I recently wrote about healing trauma by using somatic experiencing here. To give an example of somatic experiencing and how it works I spoke about a time my body began involuntary shaking. When this occurs it’s become clear to me that traumas have been given a “ permission” to surface. It had calmed for a bit as I mentioned in my last blog but daily tremors in my feet and hands, a heaviness in my right arm, and tingling in the fingers of my right hand sprang up. I knew it was connected with songs I had been “craving”, so I listened and occasionally had images flash of a specific traumatic event. (As I mentioned in the other piece it was in a car.)
I booked a somatic experiencing session with a practitioner I was working with in training. In the days leading up to the session I noticed more tremoring, more flashbacks, energy running down my right arm, my right hand often feeling very heavy, my left arms and hand feeling numb. If I sat and just observed my hand it would start shaking and spinning very quickly. I felt a tingling in my shoulder and when I brought my awareness to my shoulder it would move back and forth. Key to somatic experiencing is not to try to do anything and just allow the body to move in the way it is asking while you as the observer “ slow it down”.
During my appointment my movements began with my right hand feeling very heavy and beginning to twitch, then spin at the wrist . The same occurred in my left hand and my shoulders began to move back and forth. Slowly, I was guided to testing the shoulders to see if they wanted to turn in a certain way. I found my body twisting to the left, and my left foot begin to point in that direction. My practitioner helped to guide me not to think much, but just “allow”.
I followed my body slowly begin to stand and attached was the memory of me in my twenties in a car faced with firefighters to my left trying to get me out of my car. In those moments I felt “trapped” and couldn’t get up and out of the car as they asked me to. As I stepped up and finished the movement of leaving the car, standing there , I began to sob with my head in my hands and covering my face. There was shame, and a feeling of surrender. My body began to calm. I started to tell the story of that day, and the events that led up to me being “stuck” in the car. As I told the story, it was like I began to know it intimately. But, I was incapable of sharing how I’d gotten “trapped” in the car.
My right elbow laid against the edge of the table while speaking and I noticed pain. My elbow was pushing against the table to the point of pain. “Your body is speaking to us Maria”, my practitioner said. It wasn’t finished this stress response. “Follow what it wants to do”, and so I noticed tingling in my right foot, a heaviness in my thigh, and pain on my right side. My body began to twist to the right, as my feet followed and I lay my head on the chair next to me sobbing, “leave me alone”. The right side was where I could flee. Being incapacitated in the car, I was in freeze. Naturally, the body wants to get away from the danger. It never got a chance to, until this day.
I sobbed and sobbed.
My SE practitioner gently guided me to continue following the sensations and I watched now my body stand slowly. She asked me what I saw and I began again to sob. I saw myself running down a road, on either side were tall evergreen trees. Faster and faster I ran in my mind (eyes wide open) and my body responded by sobbing. I felt the freedom of being able to leave the car without any intervention. I slowly sat back down, shoulders slumped, head looking down, crying about being able to get away from everyone and the car I was “trapped” in. I was free in “running”.
I began to retell the story again of this day. This time I was able to finish the details. I had decided I no longer wanted to be alive, as the suffering was too great and impulsively overdosed. I was found. It’s hard to remember in detail but on my left side were firefighters trying to get me to roll down the window and/or shut the car and come out. I was too afraid and groggy. On my right side was the passenger seat with no one in it. It would be the way I could escape had I not been so incapacitated. I was unable to complete both the right side movements and the left. My body held this memory until the day of this session in which it was able to complete both as I just followed. “I’ve set my entire life up to run away” I told my practitioner. I had always run as a resource but it increased after this day. My default both for exercise and when my emotions became too overwhelming was to run.
That afternoon, I found myself walking slower than usual.
The days following this session I found myself dreaming more, something I very rarely did and feeling a sense of awe and grounding. The memory of this event felt more a part of me rather than something that seemed to have happened to someone else. Rather than dissociate from the experience it was now my experience but one that had become integrated with my body and mind, with no reactivity to it. I experienced it, it was something that happened but it no longer caused an overwhelm in my system.
The body really does speak, and learning to listen to it as well as be able to be with it is one of the most wondrous processes I have learned, and one that can be an invaluable part of retraining your system to calm. The body can continue to act as if it is still in the trauma easily activated and flooded with the same chemicals as the initial experience. Eventually as in my case it can lead to illness. Somatic experiencing can be an invaluable method to help ease this reaction.
Here is another article about somatic experiencing that may be of further use.
