Trauma Recovery: Intense Healing Moments

Life, healing and trauma recovery can really get intense. It does not take much to make ordinary moments into stress filled days. The little things connect with moments from the past that often appear as fireworks shooting into the sky.

It could be a simple word spoken or a photograph from days gone by. It may even be a sight, a smell or a sound. Our brains are so intricate and complex with nerve pathways connecting the amygdala to the conscious moments of the past.

I am amazed at just how intense healing moments can sneak up and attack. For me, this is the same story I have written about and discussed, yet the power behind it is strong beyond belief. The emotional charge it holds, acts as if I am its slave. The memories that lie open for me to view make my eyes want to close with disgust. My body reacts as if it is in battle fighting all enemies known and unknown.

During the intense moments of healing, I feel as if I am all alone. It seems that no one truly understands. It feels as if everyone disappears. I reach out but I feel no hand to grasp. Are they there, I wonder? Am I on my own just like I have been throughout my life?

It is a confusing time of anguish as I sift the nuggets of gold from the rocks. I'm really not sure from one day to the next, how to make it through the moment. Rest, peace, and comfort seem illusive to me. They evade me with gusto.

The only thing I know to do is to continue putting one foot in front of the other. Even though the head winds are strong, I must not stop. I must not quit. I have come so far. For in these difficult moments, may I never forget that I have walked through similar times.

Let me be as a bird on the power line, observing all that is going on. Help me to realize that these intense moments are pushing me through the fire into greater awareness. Help me understand that these intense moments may challenge me to the limits physically, emotionally, and mentally. Let me not forget that I know I am much greater than the sum of these attacks.

Keep me hopeful that these moments will soon pass. May I remember that the calm water amongst the clear blue skies will emerge with beauty, hope and a renewed strength for my life.

(Above Picture taken - (c) 08/19/10)

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Nervous System and Trauma

Nervous systems are becoming so overloaded and overworked that few people are actually engaged in life and reality. When we overload and overwork our nervous systems without release, we cannot expect to function at 100 percent as humans. We become less than human. We give up who we actually are as a person.

When you are under repetitive stress, the body takes all of this in. It is like the shock absorbers on a car that are designed to take in the stress of the road. If you continue to pound the nervous system of the human body, the shock absorber, than at some point you will over whelm it. When it becomes overwhelmed, the flip will be switched.

Trauma is the same way as repetitive stress. When we encounter a traumatic moment, our body winds up and revs up the major body systems. Our brains begin to record the events, and the amygdala records the emotions that go with these events. All of these events become a neural pathway that is then used to process future information.

While we need the limbic system to function and make sense of experiences in life, if we fill it up and never release anything from it, our capabilities are diminished. Peace in our lives becomes hard to locate. It is as if we are in the jungle and the lion is chasing us. Even though we lost the lion or outsmarted it, in our mind, the lion may still be chasing us. It keeps us running as if it is still on our heels. The traumatic moments become fused with reality. It becomes difficult to tell the two apart.

We continue to carry the trauma or repetitive stress with us throughout our days. We allow the tiger to continue chasing us because through our altered consciousness there is no end to the tiger chasing us. There is no separation from the tiger in our mind and reality. Every day and moment from that point forward is affected without us giving much conscious thought that it is. Our future decisions are now wrapped within this altered process. Our fears are now framed through these experiences. Who we are has now changed into who we have become.

While we often cannot stop in the moment of trauma and release everything we are absorbing, we need to give ourselves the opportunity to do this. If the lion is chasing you, then you need to run. When the lion no longer chases you, it is time to go in and clear the nervous system out. It is time to release these things. An over stressed and over worked nervous system will not get you very far in life. It has a very big impact on how life looks to you and how it affects your physical body.

If you have spent a life time absorbing so much into your nervous system, it may take some intense work but there are ways to release it. While positive thoughts can greatly help the process, what is needed to release resides in the body. Until the body has released these things, they will continue to have an impact upon your life. Of course, fear and control try to give the illusion in our lives that things are different than they actually are. All too often, we succumb to these illusions. They become our reality and yet they are still an illusion.

Trauma and stress change us. It alters our perceptions and balance of everything around us. If we continue to allow the fears and energy of these moments to reside within our cells, we will be allowing a silent thief to rob us of who we truly are. Our potential will be diminished. Our reality will be altered. We will experience physical pains in the body that are overwhelming.

