Sensation vs emotion
Using the body in the present to heal trauma in the past
When we are asked to talk about our feelings there can be a tendency to narrate the past. However, our distress is living in the present. How do we build a bridge from one to the other?
When something horrible happens to us, it happens to all of us at once: it happens to our body and to our nervous system and it happens to our thoughts and emotions. However, talk therapy can sometimes forget about the body and nervous system.
Narrative
If a person has survived a traumatic experience and I want to help them heal, I’ll start by trying to make it feel safe to talk a little about what happened and when. The person will then begin to offer me a narrative of the past. The story of what happened may be quite defended—the person may have told it before and been judged or shamed. Because of these factors, I’m unlikely to hear much more than an outline. The story as originally told will often minimise impacts, such that the telling of it does not re-traumatise the teller. They may use humour to burnish the sharp edges.
Emotion
As trust develops between us, I’ll try to help the person feel safe to open up about how their experiences made them feel. These feelings will usually be more defended than the story, with very good reason. These are what the walls of the story hide. They speak of the person’s vulnerability. A person who has been harmed has often learned to hide signs of their true vulnerability and shut down anyone who gets close to it. A lot of time in therapy therefore is spent building rapport, trust and psychological bridges so it can begin to feel safe to articulate the emotion. That is to say, the person will feel sufficiently known and accompanied that they can surface vulnerable parts of themselves without fear of being judged, rejected, shamed, shunned and abandoned to relive the full force of their trauma alone.
But when they come, the feelings are often in the past. This happened to me and it made me feel this way. It’s often important to the person to finally speak this truth, but of course it is not the whole story. Because, although the events are in the past, the person is still feeling distress today. They may have grown around the wound, stoically moved on with life and they may have been outwardly successful at all of this. But they have come to therapy now because they have not healed and they are still feeling the distress right now, in the present. So the present is where we must go.
Sensation
The key here is to focus not on the emotion or the story, not the rationalisations or meanings we have made, but sensations in the body right now. Find where the feeling lives on in the body, what is the sensation? Does it feel like a burning spike or a cold hand in your gut, does it feel like turbulence in your insides? Do you feel sick or like you’re being shaken? Is it a tightness, a compression, a pulsing? Does it have a colour or a sound or a smell?
The events have long gone but trauma lives on in our nervous system, in our muscles, in our state. A key part of the work is to accompany the person and make it feel safe for them to locate the source in the body and describe it. Name it. Then help them find ways to return their body to a safe state.
