.

In his work with a patient and holocaust survivor, Adam, explored in the above book, Levine leads Adam back to the feelings of his child self , lost long ago.  In a particularly moving excerpt. Adam comes to the following realisation : “I am alive”.

Part of suffering from PTSD and Complex PTSD is that part of us feels dead.  We may be dissociated, fear social interaction and even be living lives in which we reduce our movement so much that we no longer engage in a dynamic or social way.  In many ways we are held hostage by a past and by buried trapped feelings that have paralysed us on some level.

Healing involves knowing we can move, that there is joy despite the pain we have suffered.  That we can begin to open the dark door that contains our past trauma and suffering without being overwhelmed or permanently flooded by the experience, developing a sense of what Levine calls middle ground from which to negotiate past traumatic symptoms which contain a life energy longing for attention and release in order that our lives can be transformed and we can find the will and desire to move again.

Healing involves developing a degree of mindfulness into painful sensations, developing a place or ground of safety that can contain us as we begin to feel and grieve (like Adam) for all that was lost through trauma and finding of a place of hope that lets us know we can survive the experience of renegotiating our trauma with a heart that is opened to both suffering  and love.

Who knows

that in the depth of the ravine

of the mountain

of my hidden heart

a firefly of my love

is aflame

Abutsu Ni