Working to connect our mind, our experiences and our awareness together with our body gives us hope, possibility and freedom. While it may not be easy to reclaim these parts of our life, we owe it to ourselves to become all that we are. For not only the sake of who we are but for the universe, it is imperative that we discover our potential. Anything less than this, and we've reduced the human experience for ourselves and for all those around us that we meet.

Picture taken along Volusia County Fair, Florida (c) 11/05/09


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Trama and the Limbic System

The limbic system is the part of our nervous system that is responsible for our survival as well as emotions like fear and anger. It is also involved in feelings of pleasure such as eating and sex. It is a complex set of structures that lies on both sides of the thalamus just below the cerebrum and includes the hypothalamus, hippocampus, amygdala and thalamus.

The amygdala and hippocampus are part of the limbic system and play a major role in our memory. The amygdala determines what memories are stored and where they are stored while the hippocampus is responsible for sending out memories to the appropriate areas of our brain for long term storage. The hippocampus retrieves the appropriate memories when it is necessary. The amygdala is involved in our emotional response.

The limbic system has an important role as it helps in the self preservation and survival of the species. it is responsible for the fight or flight response. If parts of the limbic system are impacted negatively, it can strongly influence or disrupt normal social behavior.

According to the article, "The Biological Response To Psychic Trauma", because the limbic system is the main area of the Central Nervous System where memories are processed, this is the most likely place to find an explanation of memory issues as a result of trauma. The hippocampus does not fully mature until at least the third or fourth year of life but the amygdala matures much earlier in life. In the first few years of life, the quality of events but not necessarily the context with which they happened can be remembered. Severe traumatic events of prolonged stress can disrupt the normal processes of the hippocampus which then disrupt the memory process by creating fearful associations without context, yet the feelings are still associated with the memories.

The main thing to keep in mind is that there are memories stored throughout our body and that connect to our mind. These are stored as emotions and sensations. Our fears get locked in with these memory sensations and so in order to understand our emotions and to understand the fear we hold, we must go in to the body. Only trying to access these memories through cognitive or mental exercises, is like only filling up a water glass a third of the way to quench your thirst after being outside all day. While you may add water to your body this way, you're going to still suffer from thirst. So it is with cognitive functions. If you only address part of the underlying events that reside in the body, than you're missing the greatest part of it.

Many claim that they have the right way to heal and they try to prove this. However, just having emotions come up or feeling nice or relaxed or seeing certain conditions change does not necessarily mean you are at the root of what is going on. If there is not a grounded body connection to the method of healing where you go in and embrace the fear, you are missing the point as a healer. There has to be a connection to the body, through the mind to arrive at the place of release, surrender and healing. Without all these elements, true healing is not taking place.

For More Information:
Reference: http://www.cirp.org/library/psych/vanderkolk2/
Anxiety Research (U.K.), Volume 4: Pages 199-212
The Biological Response to Psychic Trauma: Mechanisms and Treatment Of Intrusion and Numbing

What Your Child Remembers

Note: This is an article that I stumbled across while doing some research and the author, Robin Grille, has given me permission to reprint this in the blog. It is excellent information and make sure you check his books and his website out.

WHAT YOUR CHILD REMEMBERS
New discoveries about early memory - and how it affects us

Most of us have been told at one time or another that children aren’t supposed to remember anything that happens to them before – roughly – the age of two. Emotionally painful experiences during infancy will therefore have no lasting impact. These words might have been reassuring, if they didn’t also imply that our infants don’t remember the love we have given them, and so our love at this time has no lasting impact either. As science continues to throw open the mysteries of the brain, and the nature of memory, this kind of advice will gradually vanish. Every emotionally meaningful experience - whether joyous or painful - is stored in memory and has a lasting impact on a baby’s developing nervous system. The way our world feels to us as babies influences our unfolding personality, emotionality and relating styles profoundly, for the long term. There are different kinds of ‘memory’, beyond the stories we can recount. And we ‘remember’ a lot more than we realise.

Within the limbic system of the brain - an area concerned with processing emotions - are the amygdala and hippocampus. The amygdala processes highly-charged emotional memories, such as terror and horror. The hippocampus processes narrative, chronological memory. The amygdala is mature at birth, so babies are able to feel a range of intense emotion, even though they cannot understand the content of the emotion and its relation to what is going on around them. The hippocampus on the other hand, does not mature until sometime between the second and fourth years. Until then, babies are relatively unable to organise memory meaningfully in terms of sequences of events. Only rarely does anybody consciously recall the events of infancy. However, the storage of the emotional content of memory is facilitated by the amygdala. We therefore remember every emotion and physical sensation from our earliest days, and even if we have no clarity about the events that took place, these memories imbue the way we relate to each other as adults.

