Recovery: It's More A Verb Than A Noun (Part 4)

Having caught up on a wealth of wonderful pieces of serendipity (as enumerated in my most recent post), I'm now ready to return to a topic about which I last wrote in August 2014. I had written a series of 3 posts on the subject of recovery and how it's not a 'place to be achieved' as much as it is an ongoing journey of discovery. I had written the first three 'parts' in rapid secession, and then been side-tracked by other events in my life.

My original intent on this 'Part 4' blog was to write a two-part essay on body memories and dissociation. But the more I thought about it (and wrote it 'in my mind', as is my approach to the construction of my articles), I realized that the issue of body memories was, all by itself, a potentially overwhelming topic, and needed an extensive focus as a single topic. In fact, as I gave it more thought, I realized that a lot of events in my life, that I would have previously seen as dissociative memories, were more properly the outcome of 'my body remembering', rather than the 'dissociated mind' remembering. In other words, they were more somatic memories than they were cognitive memories. Now, I do understand that 'cognition' and 'dissociation' aren't equivalent; cognition has more to do with conscious, in-the-moment, known-to-the-clear-mind memory, whereas dissociation is more about the memories being 'divided' from the conscious self, in 'parts of Self', that are often unacknowledged by the primary public personality (the one that is known to ourselves, in a conscious state) -- locked away in the 'parts of Self' that arose due to traumatic events in ones life.

Hence, the somatic (or body) memories are ones that don't have 'words' attached to them. It's a means of the 'body speaking for itself', because that's where the memories are located, locked away at a cellular level. 

Before I go any further, let me note that I've been very influenced, of late, by several books I've been reading that have opened a door to a kind of knowledge that was previously unavailable to me. I had read a book that a former therapist of mine in Albuquerque, years ago, had suggested - Embracing Our Selves: The Voice Dialogue Manual, by Hal & Sidra Stone. That opened my mind to the method of communicating with my 'parts of Self'. But though it dealt with the mental dissociation aspects of my personality (which I will cover, far more extensively, in Part 5 of this ongoing 'Recovery' series), it didn't, to the extent that I sought, deal with a lot of the bodily responses that the trauma has produced -- the nightmares, flashbacks, startle responses, tightening of muscles, fear in my throat, etc. So, I searched further for answers to that part of my post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD]. The two books I discovered and have very much enjoyed reading (well, 'enjoyment' in the academic and thought-provoking sense, not that the subject is in any way 'fun' -- far from it!), upon which much of this essay is based, are The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment, by Babette Rothschild, and, to a lesser extent (since I am still reading it) In An Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, by Peter A. Levine.

What both authors stress is that somatic memories don't have a 'voice' of their own, at least not in the sense of 'verbal language'. The memories do exist, however, but on a level that requires a much different approach in mental health therapy. Because the 'voice' is expressed in body sensations and responses to emotional triggers, the client must learn to 'listen' in a very different manner from the standard 'use of the auditory ear'. It's more about listening with an inner, 'heart' ear. And noticing how 'in our body' we physically respond to the world around us.

Ms. Rothschild talks about how infant amnesia is caused by the lack of a memory recording mechanism in the brain. Our memories are recorded in our hypothalamus, which doesn't reach full maturity -- and hence not complete ability to 'record memories' -- until the age of 3. Very young children don't remember precisely because there is nothing to remember with, no 'recording' mechanism in the brain. But that doesn't mean that they have no way to remember the trauma; instead of being locked away in the mind, it is locked away in the body and therefore has to be 'translated' in a wholly different way. 

But, additionally, as my therapist, Rev. Dr. Mark Robinson, points out, often the trauma is so thoroughly severe that even with a fully developed hypothalamus, past infancy, the victim is struggling to simply cope with the terror and stay alive; hence, the 'recording of the trauma' doesn't take place, at least not at a 'clear and verifiable' level. The recording mechanism in the brain is overwhelmed by the severity of the trauma. Indeed, the client often (though not always) knows that the event occurred, but the details are lost. And they simply may not be accessible at a later date, because they were not 'recorded' by our memory bank. (I hope I'm translating what Mark stated in a clear and accurate manner.) 

