 Peter Levine's Healing
Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of
Your Body is especially useful because
it includes body awareness exercises on a CD that comes
with the book. I read it in hopes of better understanding
dissociationa as a response to trauma. I've been confused
for years because I share so many symptoms with sexual
abuse survivors. Dissociation, self-abuse, flashbacks,
promiscuity, low self-esteem, alcohol abuse, eating disorder...
with no memory of sexual abuse.
Then my friend Maurie recommended that I stop trying to remember
sexual stuff, and start seeing chaos and unpredictabily as enough
to a kid want to retreat. Levin says, "… we become
traumatized when our ability to respond to a perceived threat
is in some way overwhelmed. People can be traumatized by any
event that they perceive (consciously or unconsciously)
to be life-threatening. …sudden loud noises… angry
shouts of adults, can traumatize infants and young children. …when
it comes to trauma, the critical factor is the perception of
threat and the incapacity to deal with it."
Thanks Maurie.
I have terrible boundary issues. I mean, I'm constantly jamming
people with my elbows and knees or tripping over stuff, and I
see these as boundary issues. Levine says, "When you
have been traumatized, you’re often unable to feel your
physical boundaries, because of disconnection from your body… The
body is the container of all our sensations and feelings… This
boundary gets ruptured in trauma so that we often feel raw and
unprotected."
He also says, "The way you distinguish a sensation
from an emotion and from a thought is by being able to locate
it in your body and experience it in a direct physical way… The
trick in dealing with and finding a sensation is to realize
that it has to have a location in the body. It can have a size.
It frequently has a shape. And it has a specific physical quality,
such as tightness, spaciousness, constriction, heat, cold,
vibration or tingling."
Levine's working from Gendlin, and these parts of the book really
resonate for me. Since reading it, I've started really noticing
my body when I'm experiencing emotions, and asking myself where
the emotion is held. Most arise in my chest and neck. It was
also interesting when I got Bill to do it. It's one thing to
hear someone say they're experiencing anxiety, but it's something
else entirely to hear them describe a feeling of anxiety as dark
gray-green, wedge-shaped, and lodged in his neck. It's also hard
not to feel responsible for his negative emotions. More boundary
issues.
This speaks volumes, "When we are traumatized, the
body doesn’t feel like a safe place. It feels like a
dangerous place."
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