Just as memory can be divided up into the dual categories of ‘Short Term’ and ‘Long Term’, there are also two qualities of memory: ‘Explicit’ and ‘Implicit’. The capacity for ‘explicit’ memory reaches full maturity at around three years of age. This is the kind of memory that is conscious and enables us to tell a story that makes sense of what happened. ‘Implicit’ memory is available from birth or earlier, it is unconscious, and is encoded in emotional, sensory and visceral recall. In other words, what we don’t remember with our minds, we remember with our bodies, with our hearts and our ‘guts’ – with lasting implications for our thinking, feeling, and behaviour.

The process of ‘forgetting’ is more superficial than we once thought: it only rubs out conscious recall. Even as adults we are mercifully capable of deleting any record of traumatic events. If we are unlucky enough to face a situations of panic or terror which we feel helpless to escape, the brain secretes endogenous opioids in order to numb us to overwhelming emotional or physical pain. These brain chemicals also interfere with the storage of explicit memory, though implicit memory of the trauma remains available. Experiences that are emotionally too overwhelming to deal with are stored somatically, as a body memory. Thereafter they are expressed as an unconscious response to stress. When we over-react to mildly stressful or even innocuous situations without knowing why, this might be the result of implicit, traumatic memories dating back to childhood or infancy.

The memory centres that govern narrative recall, emotional memory and body memory can operate independently of each other. Despite being in a coma, one man went into physiological anxiety states when exposed to a smell that was associated with a personal trauma. It is possible to have strong emotional reactions without conscious recall, even without consciousness! Another man whose damaged brain had lost all capacity for short term memory, still reacted aversively to specific doctors who had conducted unpleasant tests on him, without any recollection of having met them. A brain-damaged woman who had also totally lost her short term memory refused to shake the hand of a doctor who had earlier hidden a sharp pin in his hand. She was bewildered by her own refusal, since as far as she was aware, each time she met him was the first. So, much of what we think, feel and do is induced by implicit memories ‘written’ into muscle, sinew, fascia and viscera. Not one of our experiences is lost to us. Each experience, particularly those that are charged with emotion, adds to the complex mosaic of our personality.

Our brain has an amazing capacity to make associations. Something or someone that ‘reminds’ our brains of a traumatic situation - a smell, a song, a person that looks like someone from our past – triggers our automatic, self-protective ‘fight, flight or freeze’ responses. This reflexive reaction occurs too quickly; before the information reaches the cortex where it can be evaluated rationally. That is why we sometimes over-react to things, people or situations reminiscent of a traumatic event, without any conscious recollection of the event in question.

There are occasions when implicit memory can be made explicit. Since implicit memory is ‘stored’ in the body, repeating certain movements, gestures, breathing patterns, or assuming certain postures associated with highly-charged emotional memories can bounce these memories into explicit, conscious awareness. It is as if the body releases its secrets to the mind. Many individuals have been able to retrieve traumatic memories, both from adult and infant experiences, when induced by strong emotions associated with the original experience. In certain states of consciousness, in psychotherapy or meditation, people have spontaneously recalled things that happened to them as babies. Many have remembered how it felt to be a baby, howling for a mother who would not come. In reconstructing a particular body posture, or talking about a similar emotionally charged event, the contextual memories of unbearable longing, rage or terror come back into focus. It is equally possible for sweet, joyous memories of a parents’ loving face to resurface. This phenomenon is called ‘state-dependent memory retrieval’, and while it is not essential, it can bring healing under certain conditions.

But even if not consciously remembered, early memories show themselves indirectly through behaviour. It is intrinsically human to re-enact defensive reactions to forgotten traumas, though our reactions are no longer relevant. Often early memories become evident through persistent feelings that don’t seem to relate to a present situation, or through bodily sensations that don’t seem to make any sense. More commonly, these early memories of emotional pain or hurt are indirectly evident through persistent difficulties in relationships, particularly in intimate relations.

Implicit memory - or body memory - explains why, for instance, a woman who was molested as a child remains fearful of intimacy - at least with men that ‘remind’ her of the perpetrator – even without a trace of conscious memory of the traumatic episodes. A man fears being alone because it triggers an emotional memory of terror as he cried in the crib, and no-one came to comfort him. He has no recollection of the event, and all around him find him likeable and congenial. He has no understanding about his compulsive avoidance of solitude. Though successful and functional, many people can be avoidant, clingy, or perhaps insensitive in relationships. These are just some of the problems of relationship that have their roots in hurts we felt at the advent of life. To some extent, most of us suffer from some behavioural manifestations of painful implicit memories.

Unbeknownst to our ‘rational’ minds, we sometimes respond mistakenly to current challenges as if they were the hurts we suffered originally. This dynamic holds true in our relationships with our children. There are many reasons why, for instance, we might find our children’s expressions of need aversive and overwhelming. Here is a common scenario: when a baby screams, our bodies react the same way as when our parents screamed at us as children, we are neurologically conditioned to escape or push away, rather than to respond with spontaneous compassion. Alternatively, our baby’s cry might trigger in our bodies an implicit memory of a time when our own cries, as infants, were not met with a loving response. Either way, our baby’s cries evoke our own painful memory, and so we seek refuge. We are all biologically capable of a wellspring of spontaneously loving responses toward our children, and toward each other. Sometimes this love is blocked by automatic defensive reactions to unresolved, implicitly remembered hurts. We are not insensitive nor neglectful; we are wounded.

When a child is reprimanded, an image of the scolder’s looks of disapproval gets stored in the lateral tegmental limbic area of the brain. The growing child and adult judge their own behaviour through the lens of these stored inner representations, which are imprinted as images charged with feelings of shame. These inner visual and auditory records of the shamer usually – but not always - operate beneath conscious awareness. The experience of parents setting healthy boundaries literally grows the child’s orbitofrontal brain, whose purpose it is to contain and regulate raw emotion. But when the parent imposes limits, for some time following the symbiotic time of infancy, the toddler feels a degree of hurt and betrayal. This developmentally necessary change in the parent-child relationship is emotionally stressful. It is important that the parent soothe the toddler after imposing restrictions on him, to help him cope with his ‘shame-stress’. Reassurance of the parent’s love repairs the child’s wounded ‘self’ and restores his self-confidence. If parents diligently assist with their child’s shame–repair, he soon learns to take over, and based on his parents’ role modelling, repair his own shame when needed. Inner representations - stored as emotional and narrative memory in the brain - of a soothing and reassuring parent are used later in life as a template for shame-repair. This internal portrait of a reassuring adult is essential so that as an adult the individual won’t be disabled or overly inhibited by experiences of shame. Though this process is usually unconscious, it secures our ability to self-soothe, and to recover from shame when needed.

Psychological and social problems arise when a child grows up with too many images of a disapproving face stored in the brain centres that store implicit memory, without the subsequent images of a soothing and reassuring adult. A child that lacks these positive images, stored in his emotional memory centres, is at risk of slipping into depression, becoming overly inhibited, or defensively hostile.

From the earliest moments of life, parental nurturance shapes the child’s emotional make-up, literally altering the course of brain-growth. One of the key elements of secure parent-child attachment is affectionate eye-contact. A parent’s sustained, loving gaze and smile suffuses infants with indescribable joy. What ensues is a cascade of dopamine, endogenous opioids, enkephalins and endorphins in the baby’s brain - all feel-good chemicals associated with loving relations. This joy-precipitated surge of brain chemicals promotes the maturation of precise regions of the cortex, which are concerned with healthy regulation of emotion later in life. Every baby requires this kind of nourishing experience regularly and frequently, for healthy brain development.

By the end of the first year, the infant has stored an internal representation of her mother’s loving face in the area connecting the anterior temporal and the orbitofrontal cortices. These images, though rarely consciously remembered, form the basis for an internal working model of relationships. It is as if the child has filed a video-clip of her mother in her brain’s ‘hard-disk’. Henceforth, these inner representations will animate her core emotional responses, forming the basis of her fundamental relationship style. When she feels her emotional needs are consistently attended to, this engenders in the child an enduring expectation of a supportive world. This attitude is pervasive and unconscious, and it inclines the child toward friendly and considerate behaviour.

Just as we might not remember learning to walk, yet our legs and feet seem to play their parts perfectly, some of our most pivotal lessons in human relations were learnt at a time that our bodies, but not our minds, can remember. The greatest gift in these discoveries is the knowledge that every loving moment we share with our children, from the very beginning, will stay with them for life.



Robin Grille is a Sydney-based psychologist, and author of: Parenting for a Peaceful World (Longueville Media, 2005) and: Heart to Heart Parenting
(US edition, LifeTime Media, due in April 2010).
For more information see: www.our-emotional-health.com


References

Damasio, Antonio (2000) ‘The Feeling of What Happens – Body, Emotion, and the Making of Consciousness’. Vintage.

De Bellis M, et al (1999) ‘Developmental Traumatology Part II’. Biological Psychiatry Vol 45, pp. 1271-1284.

Patten-Hitt, Emma (2000) ‘Childhood Abuse Changes the Developing Brain’. Cerebrum, Fall 2000, pp. 50-67.

Perry B.D., Pollard R.A., Blakley T.L., Baker W.L. and Vigilante D., (1995) ‘Childhood Trauma, the Neurobiology of Adaptation, and Use-Dependent Development of the Brain: How States Become Traits’. Infant Mental Health Journal Vol 16(4), pp. 271-291.

Perry, B. D. (1997) ‘Incubated in Terror: Neurodevelopmental Factors in the Cycle of Violence’. In: Osofsky JD ‘Children in a Violent Society’. The Guilford Press.

Perry, B. D. (1999) ‘Memories of Fear: How the Brain Stores and Retrieves Physiologic States’. In: Goodwin J. and Attias R., ‘Splintered Reflections: Images of the Body in Trauma’. Basic Books.

Rothschild, Babette (2000) ‘The Body Remembers – The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment’. WW Norton & Co.

Schore, Allan (1994) ‘Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development’. Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc. NJ.

Teicher, Martin H (2002) ‘The Neurobiology of Child Abuse’. Scientific American, March 2002, pp. 68-75.

Van der Kolk, Bessel (1994) ‘The Body Keeps the Score: Memory and the Evolving Psychobiology of Posttraumatic Stress’. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, Vol 1, pp. 253-265.

The Body In The Shutdown Process, Part 3

For Part 2, Click Here - June 25, 2009

At the end of the session, Dr. Canali did some major adjustments on my neck because there were still some stiffness and alignment issues. You see, as our bodies become overwhelmed with fear and as they repeat the stories of old, our bodies change biologically and physically. So as these things are released, the body then has the ability to come back into balance and alignment. The neck adjustments don’t always feel good and often my body tries to hold itself back from these but again, if the fear part of my brain allows my body to let go, the outcomes are unimaginable.

When we left Dr. Canali’s office, I felt so much different than when I came in a few hours earlier. Yes, I did have two sessions that day because my body had so many mountains to cross through. I still remember one patient there looking at me and telling me that I looked much different than I came in. He said he could tell that I was in a lot of pain. And yet now, I was walking out of there without hardly any pain. My legs were moving like they had never moved before. The stiffness in my neck and shoulder were basically gone. I felt a little out of it as if time had quickly passed by that day and I needed to catch up. So we went to a park off of the bay and just enjoyed some down time in the sunshine and in nature while I was able to process more of what had gone on. It was a beautiful time to just be there and take it all in.

The plan was to make the 270 mile trip back that night but it was getting late and I really felt that my body needed rest instead of the stress of driving the distance. We stayed overnight and it felt good just to relax in the hot tub at the hotel and enjoy a peaceful night of sleep.

As I went into the night, I noticed that I was holding my body as I was before my sessions just as if it was full of pain and stiffness. Noticing that, I told myself why am I doing this? For my body doesn’t feel bad and there is nothing wrong. I no longer needed to hold my body in this way. Then it would release. Of course as Dr. Canali explained to me, that the pattern I was holding before was now in my conscious mind and it allowed me to make different choices and to do something about it.

I also shared with Dr. Canali that I believed this was the most acute physical situation I had been in since I had known him. Seeing how my body was in such a state of shutting down, even beyond that which I was able to pick up before the session and then seeing that allowing my body to heal and the results that followed were eye opening. It was not like I needed anyone to tell me this was or was not possible. It was something that was proven to me through my own body. I knew from firsthand experience that this truth was not what someone told me but it came out of my own body where I could see it, touch it and feel it.

I’m reminded that there is no greater truth than which you can connect with in your own body, mind and soul. There is so much more out there than what we are currently aware of and although the fears may be strong and although we may feel overwhelmed as if there is no hope, this is the moment being given to us so that we may truly discover another part of ourselves. It is a gift that we can either open or ignore. If we choose NOT to open it, we may trick ourselves into thinking it has gone away. It will continue attempting to get our attention. At some point we will either continue to ignore it or we will begin to listen to it. Through listening and opening to all that it is, we give ourselves one of the greatest gifts any human could have. That gift is truly knowing ourselves and how we impact the rest of the world by becoming more human.

