The body speaks its trauma: nonverbal and preverbal expression in water

Aquatic bodywork and trauma healing: After Pat Ogden, PhD. NICABM Seminar title:Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to the Treatment of Trauma 

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

Trauma is failure of integrative capacity so always work with integration. Pat Ogden  Traumatic, attachment and developmental issues are often intertwined in trauma responses. Healing involves making a shift from passivity or dependency to self-empowerment.  How can this understanding inform our work in the water? 

The body is 'like a big water drop' says movement expert Liz Koch.  This reminds me of dancer Emilie Conrad's suggestion that illness (including trauma reactions) may be seen as an interruption of the natural spiraling or pulsing movement patterns of our liquid body in motion.  In water, we may be able to sense the freedom of movement that is our birthright.

It is not insignificant that many of the movements that arise spontaneously during a free-flow aquatic bodywork session are typical of the early stages in our evolution and infant development.  This suggests that when they occur we may be witnessing a revisiting of missed or damaged steps that could, if properly supported, rebalance and heal the body.

In view of all this, Pat Ogden's background in yoga and dance and her mention of  Continuum movement therapy, developed by Emilie Conrad, immediately attracted me to her work.  She began by describing how the 'organization of body experience' is affected by trauma.  A person suffering from chronic trauma may lose the ability to respond appropriately to sensory cues.

For example, people who tend toward the freeze response (a form of feigned death) have often lost the ability to defend and push away. Showing them how to find that impulse again can be very helpful.  Being utterly passive - as in lying or floating - might not help with shifting this state, unless the person can push against something solid.

Pat talked of the value of getting a person who is beginning to dissociate to stand up, so that a more active physical state might be stimulated. This suggests that the purely passive experience of table massage - or the work we do floating someone in warm water - could actually exacerbate the shutdown or freeze state and not be desirable for people stuck in this trauma response.

Sitting someone up or inviting them to push against the side of the pool, instead of going floppy would be one approach.  This is in fact part of the aquatic training 'Prenatal Journeys' in which David Sawyer applied his knowledge of prenatal and birth trauma to recreate the security and nurturing of a positive birth experience. For some, the body memory of a traumatic birth may not surface until they come to an aquatic bodywork session.

A path to aquatic ecstasy (elsewhere on Aquapoetics) Extract: In this post I reference my experience (in 2000) on a training in aquatic prenatal techniques taken with psychotherapist and aquatic bodyworker, David Sawyer.   Over the course of two weeks I was able to pace the process associated with my own traumatic birth (40 years previously) and fully integrate it.  This was aided by the safe space created, the preparatory land sessions, and certain triggering body positions (drawn from prenatal psychotherapy) incorporated into the aquatic sessions. Read more.

Birth trauma occurs before a person has language to describe it.  In addition, Pat explained her further reasons for a nonverbal emphasis in trauma situations: when trauma happens language centers shut down; the same shutdown occurs during trauma-related flashbacks;  'numbing out' (dissociation) often involves becoming speechless also.

So, learning how the body 'speaks' is valuable both to those who are traumatized and those helping them.  Since aquatic bodywork is effectively a non-verbal womb-like or dream-like experience (the receiver's ears are mostly immerse in the water and their eyes are shut), practitioners may develop a special sensitivity to body language. But they may not have the understanding to link what they are seeing to trauma issues.

Pat spoke of the value of separating out trauma and attachment issues (even though both may be present). She sees a trauma issue as calling for integrating the senses and recalibrating the nervous system; while an attachment problem requires integration of beliefs and emotions with the  body (changing the beliefs behind body habits enables those habits to change).

She identified three phases of healing for people with both trauma and attachment issues: safety then  mourning  then reconnection.  These struck me as reflecting the stages of an especially transformative aquatic bodywork session: if someone feels safe, they may openly express grief, and eventually move towards peace. They may ascribe this peace only to the practitioner or aquatic medium.  But what if it were, in some cases, integration and resolution of past trauma?

To fully heal trauma, the person needs to make the shift to self-empowerment instead of passivity or dependency.

Pat Ogden's Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute offers a training specifically for bodyworkers and movement therapists (Watsu is actually mentioned so I suspect there must already be some practitioners out there with this training). The Bodyworkers' Training  is focused on understanding trauma and attachment disturbances, how they affect the body, and how to install somatic resources in clinical practice. 

I have summarized the level I and II programs below since they illustrate what is important in this work.

In level I, students learn simple body-oriented interventions for tracking, naming and safely modulating trauma-related dysregulation in the context of bodywork. They are taught effective, accessible interventions for identifying and working with disruptive somatic patterns.  The techniques emphasize using the body to promote stabilization.

