On Somatic Experiencing, Healing, and Wholing

Our culture’s conversation and awareness regarding trauma has grown immensely in recent years. Books such as The Body Keeps the Score and The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture have broadened our basic understanding of how trauma works and what it even is. Where before we thought of trauma as an event, it is now better understood as a response our bodymind carries with it after an event. In other words, one person may have the same lived experience as another, yet one may walk away from that experience with trauma in their system, when the other does not. The events don’t matter as much as the way an individual responds to them. 

Still another book in this milieu is called Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma by Peter Levine. Levine’s work extends into the development of a modality for working with trauma called Somatic Experiencing. Within this modality, we are asked to accept one primary understanding in order to grasp what trauma is on a functional level: that we are animals. Our “animal body” responds to our experience instinctually, while our “human mind”, conditioned by societal norms, often inhibits responses to our experience. Trauma manifests as a result of the inhibition of our natural responses to experiences that we perceived as threatening. These incomplete responses keep us from engaging with the present moment. Instead we subconsciously mistake our current experience for a previous moment in which we did not receive what was needed to return to a baseline of calm curiosity and safety.

One key factor in whether something is experienced as traumatic or not is how the person was cared for afterward. Did anyone check on them? Were they given a sense of safety? Were they able to return to a state of “I’m okay”? There are many other factors to account for, but often a sense of betrayal or abandonment accompanies an event which leaves a person traumatized. By returning to these experiences with support from an attuned individual or group, we are able to resolve the responses which did not get a chance to complete. 

Worth noting are the layers of complexity presented by repetitive trauma that are often minimized in comparison with the drama of impactful events. Parent to child trauma can come from misattunement from a caregiver, not just abuse or neglect. The everyday trauma incurred on those of the global majority (as well as white westerners) as a result of systemic racism and white supremacy should not go unmentioned either. Resmaa Menakem, author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, has brought the somatic lens to the movement for racial justice, offering a necessary innovation in an activist movement that by default requires contact with momentously charged subject matter and experience. I write in terms of discrete events for the sake of conveying some basic understanding, but the process can be very nuanced and ask for a great deal of patience as we sort through the many facets of the internal landscape.

As one who is training in Somatic Experiencing (SE), I support the process of completing these “stuck” or “looped” patterns in the body and nervous system. But what compels me the most about the SE approach is the very gradual (or titrated) pace which this work uses. We do not dive right to the center of people’s most painful memories. We instead work around their edges. By taking this slower, more measured approach, the nervous system builds capacity for the charge that comes when a trauma trigger activates. Another word for this capacity is trust. Trust builds, and the system learns that a big charge does not necessarily mean “danger!” even if at a particular moment in time, it did. 

Still another powerful understanding of this modality comes in the form of a quote of Peter Levine’s which was shared in one of my trainings. He said, “I don’t work with trauma. I work with essence.” Levine’s words convey the primacy of something which trauma blocks, something that is more fundamental and abiding than trauma. Our aim is to coax that forward, to remind this essence—or what I would call “soul”— that it’s okay to come out and play again. 

In this context, “healing” does not mean experiencing life as one did before the trauma. “Healing” is a return to vitality and aliveness that includes the trauma. The scar left by the experience means the skin is stronger where it has reknit itself. One is left with an abiding sense of “I can” even after having gone through such life-altering difficulty.

It would bless me to support you in a path of healing of this nature. Or we might better understand it as a path of “wholing”. We widen our embrace to hold those aspects of life which have, for whatever reason, been exiled. We welcome them back into the fold, eager to hear the story they have to tell of their sojourn out in the wilderness.

In Grace, Rainer Moon Raven

bend-in-gratitude.com

PS. If this spurs questions, feedback, or further interest, I’d love to hear about what’s be stirred.

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