.png){kind=small}
When experiences and memories are too distressing to be acknowledged or expressed, they are shut out of awareness or indirectly expressed psychologically/physically/spiritually/energetically.
Trauma by definition is an experience of overwhelming fear and of threat to one’s very existence. This can be because of a specific event, like rape, or an ongoing situation, like an abusive or neglectful childhood home. The person can’t take in what’s happened, escape the situation, or resolve the feelings of threat. Sometimes the word “trauma” is also used for other situations where psychological conflict is deep and unresolvable or is resolved only by costly compromises that in some sense retain a sense of self but at a cost of restricting experience and sense of self, limiting physical and energetic experience and movement.
Trauma, then, is a threatening experience that a person can’t assimilate or allow themselves to experience directly. Coming to terms with trauma involves, in part, consciously experiencing these distressing feelings and memories. However, this most often isn’t a matter of simply releasing feelings or memory, of re-experiencing the experience. A shift in the experiential ground within which these memories are experienced in some way has taken place, so that the experiences aren’t overwhelming or all-encompassing, the only reality the person is aware of. The person in some way has a sense of perspective that allows them to turn towards, face, cradle, re-evaluate, and let go of their experiences.
Depending on the practitioner’s style, traumatic memory may be worked with in a variety of ways. However, feeling a sense of safety in the body is one important shift that allows turning towards, facing, cradling, releasing, or situating within a larger perspective. As does experiencing a more grounded, centered, larger sense of self. Shiatsu touch, of course, encourages all of these; touch is a meditative, communicative experience of being open to the client’s reality, of listening, receiving, and authentic connecting. Whatever the practitioner’s style, Shiatsu encourages feeling whole and grounded; as when clients say “I feel more like myself.” Shiatsu touch can communicate a sense of safety and acceptance. Feeling the practitioner’s presence can contribute to a receiver’s experience of not being alone, of being “seen” in a way that feels safe. For example, if the practitioner feels, when touching a tsubo, when the point of resistance has been reached and whether to respect or carefully challenge that boundary; when a kyo lingering on and nurturing a point is invited and when a jitsu challenge is wanted; when energetically connecting two points along a meridian, whether a burst of flow or a gentle sinking is wanted; the practitioner’s global sense of the person’s state/being informing the quality of touch. Depending upon the client and the session, and the practitioner’s Shiatsu style, the shift towards a more grounded sense of self may be encouraged by working with Metal or Supplemental Fire (e.g., by encouraging a feeling of boundaries), or Earth (e.g., grounding), by supporting the client when directly releasing the trauma, or in other ways.
In addition: Revisiting and resolving painful memories is part of coming to terms with trauma, but it isn’t the only issue. Traumatized people are said to be living in “trauma time” rather than in the present. Their assumptions about others, their painful emotions or lack of emotion, and their experiences of their bodies, are filtered through assumptions that the present continues to be dangerous, just as it was in the past, or that the present continues to be the past. These filters are psychological, bodily, and energetic. Feelings of fear, threat, anger, and so on—are the core reality, rather than experiencing themselves more largely, as people who have these feelings among others. Trauma is an experience of being disconnected, from the body, from experience, from one’s self, and from others. In the extreme, people experience that they’ve left their bodies. Living in the body, one experiences the full force of memory. Deadening experience of the body deadens memory and uncomfortable feelings like fear, but also deadens feelings of aliveness, joy, and purpose. In addition to feeling fear, anger, and so on, paradoxically, persistent feeling of inner numbness, deadness and disconnection can also be a part of living in trauma time.
Positive experiences are therefore healing. Feeling safe, embodied, etc. is a precondition to reviewing the past, but is also an end goal. Perhaps a recognition grows that it’s an illusion that trauma-mediated experience is all that is real, as a person gets in touch with many other parts of themselves. Experiences of safety, enjoyment, joy, centering, pleasant body sensations, and safe connection with other people, enlarge a person’s sense of who they are and what is possible for them to experience. Developing a sensation of safety in the body can be a precondition for being able to turn toward and revisit memories rather than feeling taken over and overwhelmed by them. However, this can also be an end in itself, the end state of a pleasurable expansion of what is possible to experience. Similarly, if trauma involves a feeling of disconnection from other people, then feeling connected may be a precondition to feeling safe to revisit memory, but is, again, the end in itself.
Importantly, feeling more like oneself, connected to self and others, living in the body, rekindles feelings of vitality, of being alive, of pleasure, rather than inner deadness and numbness. Shiatsu, of course, restores interconnection within the body/mind/spirit, to feel whole within and in relationship to the external world. Shiatsu touch, in addition to being comforting, can remind clients that they have the ability to feel good, that it’s an illusion that trauma-reality is all of them. It can encourage a deepening sense of self, of reaching down to the core, of the experience that “I feel more like myself,” of living in the body. Varying techniques and approaches to Shiatsu approach this grounding, connecting, in different ways. Of course, many other practices, ranging from psychotherapy to meditation to breathwork to nutrition, complement and augment Shiatsu.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Paula Derry has a private practice in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, where she combines Shiatsu with a wide variety of other body-oriented and holistic practices. She graduated from the Ohashi Institute, studied Shiatsu Shin Tai, and draws on, among other practices, imagery work, Zero Balancing, NeoReichian work, myofascial massage. Her original training was a PhD in psychology from Yale University.
Although her current work is Shiatsu, not psychotherapy, her previous training informs her understanding of what she is doing in her Shiatsu practice. She is very interested in cross-fertilization between Shiatsu and psychotherapy, by looking for a common language and how each can enrich the other.
CONNECT:
Website: PaulaDerry.com
Email: paula.derry@gmail
Comments