Level II graduates are trained to distinguish developmental and traumatic issues and to discern how each affects the body. The program illustrates how traumatic, attachment, and developmental issues influence one another, and how to provide effective somatic treatment given their inevitable intertwining.

To further illustrate the way in which aquatic bodywork can assist in working with these issues, here is an extract from my personal notes (2000) after taking Prenatal Journey with David Sawyer.

..................................................................................................................................................

A water re-birth

In the womb-like environment of warm water it seems we can journey back and retrieve held or suppressed  organic memories.  In doing so we may repattern body, emotions and psyche with profound effect says prenatal psychotherapist and aquatic bodyworker, David Sawyer,  who has been developing a way of working in water with this focus called Prenatal Journey.  

He  has shown how, in water, more primitive brain functions begin to surface - archetypes, feelings, sensate awareness, somatic memories - the release of which can allow someone to move on in their life.  However, this may also unnerve receivers who are not prepared for the experience or disturb those left to their own devices afterwards when there may be a delayed reaction (or healing crisis).   

It is important that practitioners have worked through their own organic memories in this way; they should be equipped to reassure and guide another and prepared to direct them towards other therapists for more specific counseling. 

Prenatal movement patterns identified and described by David Sawyer frequently occur including:  flexion indicating umbilical armory (sometimes part of the bodywave); extension suggesting divine homesickness or the startle reflex;  and limb-shaking perhaps recalling sperm energy. 

Prenatal triggers - such as pushing the receiver's feet against the poolside to initiate the birthing process and pressing a hand to the person's forehead to simulate implantation or birthing - are sometimes just what  they need to express deeply suppressed energy and emotion. 

In my own work, I do not use these triggers intentionally with clients but sometimes they have arisen spontaneously and the response is remarkable and powerful, as with one female client who found the cues gave her 'permission' to vocalize buried emotion.

The most profoundly transformative personal experience I have had through aquatic bodywork occurred while I was taking part in a workshop for practitioners led by David.  I call it my near-birth experience and feel it affected me much as near-death has others.  Over the course of two weeks I was able to pace the process associated with my traumatic forceps delivery (40 years previously) and fully integrate it. 

This was aided by the safe space created, the preparatory land sessions and certain triggering body positions (drawn from prenatal psychotherapy) incorporated into the aquatic sessions.   It was made possible also by my own willingness to witness the unfolding of a shocking event that occurred at a time when I was not equipped to communicate verbally or to cognitively process it. 

The session began, as often, with a series of bodywaves during which I focused on smoothing out the waves that shook my body.  When I was lifted into an upright seated position, all the strength seemed to leave my body though the jerks in my solar plexus continued.  All of a sudden, I went into shock - a place of mortal fear.  I felt that my abdomen was being ripped open and that I would bleed to death if the practitioner did not hold me together.  A  part of me was sure I would spill my guts and bleed to death; another part rationalized that I must have healed otherwise I would not be here now.  I remained held around my middle in seated stillness for almost 30 minutes, not disassociating but concentrating on a deep inner healing.  At the end, there was a wonderful feeling of wholeness, as if I were inside an intact sphere with a strong cell wall that had a high, sweet vibration I could clearly hear.  This blood-red, gory experience left me with the realization that I had been afraid of surgery all my life because I thought I could not heal; that I had been afraid of hurt for a very long time.

In the final session, for almost an hour, I was held in craniosacral stillness until I had gone fully and deeply into that birth-shock state.  Then followed another hour of sheer mystical artistry.  First my body went into the extensions of 'divine longing'.  I screamed silent, primal screams that seemed to call in my guardian angels one by one.  I knew, then, in my soul-spirit that I was somehow precious and important to that 'other' world.  They [the angels] were preparing me to face my rebirth.  Now I felt my body twisting and turning its way, as if skillfully manipulated by forceps.  Then, I was free and instead of the terrible stillness of shock, my body went into a long, long phase of reorganization.  I watched in awe as it began to move through an intricately, self-orchestrated sequence of movements.  The tender patience and infinite space I was given this time seemed incredible to me.  Kisses rained down on all the wounds to my head.  I felt I was being honored and welcomed in some ancient, sacred ritual of birth.

.......................................................................

Question: Although aquatic bodywork moves are often gentle and flowing, sometimes a more dynamic approach is needed.  Have you experienced the value of this in your own practice? (Add your comment below.)

Go back:

• 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)

• Working on your own trauma history before working with others in the water (after Babette Rothschild)

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

Read on:

• 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)

See also:

• Floating through pregnancy with aquatic bodywork

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).