Ms. Rothschild, in The Body Remembers, discusses such an incident. A woman was raped, as an adult, by a man who was wearing a red shirt. The victim remembered that the rape occurred, but in the terror of the event forgot that the man was wearing the red shirt. For months afterward, every time she was out in public for a walk and saw something that was red (a dress in a store window, stoplights, stop signs, red lettering on a billboard) her fear was re-triggered and she avoided that location. 

Now, she has no conscious memory of her attacker having worn a red shirt, so she has no access to why she is having this reaction to the color red - in fact, since she doesn't realize it is due to the color red, she has no earthly idea why her body is freezing up, and her heart is racing in such situations. Eventually, she becomes locked away in her own house by a fear of going outside (agoraphobia). Thankfully, with the help of a competent therapist, she is able to access some of the memories of the traumatic rape, and gain additional knowledge about the details of the incident and her attacker. When she becomes aware of the 'red shirt', slowly she is able to desensitize her body, and venture out into the world again. 

But since, as Mark Robinson points out, the memories, at least in childhood, may not have been recorded by the mind, assuming that in therapy in later life the client can 'access those memories' may be a lost cause. The memories may simply not exist, at least on a cognitive level. And they may not exist even at a dissociative level. But, they may exist at a somatic memory level. And that's where the whole issue of 'body memory' comes into play. 

Now, having discussed the 'theory' of somatic memory (I would encourage the reader of this essay to access the books mentioned to gain a more in-depth understanding of somatic memory and its related outcomes), I want to address -- in the way that I make use of my own experience to portray the outcomes of PTSD -- some of the ways my own body has 'remembered' the sexual and physical trauma of my childhood.

Invisibility to my parents and adult sexual partners

Clearly, due to the nature of the sexual molestation that I experienced at the hands of both of my parents, my own needs as a child -- as their child -- were 'invisible' to them. Their sexual pleasure and 'fulfillment' (if one can accurately discuss pedophilia as 'fulfillment', given that it often occurs, for the perpetrator, in a state of their own dissociation) was achieved at my emotional and physical expense. They didn't 'see' me as a human being who deserved care and nurturance, surely not their care and healthy love. I had a body that could be penetrated (as in the case of my father) or made use of (as in the case of my mother) for their own sexual and emotional release. 

Then, when I reached chronological adulthood (I stress chronology here, since I'm not sure I achieved emotional adulthood until much later in life), I had a series of female sexual partners who cared little about who I was or about what I needed as an individual male, separate from their cultural expectations of 'men' generally, and hence I continued to feel 'invisible' to them. It felt like I was a transparent being who had no solid form, and the only thing about me that was 'solid' was my genitals, which the women used for their own sexual pleasure, without much willingness to reciprocate -- in that most of the 'love-making' was about, for them, my 'making love to them' with very, very little focus on my own sexual needs [it did occur, but rarely]. This was not due to my being unwilling to enunciate those needs, in a fairly clear manner, but rather that there was no 'felt' responsibility, on their part, to engage in love-making in return. Again, that was the experience I had had as a child, when I was inappropriately and traumatically sexualized by my parents. That it was replicated in my adult sexual relations simply drove the 'sense of invisibility' even deeper. 

Thankfully, several rare partners were willing to 'know me for who I really was', as differentiated from their cultural expectations of males. Clearly my female partner of the past 7 years has been willing to 'see me and know me' -- and crucially respond to me in a reciprocal way -- which has allowed me to open my heart and be emotionally and physically vulnerable, knowing I can trust her. That has led to, and continues to promote, significant healing in my life!

Before moving on, let me use one other example of this feeling of being physically invisible to people around me. When, at the age of 45, I was attending my first year of graduate social work schooling in New Mexico (at NM Highlands University, a commuter program that was two hours drive from Albuquerque, where I was living at that time), I was having a conversation with my male traveling partner about my experience around the other students. I said that I often felt quite invisible in my classes, like no one noticed I was even there. My friend, in definite surprise, exclaimed that, at 6'8" with a deep resonant voice and a brilliant mind, I was quite visible to everyone around me. Yet, in spite of that, I felt invisible to them. He speculated that they were overwhelmed by my greater command of the subject (in that I was older than most of the other students and had had considerably more 'life experience', as well as having been a voracious reader all my life) and often 'ignored' me because they didn't know how to 'keep up' with my academic prowess. That observation 'stopped me in my tracks'; I was actually surprised by his perspective and yet took his words to heart. It allowed me, for one of the first times in my life, to feel bodily visible to myself, even if I continued to 'feel' that I was invisible to others around me. 

Lifelong pain in the sides of my chest

Since as far back as I can remember, I have had periodic sharp severe pains in my chest. For many years, I assumed I was having a mini-heart attack, which of course greatly concerned me. In my mid-20's, I talked to an orthopedic doctor at the University of New Mexico Student Health Center about this problem and his observation was that the pains were caused by intercostal muscle spasms, not the tightening of arteries to my heart. That knowledge was of some assistance; the pain continued (and has continued in the years since), but at least I know it's unlikely I'm having a heart problem. 

Around 1986, when I was recovering from a traumatic nervous breakdown (or 'breakthrough', as my therapist, Shoshona Blankman, termed it from a 'spiritual strengths' perspective), I began to have a series of nightmares that had the same theme, over and over again. [The nightmare was 'set' in Guam, where I was living at the time as an infant, and a set of numbers on the suitcases, that I later realized was a 'date', kept appearing in the nightmare, which had strong elements of traumatic terror.] Putting together knowledge about my early medical history, plus knowledge about the traumatic nature of my abuse, I speculated (and am now fairly certain this is accurate) that my father either anally or orally raped me when I was an infant -- once at the age of 9 months, and again around 2 and 3, and later at age 10. [I had what were, in my adolescence, diagnosed as 'epileptic seizures', but which I'm fairly certain now were seizures caused by traumatic sexual abuse.] My assumption is that when he was raping my infant body, he held me under my arms and pressed his thumbs into the sides of my chest. And that is why I have these pains in the sides of my chest, for as long as I have had any conscious memory -- the pain being a somatic memory of the abuse.

Release of toxic memories following bodywork

I have had a fair amount of bodywork in my adult life -- massage, acupuncture, cranial-sacral, trager, and similar modalities. It has been an excellent avenue for getting in touch with many of the traumatic memories that were solely accessible on a somatic level. In 1982, I had a series of migraine headaches, for weeks on end, to the point of often feeling suicidally depressed. My brain often felt like it wanted to vomit. The migraine headaches would last anywhere from 10 hours a day to 24 hours, and feel like they would never end. Finally, late that same year, a nurse friend suggested I try acupuncture, after tranquilizers prescribed by my doctor failed to resolve the issue. Over a period of 3 months and 10 treatments, the problem was indeed resolved, and I have only had about 3 serious headaches -- of the magnitude of a migraine -- in all the years since.

Often, when experiencing massage, I would start crying, feeling like I was fated to 'live and die all alone', with no intimate partners in my life who actually cared about me. I would see other people around me who 'appeared' to have healthy, intimate partnerships, but those relationships, for a great many years of my life, seemed like they occurred beyond a solid plexiglas wall: I could observe them, I could hear other people talk warmly and supportively to one another, but I rarely had the opportunity to experience such a relationship myself. It produced deep emotional angst in my heart and body.

The aforementioned nervous breakdown happened in 1985, following a very bad acupuncture experience [though I must note that I had also stopped all substance abuse and alcohol intake earlier that summer, and hence, I had no way to 'anesthetize' myself from the emotional tension that filled my life]. Generally I had had positive (though often strong) 'emotional and tension releases' due to acupuncture. But a particular session around July 1985 sent me 'over the edge into a sea of terror', the vast reservoir of depression and trauma memories that had filled my life for as long as I had had conscious memory. For about three months, nonstop, I was shaking uncontrollably, in a state of incredible unending terror. It was, to put it mildly, simply the most horrible three months of my adult life. The only way I survived it was to get acupuncture treatments, daily, from another Chinese medical doctor [CMD] to whom I was recommended by a friend.

Years later, I was talking to Linda Bebee, a close female friend who had studied acupressure. When I explained what had occurred, her speculation was that the fellow who produced the overwhelmingly negative reaction probably checked my 'pulses' (using the meridians upon which acupuncture doctors base their treatments) and determined that my 'heart meridian' was weak and needed strengthening. However, as my friend pointed out, she had learned, from a couple of years of doing acupressure on me, that emotionally traumatized people do indeed have weak heart meridians, but the worst thing that a CMD can do it go 'straight for the center' and try to strengthen the meridian directly. Her speculation was that this fellow had literally 'blown me out of the water' by releasing all the emotional trauma all at once, instead of allowing it to 'bleed off slowly', as had been the approach of all my other bodyworkers. (I might note that this particular CMD quit that profession as a result of what happened to me, realizing he wasn't as sensitive as he had assumed.)

And this 'hypersensitive' reaction to bodywork has continued since that time. Every massage therapist I've worked with since 1985 has learned that I can only tolerate light pressure and at most a half-hour session. Full-hour deep tissue massage is simply too powerful and leaves me swimming in an ocean of toxic energy, a most frightening outcome. In fact, of late I've asked my massage therapist, Alice Sanvito, to add some very light work on the sides of my chest, where I've had those life-long intercostal pains, and sure enough, even at that careful level, within an hour or so later a powerful bit of toxic 'terror' spews into my bloodstream and makes me unduly frightened. Alice (and I) have learned to only engage in massage on those areas for a couple of minutes, to allow the 'terror to bleed off slowly', given how many trauma-based somatic memories are locked in that part of my body.

Fear of walking past any man who is seated on a bench

This has been another life-long fear. It generates extreme terror in my body, on a regular basis, even up to the present time. The fear is of being attacked from behind, and overwhelmed physically, while the man anally rapes me. Now, as an adult man who is 6'8" and fairly strong, this fear doesn't make much sense. I can generally, at this age, defend myself from such an attack, or at least could put up a good fight. But since the fear arises over and over again, clearly it is a somatic memory from childhood, maybe even infancy, that I haven't sufficiently 'processed' and moved beyond. It happens with any man, sitting on any bench, in any park or other location. It's not 'that specific man' who is a perpetrator; frankly, 99.9% of the time he's probably just sitting there minding his own business. But the fear arises in my body. I literally have to consciously think "this is about a body memory, you're being triggered by something in your past, this is not 'about what is happening right now'". For at least the next 50 feet or so, my gait becomes very 'stilted' and my butt muscles tighten up, and my arms move into defense mode. It's something I can't much control, even with that conscious processing in my mind. Then, as I move away and feel 'physically safe' again, the fear subsides. 

What I would emphasize is that the fear is not simply 'fear', but a feeling of terror. I'm not simply 'scared', I'm having a difficult time breathing and want to get away from the situation as fast as possible.  That it's 'about something in the past' and not 'about what is happening right now' doesn't seem to help much. The feeling of terror is very, very 'real' to me in such a situation.

Fear of highs, especially tall buildings

Another significant fear that I have had most of my life is a fear of tall buildings. What is paradoxical about this fear is that 'heights' alone are not the problem. I love to sit next to the window on an airplane and watch the earth move by far below, and I have no problems with being on tall mountains, as long as the edge of the high point is not a shear drop of more than 20 feet. But in tall buildings, anything over 2 stories, I am absolutely terrified. I've had to pass up employment opportunities in the past because the organization's offices were on the 20th floor of the building. I've had to pass up educational opportunities because the classrooms were above the 2nd floor. If I do attend a meeting in a tall building (I've slowly desensitized myself to some extent), I make a point of not sitting near a window -- in fact, of sitting where I can view the window from a distance. In tall apartments or condos, I strictly stay away from floor-to-ceiling windows. 

From my mental health therapy, I have speculated (and again, given his bizarre behavior, this is not unlikely) that my father 'held me by my feet out a window' probably in his odd sense of life 'to make a man out of me'. [That was a major expression he was constantly making.] Of course, given all the other trauma I experienced at his hands, it only drove my fears even deeper. 

Hence, again, I strongly feel that this fear of heights in man-made buildings is a somatic memory of a PTSD event.

