The mind needs to be reeducated to feel physical sensations, and the body needs to be helped to tolerate and enjoy the comforts of touch.
Individuals who lack emotional awareness are able, with practice, to connect their physical sensations to psychological events. Then they can slowly reconnect with themselves.
Bessel van der Kolk
My heart seems to be open to what I have buried a lot over the past week or so. I cried a lot in therapy yesterday with deeper recognitions of how alone I was in the past. I can see how that aloneness and inability of others to respond in the way I needed drove me into isolation. Body trauma made me feel scared and very unsafe and I carried that fear and sense of terrible vulnerablity at a deeply unconscious level. My body still goes through a host of strange sensations and symptoms but I am learning to turn toward and befriend them and not react to them as much.
Bessel van der Kolk, trauma specialist, has explained how unsafe a traumatised body feels. The trauma sufferer dissociates in order to survive and has to shut down to intense body sensations but its only in opening up to the past that lives inside the body that helps us. That is why to say we should only live in this present moment doesn’t really help trauma sufferers, in fact it may make them feel worse with guilt or shame they can’t manage what is really (deep inside the body) a deeply unmanageable situation which can feel incredibly hostile.
The truth is there is no pain when we are fully alive in this present moment if it is a moment of peace but there are present moments that are alive with past pain. Our suffering really grows in the resistance to that pain instead of the welcoming in of it. It may sound masochistic to say we should ‘welcome in’ pain but what I am saying is that it is in the opening to it that we can feel the body sensation of it. If we don’t split off into words or stories about how it is all too intolerable and impossible to cope with we will find that we can open and cope. It may just be a painful reality we have defended against accepting because it hurt us too much.
When we allow ourselves to feel the sensation such as being piereced or drowned or submerged and flow with that and open to it or give it a voice, something miraculous happens : our body sensations and pain can transform and shift. This is very much a mindfulness and self compassion process that is clearly explained in Christine Neff’s book on the subject. I will post a post soon which gives us a technique for being present to and connected with painful feelings trapped in the body as sensations.
I spoke in a recent post on grief about the Babylonian myth of Innana and Erishkegal. In the myth Erishkegal who is trapped and lives in an underworld of great psychic pain is crying out for love. Her sister who lives in the upper world decided to visit her and on the way down she has to surrender all of her garments one by one. Sheis then pinned to the wall and has to witness her sister in what some may believe to be a great state of madness. Before leaving the upper world she calls on little finger gods called the Enkies saying “if I am not back in 3 days pleace come and help.” After three days the Enkies arrive to see Innana pinned to the wall. All the Enkies do is mirror the screams and sufferings of Erishkegal who is crying out “woe is me and woe to my insides”. When she is affirmed and mirrored Erishkegal’s suffering abates and her sister Innana is freed.
I read about this myth years ago in a book by a Jungian analyst on working through depression called Descent to the Goddess. It is something I practiced a lot with my older sister in the care home in the years before she died. Being present with her always stopped the screams but sadly by that stage all her trauma was locked deep inside and finally killed her. It is also something I practice with my own suffering self on the difficult days which thankfully are lessening. I awake with a host of painful body sensations and have to use my breath well. I also have to make a conscious choice to move into the present moment and take action rather than be focused 24/7 on the painful body symptoms. I am getting much better at this in recent months
Trauma specialist, Peter Levine, talks of the process of pendulation in which we move between witnessing the past and painful body sensations and the present moment in which we focus on something of goodness and beauty. Trauma can fix and pin us to the past, just as Innana is pinned to the wall in the Underworld. Loving kindess to our body sensations and an opening to and allowing of them without magnifying or contracting is difficult work in trauma recovery but possible. It might just free us.
Mindfullness practices are very helpful as they help us to touch our pain or past trauma with love. Its hard to say that we need to accept that we were traumatised and its not great to hear it may have all been for a reason or a purpose but those who have worked with and seen the great spiritual understanding and gains trauma sufferers who are brave enough to work with their pain and trauma achieve such as Peter Levine testify to the fact that trauma opens the sufferer to realities on a far deeper level of insight.
The trauma sufferer carries always a rememberance of what a painful and lonely place life can be and yet when they turn inwards to befriend themselves and their symptoms they make amazing gains. The price of liberation is presence and presence is the soothing balm of recognition our soul intends for us to embody on the path of dealing with and working to heal our trauma and Complex PTSD symptoms.
Emerging From The Dark Night 