Aquatic bodywork and trauma healing: After Robert C. Scaer, MD. NICABM Seminar title: Trauma Wounds, Dissociation and Sensory Processing Disorder
This post is part of the series New treatments for trauma: a review with special reference to aquatics.
Are nervous system responses to trauma especially apparent and accessible in aquatic bodywork? This post gives some personal examples and relates them to insights gained from Robert Scaer's work on what happens in the brain when a person goes into the freeze state associated with trauma, and the significance of early childhood traumas in causing adults to be more vulnerable to later trauma events.
The quiet terror of watching as my left arm began to unravel itself. Sinews, like the strands of a strong rope, twisting and untwisting themselves. Snake in it's death throes. Earlier in the day I had danced, shaking my arms free.... Sickness rising where it always does, in my solar plexus. And suddenly X folds me up there, cramps the pain in until it just has to explode out. Stretched open on the surface of water, no need to wonder any more about the courage it takes to leap. Leap into water. Jumping over the edge into the rush of a steep fall of water. How many times did we repeat that unleashing? From Experiencing aquatic bodywork by Sulis on Diving Deeper.
'False memory, being stuck in the past, any event that replicates a memory and sends person into fight or flight response ... this is trauma', says Robert Scaer. His work with somatic syndromes of trauma stress has indicated that the body retains traumatic memories unless they can be resolved and reintegrated. If this doesn't happen, the symptoms continue to play out in ways that compromise someone's life to a greater or lesser extent.
Dysfunctional freezing affects brain and memory. If the next step in normal trauma processing of discharge (which replicates the flight response) doesn't happen, then someone remains stuck in the trauma event. Also, it seems that their ability to assess danger correctly is affected if discharge doesn't happen - they may under- or over-react to threatening situations.
Robert described a kind of imprisonment of mind when a person's survival memory bank is full of false information. Small sensory cues keep erupting that replicate old memories but have no direct relationship to the present. Repeat exposure to these cues can lead to neurosensitization (also called 'kindling'). Over time, this in turn may lead to actual physical diseases.
One such disease is sensory processing disorder (SPD, hypersensitivity) which correlates especially with early childhood trauma and may continue through a person's lifetime affecting their perception of sensory input. There is also evidence that trauma can cause actual shrinkage in parts of the brain involved in memory processing and hormonal regulation.
Trauma-related 'disorders of regulation' cause some brain functions to become cyclically unstable. This makes them hard to diagnose because the person swings unpredictably between normal and abnormal responses. Sometimes the brain rejects a body part that has been associated with trauma. The part doesn't seem to belong to the person - it gets very red or white or has severe burning pain (or perhaps flails around of its own accord, as my arm did in the extract above).
In these states of dissociation, the limbic brain is processing traumatic material composed of somatic memories: for example unconscious neck protection after whiplash or the personal examples I have included below. Robert finds that people suffering from these kinds of trauma states can't be cured by talking, instead it is helpful to address their spontaneous body sensations.
This has been my own experience in receiving aquatic bodywork and healing my own body-stored traumas. The account with which I opened this post, describes a spontaneous releasing of my left arm. This arm had suffered a greenstick fracture when I was a child that went unrecognized for several days. I made further associations with this event that you can read about in the post Experiencing aquatic bodywork.
For the first forty years of my life, I had also protected my belly button and left lower belly area from anticipated but apparently unfounded pain. When I began to work in the water with my birth trauma, these symptoms slowly went away, though I can still find some touch curiously uncomfortable. A car crash as a novice driver left me an unenthusiastic driver and likely contributed to the curious neck-spine unwinding that later appeared when I was supported in water.
Robert spoke at length about the significance of early childhood traumas in causing adults to be more vulnerable to later trauma events. Again, this can make the diagnosis of trauma very complex and it is often unrecognized. The effects of untreated whiplash have been an important part of his Robert Scaer's studies and insights. Read more on his website.
He also suspects that it is this long-range trauma complexity that has left many veterans, who are clearly suffering from trauma effects, stranded outside the recognized criteria for PTSD. Their problems are often put down to personality disorders and not considered eligible for compensated trauma treatment. This is an oversight he is hoping to change.
Robert mentioned that most serious illness involves elements of physical or psychological trauma that can be exacerbated by medical diagnoses and treatments which may themselves be unintentionally traumatizing. Like, Babette Rothschild, he emphasized the value of trusted and loving support in mitigating fear and the sense of helplessness in clinical settings.
For an example of the challenges of medical intervention, especially in crisis situations, see an aquatic colleague's personal account in Aquatic bodywork and healing trauma: 'I have just been through a very intense 3 days, and wanted to share an insight that came to me during this time. My 19 year old daughter ... tried and almost succeeded in taking her own life last week.'
For some further insights into how the brain-body connections might be made especially accessible in aquatic bodywork see ...
Deepening core awareness and the implications for aquatic bodywork, Part 2: How aquatic bodywork can help with psoas trauma recovery (elsewhere on Aquapoetics) Extract: Prenatal
psychotherapist, David Sawyer, noted that the wide variety of movements
possible in water stimulate and revive the brain and in doing so
frequently trigger emotions or memories that have been suppressed. He
makes an interesting distinction between shock (sudden or acute) and
trauma (repetitive or chronic): an overly tense or active area in the
body may indicate shock, while trauma is revealed when a part of the
body is not inhabited or is dissociated. Read more.
Questions: Do you have some examples of repetitive or chronic body responses to aquatic bodywork? Have you noticed dissociation or lack of awareness of a body part during a session? What have you concluded about this? (Add your comment below. Please be careful to protect the confidentiality of clients in anything you share.)
Go back:
Read on:
