Far too often, getting on with ‘everyday life’ requires suppressing the impact of traumatic stress on body, mind, and spirit. This self-imposed desensitization to one’s own suffering also lessens how empathetic we are to others’ suffering, including to their stories of trauma. Much like the Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, and blog aggregates that keep us aware of current events without demanding much engagement, stories of trauma can suffer the same disconnection, if not compassion fatigue, in which only the most horrific and peculiar receive much of an emotional response. Hoping not to hurt, we can risk not feeling much at all. The lack of emotional engagement with stories of trauma may have increased the last hundred years — an era overrun with world wars, genocides, community violence, poverty, natural disasters, and environmental devastation. What may distinguish this era from past periods of upheaval and destruction are not only the large number of people who have been impacted, but also how television, the Internet, and other communication technologies have led to a peculiar way of engaging with stories of trauma. Rather than listening to trauma stories with a group of people who share our concerns and our emotions, we often read about trauma when alone, such as in the privacy of our homes. These communication technologies also primarily engage our thoughts, perceptions, and hearing, thus leaving our bodies largely inert as we passively watch stories unfold on screens or in print. In similar fashion, clients in psychotherapy traditionally have been expected to tell their stories of trauma with minimal or no awareness of their bodies. This is actually a bit mind-boggling, since our bodies are the source of our emotions. Furthermore, recovering from trauma typically requires re-integrating split off emotions that threatened to overwhelm at the time of the traumatic event. Perhaps unwittingly (or in an unconsciously avoidant state of mind), we’ve sought communication technologies that allow us to connect to each other and be aware, but also to choose our level of emotional engagement — or disengagement, should that be preferred. (At the very least, this has been an unintentional consequence.) At the beginning of the twentieth century Kafka wrote, “A literary work must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us,” which speaks to the expectation that stories should somehow transform us by causing us to deeply feel our emotions. [1] More recently, American novelist Deb Olin Unferth stated, “Fiction is not natural. It imitates nothing but itself. More than resembling what we see, it expresses what is absent, what we dimly desire. Fiction is everything that life is not.” [2] Olin Unferth’s account of fiction reflects the sense of disengagement and muted emotions that seems more common today than when Kafka lived. When I read her words, I think of disillusionment, lack of hope, and disbelief that what we imagine is on some level also real — an attitude I do not contribute to Olin Unferth, but to the resistance to the power of story to transform that seems prevalent today. And I believe this lack of faith in stories to transform is related to how we passively consume stories (both factual and fictional), including our own stories, especially stories of trauma. In particular, the lack of connection experienced between the body and the imaginal — that is, the images, fantasies, memories, and reveries that take up so much of our mental life — suppresses the impact of stories and the power of stories to transform. This disconnect between the imaginal and the body also plagues the treatment of trauma and re-storying the past. It is difficult to heal from trauma, learn from it — grow in spite of it — without somehow bringing the body and the imaginal together. To overcome the dissociative splits between body, mind, and spirit caused by trauma, what we imagine, fantasize, and remember must be reconnected with the intense emotions that led to memories and images being split off in the first place. But this also means reconnecting with the body. In what follows, I use sensorimotor psychotherapy — a mindfulness-based, somatic-focused form of psychotherapy developed for the treatment of trauma — as an example of how psychotherapy can support the kind of transformative experiences that emerge when the story of trauma is told through the body and the imaginal. Basic Goals and Tenets of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy When the body is the focus of treatment, the role of the trauma story changes. In fact, telling the trauma story can actually become an impediment. To resolve past traumas, we need to directly experience their effects on our body, mind, and spirit in the present moment, which allows us to address how they continue to impact us. And as Dan Siegel observed, “Without the balance of our non-linguistic world of images, feelings, and sensations, the seduction of words and ideas can keep us from direct experience” (Ogden, Minton and Pain, 2006, p. xiv). Rather than focusing on retelling the story of past traumas, sensorimotor psychotherapy directs attention towards becoming mindfully aware of how experience is organized in the present moment. This involves tracking what are called core organizers of experience — the thoughts, emotions, five-sense perceptions, movements, and inner body sensations that co-occur with remembrances of past traumas. Thus, instead of mastering the trauma story — for example, remembering every detail as done with exposure therapy — clients become aware of how traumatic memories organize their felt-sense of selfhood. They pay attention to memories held in the body that speak not only of what happened, but also of what the body wanted to do — what Pierre Janet called acts of triumph — the scream that was suppressed, the shove or punch held back, the desire to run not acted upon. This mindful awareness of what did not transpire — what the body wanted to happen but could not do — becomes a central part of the new story about the trauma, regardless that this story exists only in body awareness and the imaginal. laurakkerr/2014/06/19/body-imaginal/
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 09:26:10 +0000
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