Working on your own trauma history before working with others in the water

Aquatic bodywork and trauma healing: After Babette Rothschild, MSW, LCSW. NICABM Seminar title: The Body Remembers: Harnessing Somatic Memory in the Treatment of Trauma 

This post is part of the series New treatments for trauma: a review with special reference to aquatics. (Subscribe to follow the series here.)

May we live like the lotus at home in the muddy water.
Judith HansonLasater

Working with those who are courageously facing serious physical and/or psychological traumas requires honest humility and true compassion. Practitioners who stick conscientiously to the rules they have been taught, and those who unconsciously break them to serve their own wounded needs, can be equally harmful to those they hope to help.

Highly developed awareness and responsiveness in a healer-practitioner can only be gained by facing one's own wounds and working with them.  Below you'll find a link to my thoughts on The shadow side of aquatic bodywork (Watsu-based).  Also, see The wounded healer (a video from Humanity Healing Network).

On her website, Babette Rothshild suggests that though it is true that the body is often missed in trauma treatment, some body-approaches neglect the importance of psychological integration: 'Neither aspect can be neglected. Trauma treatment must regard the whole person and integrate trauma's impact on both body and mind.'  Know when to refer someone to psychotherapy and have a collaborative referral contact.

Taking a down-to-earth approach in her interview for NICABM, Babette emphasized the importance of support and respect for each person's very particular process.  She also pointed out that trauma is not a new invention and that people learned to live with and conquer traumatic experiences long before there was the PTSD diagnosis. 

My thoughts: Let yourself trust in and be guided by each person's innate drive to heal. Be a well-prepared explorer who has experienced some of the terrain for yourself.

Babette Rothschild talked of a young woman who had undergone a terrible trauma as a teenager but showed no serious ill effects in her early twenties. When she asked the woman what she thought had helped, she said that it was the immediate and ongoing support of her best friend who came to her side quickly and stayed there.

Aside: In my own most recent experience of trauma, my brother-in-law flew thousands of miles at less than 24 hours notice. He provided the clarity and practical support I needed when I couldn't cope any more. But he did not take over, he also stayed with my own pacing and intuitively knew when to wait and when to act. 

For me, this came after years in a doublebind situation, so the healing has taken several years. Both aquatic bodywork and counselling have assisted this healing, and I've been lucky to be able to proceed at my own pace.  Some key insights into this process have been gained by working with the psoas as a messenger for trauma (see Liz Koch's breakthrough work - Core Awareness).

'As part of your fear reflex response, the primal psoas expresses your innate sense of safety. An instinctive and emotionally responsive muscle, tuning into your Psoas (without the use of invasive or manipulative approaches) helps you gain a deep inner experience of calm, personal integrity, and empowerment.'  From Liz Koch's website.

Deepening core awareness and the implications for aquatic bodywork, Part 1: Personal experience of psoas trauma (elsewhere on Aquapoetics) Extract: This post is the first in a series about working with psoas-related trauma in the water and also on land.  Following a resurgence of my own challenges involving the psoas complex, I've been wondering again about the role aquatic bodywork - the practice I am trained in and write about on this blog - can play in developing our awareness of the psoas and in working to heal its role in chronic discomfort and also in less accessible trauma.  Read more.

When someone has developed chronic trauma symptoms, Babette stresses on her website that:

'It is not a good idea to proceed with directly addressing a traumatic incident -- accelerating trauma processes in the mind and body -- unless both therapist and client know how to find and apply the brakes: stop the process if it becomes too uncomfortable or destabilizing.'

In an interesting interview also posted on her website (The Body Remembers) she said that a trauma therapist needs to be flexible, trained in several different treatment modalities and theoretical bases, and able to put these aside if need be to just be present with someone, to provide a trauma therapy tailored to their needs.

However, Babette does add in the same interview that there could be problems where touch is emphasized in a therapeutic relationship for trauma.  I think this viewpoint is something for touch-oriented therapists (as aquatic bodyworkers are) to pay some special attention to regards understanding the possible dynamics of this powerful work with trauma:

'I see problems when touch gets emphasized in the therapeutic relationship. It can overly weight the transference, both positively and negatively. It can make the therapy into something more special or dangerous than it should be.'

Although I fully appreciate her caution, I also believe that it is the intimate but safe touch that is possible with aquatic bodywork that - in well-trained hands - can help heal some of the physical armoring due to adult trauma or attachment issues resulting from early childhood traumas. See Pat Ogden in the next post for more on this.

With regard to the training of trauma therapists, Babette Rothschild said: '... I also highly recommend that therapists develop this capacity in themselves to closely track their own bodily sensations, and their own emotional responses, so that they can know how they are responding to the therapy that they are conducting with the client.

Therapists who become traumatized or triggered by what’s going on in the client and aren’t aware of that, can get into a worse emotional state than the client. The higher the sympathetic hyper-arousal goes the more chance that thinking capacity diminishes because of what happens within the limbic system with the stress hormones.

If the therapist gets into the position where his system is so hyper-aroused that he is not able to think clearly anymore, he is in personal emotional jeopardy. This is also a danger point for irrational counter-transference reactions in response to the client.'

This is something I heartily agree with.  It is a reminder of the importance of self-care and self-monitoring in any bodyworker's training and practice.

The shadow side of aquatic bodywork (Watsu-based) (elsewhere on Aquapoetics) Extract: In my experience, aquatic bodywork enables a journey into the unconscious.  It has a risk attached to it that very few seem to acknowledge.  I've noticed that when people struggling with our modern society first experience this therapeutic modality, some wonder if they have touched a forgotten paradise.  They may have a deep recollection of that paradise, but they also access the common grief of humanity. For some the experience is too disturbing to handle and they never again risk surrendering to the water.   Others set out to share the work as practitioners but do not dare dive into their own woundedness (also called shadow).  Either way, something that temporarily surfaced is submerged again in our everyday efforts to live and prosper in consensual reality. Read more.

For a very valuable book on ethics issues, with special reference to aquatic bodywork, see my review of Diane Tegtmeier's Relationships that Heal.

Healing is the collaborative, transformative process by which balance is restored as we become increasingly aware of our wholeness and interconnection with all life. D.Tegtmeier

Questions: What has been your most challenging experience of working with trauma in the water?  What do you wish you had known? (Add your Comment below. Please be careful to protect the confidentiality of clients in anything you share.)

Go back to:

• New treatments for trauma: a review with special reference to aquatics

• Bad trance to good trance: finding resource in the (aquatic) trance state ( after Bill O'Hanlon)

Read on:

• Fire and water: what happens in the brain during trauma (after Robert C. Scaer)

• The body speaks its trauma: nonverbal and preverbal expression (after Pat Ogden)

• Caught fish or floating seaweed: signs of trauma in the water (after Diane Poole Heller)

• Waking the tiger in water: trauma to tranquility  (after Peter Levine)

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If this is a subject that especially interests you, please also consider joining  me and others in the Group Aquatic Healing for Trauma on AquaticNet (professional social network).