Periodic panic attacks, since early childhood

I have, since childhood, been subject to periodic severe, debilitating panic attacks, resulting in racing, chest-slamming heart palpitations and overt fear of not being able to escape a particular situation or location. These panic attacks, at least the 'out-of-the-blue' ones, have subsided somewhat in recent years. But I continue to have significant fears about materials [especially 'allergic' clothing reactions], foods [instantaneous nausea and disorientation], chemical fumes [severe headaches and tightness in my lungs], and a general sense of paranoia about almost anything, at any time, that doesn't feel completely 'safe' to me. In fact, safety has been one of the major 'watchwords' in my life -- whether specific individuals were 'safe' to be around, or whether meetings or locations are 'safe' to be in. A lack of safety causes tightness in my chest, a feeling of suffocation in my throat, and general disorientation in any given situation. I've had to learn how to cope with these situations in a way that I can survive them, but that being 'triggered' by them leads me to experience widespread terror, in the moment, is clear evidence of their being related to somatic memories from my childhood. 

Lastly, but significantly, somatic memories about my body itself

One of the common outcomes for survivors of traumatic sexual abuse (molestation, rape, penetration, and including emotional incest) is an emotional disconnect from their own bodies. Survivors of sexual PSTD, especially when it is combined with physical torture and emotional abandonment -- which is not uncommon -- literally have a feeling of 'floating in the corner of the room, observing their bodies, but not existing within those bodies'. A sort of quite negative out-of-body experience. This is a survival mechanism: the trauma is often so severe that the only way to survive it emotionally is to disconnect from the feelings it generates and 'lock yourself away' in a dissociative part of Self. 

For most of my life, it has been difficult to be comfortable within my body, especially the gendered nature of my male body. Again, this is quite common. Mike Lew, in his book Victims No Longer: Men Recovering from Incest and Other Sexual Child Abuse, talks about this body disconnect and the feeling that ones gender is the problem. [Mike's book is one that I would strongly recommend to any male survivor of traumatic sexual child abuse. It has assisted me in my own healing in the past, in a wide variety of ways. I would also as equally recommend Abused Boys: The Neglected Victims of Sexual Abuse by Mic Hunter.] To be able to live 'with comfort and ease' in my male body has been, many, many times in my life, absolutely painful at a deep emotional level. 

That severe discomfort was the major reason for my work on men's emotional wellness. When I first discovered the men's movement in the mid-1980's, it was, frankly, a godsend moment [I'll use that term, though as a devout Unitarian, 'God' language is also a bit uncomfortable to me -- but you get the point -- a revelatory, life-changing event in my life]. That there existed a version of 'maleness' that felt 'safe', that was not invested in hard-bodied macho perspectives, was the lifeboat that I needed for my healing to move forward in an emotionally healing manner. Still, it has been difficult and continues to be difficult. This male body disconnect is something I will deal with more fully in my next blog on dissociation (Part 5). For now, let me note that not being completely at ease with my maleness-of-birth has been a major somatic memory that is clearly and distinctly related to the severity of the sexual child abuse that I experienced. 

In conclusion

I come back to a favorite quote from Victims No Longer [page 72] that sums up so many of my feelings about male sexual child abuse: "What victimized children experience is the perversion of childhood. What they lost was every child's right to a normal childhood -- loving, protective, and nurturing. The abusive childhood hasn't been lost at all. It remains with the survivor every minute of his adult life."

The mind may or may not have forgotten all the aspects of the traumatic abuse, but significantly and quite hopefully the body has not forgotten. It's true that we hope to cope with our lives in ways that allow us to grow and prosper as human beings, and hope that the PTSD outcomes don't crush us with their insidiousness. But knowing that we can remember what happened, at least on a somatic level, gives us the opportunity to heal from the trauma and shame. At least, we can 'remember' in some way, and that ability to remember allows us a path out of the terror. Sometimes we wish we could just forget it all, when the terror becomes so severe that our chest tightens up, or we feel like we are going to suffocate from the tension, or our bodies freeze up and cramp due to the somatic memories. That's the downside -- and a terrifying downside, indeed -- to the trauma. But knowing that the memories are accessible on some level makes room for healing and moving beyond, into a brighter future.

For that, somatic memories are a blessing. Sometime they feel only too much like a curse, but without them we would be stuck with the traumatic outcomes without a window on their causation. And that would be infinitely worse.