The Body In The Shutdown Process, Part 2

For Part 1, Click Here - June 24, 2009

Oh please let me hide. I wonder if I can withdraw myself enough into the table so that no one will notice I’m here. Maybe this will all go away. Maybe everyone will go away. Do I really want to be here? I’m scared. I’m not sure there is a way out.

That’s how I felt walking in the door of Dr. Canali’s office. My body was overwhelmed with fear and while it wanted to be held, reassured and validated; any perceived touch felt like a nuclear bomb going on inside. It was such conflicting thoughts and desires that confused my mind into an endless stream of thoughts.

I could feel the heaviness in my chest preventing my body from really breathing. The breath was in lock step with wanting to hide for if I barely breathed, no one would see me. I felt the stiffness of my body not wanting to move and being in pain when I did. Outside of the pain and stiffness in my body, I felt very little. The trembling and shaking in my body were present and very annoying to me. They remind me of the early days of the paralysis when I would shake and have seizures while feeling all alone. Everyone would watch me from a distance feeling helpless while my body went through all these violent movements being afraid and alone. While I now know that the trembling and shaking is the nervous system letting go, I am still frightened by it as a trigger to a very scary moment in my past.

A lot of the session is a blur to me. There are little bits and pieces that I remember but not enough to draw a complete picture. I do remember some of those moments. Most things early in the session would startle me. And it is still imprinted in my mind that Dr. Canali told me “he and Quayny believed in me”. That’s something that I never got growing up and often I struggle to have the confidence in myself because no one was there for me. Those appropriate timed words were priceless and they brought tears to my eyes.

One such moment was when I could feel my hands and arms in an almost rigid form where they would not move. Quayny kept working with me to just focus on moving my fingers which was difficult beyond rationale. But as we went and she kept me focusing on what I felt, I stated that it was as if I wanted to take a baseball bat and hit someone. Of course, I’m still not sure who that “someone” was but it had so much power to those words. Quayny suggested that I take an imaginary baseball bat in my hand and make the motion as if I was doing that. To just feel the energy of it and the motion of it. As I did this, the tension in my hand and my body began to change. It began to let go and allow someone to begin the physical touch with me.

Another moment in the session, I told Dr. Canali that I really wanted to get up off the table and run as fast as I could and as far as I could. That’s the response that I get when confronted by fear. It is also known as “fight or flight”. So Dr. Canali told me that we were going to use that energy to bring about a change in my body without going into the fear part of the brain. He put the flat part of my feet together and had me lift the pelvic area of my body to help stretch the psoas muscle. When I did this, the pains that shot down through my legs were so intense that I screamed several curse words out. It was not so much a physical pain, although it was showing up that way. It was the connection to the fears locked within me.

At that moment, I felt the pain that connected me to a time many years earlier where I had felt the same thing. Actually I had buried this one pretty deep because until this current connection was made, I was not consciously aware of it. That pain was the same thing I felt in my legs early on in the paralysis when it was just hitting me. It was the pain that took my body by surprise and was so intense, that after that I could not feel a thing in my legs. They were numb and nearly dead. So when we hit this moment in the session, all of that came flooding back to me.

We pushed this reaction further in the session which then caused a shaking and trembling in my legs but as I allowed myself to connect with this and allowed it to take place, the pain and tension released. The tears started to form much as they are doing while I’m writing this because it allowed me to truly feel my legs for the first time in my ENTIRE life. Let me repeat that because this is a very big thing for me. I began to really feel my legs for the first in my ENTIRE life in a way I had NEVER felt them before. It was electrifying, pulsing, and warm and my legs felt alive. I could feel the touch around them. They felt like they were part of me instead of just being a body part that held me up as I moved around in a day. It was truly a moment in joy for me.

The specifics of the rest of the session are ones that I just don’t recall. So much was happening and taking place. I was going into the fears and not letting the fear part of my brain (amygdala) take over. I was finding my power as I released these things and went deep into the pain. The desire to freeze was there but the more I went and allowed my body to heal in the way it needed to, the more freedom I had.

For our bodies do know what is needed to heal and yet we stay in a state of “survival” locked into our fears. This prevents us from healing and growing in ways that are essential to our becoming more and more human every day. Often the fears are unconscious like they were in me before I went to the session but they are there. It is through the touch of a skilled person who can be there through all of this with someone that we are truly able to go from survival fear into being connected intimately between our mind and body. I had to be reminded of this even though I know it to be true and I work with it. The fear part of our brain is strong but when we empower ourselves from the inside out, we are the ones who are strong.

--- come back tomorrow for Part 3 ---