I feel my body become more alive as I read poet Mary Oliver’s words, knowing that we only get one chance in this life, in this body, to experience all that this life has to offer. I am following my wild and precious dreams by becoming a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and working with my horses to help people heal from trauma. A question that I often ask clients as we begin our work together is “When you do feel the most like yourself?” or “When do you feel most fully alive?” How they answer those questions gives me a sense of where we will begin.
However, not everyone can think of when they feel most fully alive, at least not in the present. Overwhelming experiences, or trauma, can rob us of the ability to feel fully alive. As the motto of SE’s The Eye of the Needle training, to work with near-death experiences, says, ‘Coming back from the dead is not necessarily the same as coming back to life.’
Many people who have suffered overwhelming trauma live in what we call a ‘functional freeze’ state. They are often able to move, to work, to take care of their daily needs but there is something missing. Those closest to them will sense it. There is little aliveness in these trauma survivors. They may be quiet, they may be distant, they may not reach out for connection or relationship like they once did.
What has happened to them to cause this? Neuroscience can explain it! When we face a situation that completely overwhelms us, our autonomic nervous system goes into sympathetic arousal to either flee or fight. Huge amounts of energy can be mobilized in our system for this. However, if fight or flight is not possible, the body goes into dorsal vagal shutdown, to prepare us to die without pain. This process is shown as:
In this preparation for death, the mobilized energy that cannot be expended becomes trapped in our body - in our joints, in our diaphragms, in our tissues. Even though we may ultimately survive the situation, on some level the body does not know that. Energetically, we remain trapped in this dorsal vagal freeze state. It is only with somatic, or body-based, therapies that we can move this energy through the system. This is the work of Somatic Experiencing.
It is not only shock experiences, such as accidents, near-drownings, electrocutions, or medical trauma, that can cause this shutdown state. Children who have lived through traumatic upbringings can live in a constant state of hyperarousal, always in fight or flight, watching and waiting for whatever terror might come next. But it can get to the point where children can also shut down. This occurs when their basic human needs for connection and safety have not been met, either through terror or neglect. We see this in kids that ‘numb out’, ‘day-dream’, or don’t pay attention. In fact, what these children are doing is dissociating. This is their coping mechanism to escape the pressure that they experience and can’t tolerate.
Another way that children get to this nervous system state is when they have had a traumatic birth. When their first experience in life is one of being ‘trapped’ or ‘stuck’, their nervous system becomes very sensitive to any kind of pressure, physical or emotional. They can be hypersensitive or shutdown or go between both states.
Interestingly, we can have freeze in only certain parts of our body as a response to trauma. I have discovered this in my own life, as I deal with my right shoulder that has long been a source of pain and stiffness. In fact, I have only discovered in the past few years that the problems in my right shoulder are connected to my own difficult birth. My mother doesn’t know all the details, just that she had been in labor for a really long time, was exhausted, so they ‘put her out’ and delivered me. The birth imprint that was left is compression on the left side of my face (sinus problems, TMJ, eye and ear problems) and my right shoulder. That shoulder has been ‘frozen’ and, as I have done my own SE work, I have discovered that I had no feeling or connection into much of the right side of my back. Slowly, I am regaining that ‘aliveness’ in these tissues, but it is too late, I fear, for the shoulder joint. It is bone-on-bone arthritis. The good news, however, is that healing can still happen, even 65 years after the trauma! I am slowly regaining aliveness in the left side of my face and I can now sense most of the muscles down the right side of my back. (This is making me a much better horse rider!!!!!)
With this knowledge and my ‘one wild and precious life’, I have found a great passion for working with clients who have had birth trauma – children, teens and adults. I especially want to work with young children, to help them learn to regulate and calm their hyper-aroused nervous systems, or to bring aliveness back to nervous systems that have shut down. If I can work with young children and their parents, we can learn how to support these children and actually bring healing to their autonomic nervous systems. It is my deep desire to keep these kids from being diagnosed with ADHD and medicated. I have seen in my own clients that Somatic Experiencing can create change in the nervous system to allow children who had difficult beginnings in life to live happy, productive lives and not be at the mercy of a hyperactive or a shut-down nervous system.
There – I have put it out into the world. In my SE work, I especially want to help children (and their families) who have had peri-natal trauma. I want them to be able to fully experience their one wild and precious life.
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