Get Over Your Past, For Good This Time
The research is in: your body is a trauma storage device. Here’s how somatic therapies can repair the faulty connections.
If you’re a dancer or musician, you already know: you can learn things with your body. When the music plays, you’re on auto-pilot. Muscle memory takes over, and you know the steps, the choreography, the combinations, the chords.
Even we writers know that when we’re at the keyboard, it’s words and concepts that flow out of us, not each individual letter. The expert typist no longer thinks about the individual keys, he simply writes full words, phrases, and sentences.
In the same way, neuroscientists, energy workers, yoga teachers and psychologists alike are now saying that our bodies are capable of learning and storing trauma.
In his book The Body Keeps the Score, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk argues that trauma is ‘encoded in the viscera’, and it’s not just the extreme experiences that linger on. As my husband says, you can cook with a blow torch or slow-roast your meal. In the end, you’re still baked.
“If your parents’ faces never lit up when they looked at you, it’s hard to know what it feels like to be loved and cherished,” says van der Kolk.
