June Project: Day 11: Body Awareness

Identifying traumatic triggers is one of the great challenges of trauma therapy. Stimuli from the environment can inadvertently set off a traumatic reaction in a client. Often the client is left with the reaction but has no idea what caused it. Tracing the reaction back to the source, the trigger, can be an important task. To that end, body awareness can be a useful assistant.

---from The Body Remembers, by Babette Rothschild.

In a chapter titled "The Body As Resource," Rothschild tells of a client with chronic hip pain, which had come on a year after her husband's death. Their time together in therapy typically focused on the woman's grief, but one day, in attempt to address the pain, Rothschild employed techniques to develop body awareness. As the woman focussed on her hip pain, her heart rate soared, and she became fearful and anxious. Rothschild asked her to sit with her emotions for a bit, notice them, and as she did so her right foot pressed solidly into the floor.

"It wasn't long before she took a huge breath and began to sob, 'I drove as fast as I could. I floored the accelerator. It was an old car and I just couldn't get it to go faster!'"

The woman's husband had had a heart attack in the car she was driving, and she had been unable to get him to the hospital before he died. The memory showed itself in her gas pedal foot, which ultimately caused her chronic pain.

The body remembers, indeed. But does it also look for its own solutions?

I'd like to flip Rothschild's technique around to ask if we can find other signals to show what the body remembers, or needs. To use myself as an example, I take note of what kind of physical outlet I'm looking for, and when. My exercise preferences lend themselves to the heavy and violent, but I'll save boxing for another post. Weightlifting: I like it. I simply like to pick up heavy things and put them down, as the joke puts it. But there are some days when I need something else. It's a very specific sensory need, and as it happened to come around this week--it doesn't too often--I figured I'd analyze it.

Two of the basic functional movements the body performs include the "push" and the "pull." In brief, push requires the chest and triceps, while pulling asks more of the back and biceps.

I have noticed that this specific feeling I get requires the push. Now, you can achieve the push through any chest exercise, really--bench press, dips, pushups--but those rarely cut it for me, because there is only so much weight I can hold on to and lift. That should be enough--lifting as heavy as I can--but it's not. Somehow, I need to feel the sensation of pushing against something large and virtually unmoveable. Think a car. I have done this, in these times--hauled the family into the car to push it. The other day, when this wasn't possible, I rigged a machine in my Y and pushed more weight than I should have been able to.

Theo had been sitting in the hallway with a blood sugar low. "Theo," I said when I emerged from the room, "I just used a machine in a way that was not intended."

"Did you pick the whole thing up, Mom?" he asked. He's a stinker.

I have to guess that just as memories can surface in the body in specific ways, memories--or needs--ask the body to perform in certain ways, too. My need for "push" is so specific that I have to believe it's telling me something. Am I trying to move a metaphorical obstacle, large and heavy, out of my way? I don't know. But reading Rothschild's work, I have to believe that when the body speaks, it's telling us something.




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