Aquapoetics

Integrative opportunity: trauma healing and aquatic bodywork

Because we've witnessed the power of trauma healing in water, we see an excellent opportunity for therapists from a wide variety of disciplines to expand and integrate their therapeutic repertoire. Aquatic therapists can get training in effective land-based trauma healing strategies. Talk therapists can learn the basics of aquatic bodywork to discover new ways of working with people in severe trauma. For example, several aquatic bodywork practitioners have sought training in Somatic Experiencing or Energy Psychology to increase the effectiveness of their aquatic bodywork practices.  Mental health professionals, nurses and physical therapists have brought their respective skills into the water's warm embrace.  Because of this integration, many of those who suffer from Pre-natal trauma, PTSD and Dissociative Identity Disorder have found relief after years of trying other ways to heal their trauma. Diane Tegtmeier and Inika Spence

To round-up the recent series on the potential applications of aquatic bodywork in trauma healing, I am delighted to reproduce here with kind permission an article by aquatic bodyworkers and teachers Diane Tegtmeier and Inika Spence.  At the end, you will find links to more about and by these two experienced land-and-water healers.

Waking the tiger in water: trauma to tranquility

Aquatic bodywork and trauma healing: After Peter Levine, PhD. NICABM Seminar title: Healing Trauma Through Somatic Experiencing


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

When an aquatic bodywork client shows subtle shifts in posture, or parts of the body begin trembling, vibrating, pulsing, or moving in other ways, they may be showing signs of the somatic release of old trauma. This is a natural, healing response shared with other mammals. Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing® method demonstrates why the body matters so much in trauma healing.  He also talks of a possible link with ecstatic states.

The yogi's judicious use of natural forces [kundalini] can be compared to the farmer who floods his fields one by one within their earthen banks, letting the water thoroughly drench the soil before breaking open a new channel into another.  For safety's sake, the yogi employs method and restraint so as to use nature's energy intelligently to gain wisdom.  BKS Iyengar Judicious use of natural forces (kundalini yoga)

Somatic Experiencing® is a body-awareness approach to trauma that is based upon the realization that humans have an innate ability to overcome the effects of trauma.   This is the seminar I was most looking forward to in the NICABM series; it was so popular that a repeat play was requested and 7,752 practitioners signed up representing countries all over the world.

Peter Levine outlined what animals can teach us about the experience and resolution of trauma and what it is about human biology in particular that can turn this natural response into pathology.  He related this to the neocortex, a part of the brain that is involved in higher functions such as sensory perception, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious thought, and language.

When restrained, animals go into tonic immobility - they stop moving and lose muscle tone. If frightened before or after a traumatic event the immobility response can go on indefinitely. In people, fright can remain for a long time also, since the neocortex resists the response that moves someone out of immobility - 'fear of fear'.  It is important then to uncouple fear from immobility. 

To provide a metaphor for this, Peter invited listeners to look at their open hand, then make a fist - this is like trauma he said.  Opening that fist reveals your hand but where did the fist go?  Trauma recedes through this  rhythm of contraction and expansion (called 'pendulation' in Somatic Experiencing® terminology).  The fundamental aim of SE is to re-educate the neocortex to experience this natural healing rhythm. 

This immediately struck me as resembling one of the rhythms of aquatic bodywork where the whole body and its limbs are expanded out and folded in many times during a session.  In my post, Aquatic bodywork and trauma healing, Diane Tegtmeier describes pendulation as 'releasing and resourcing'.  She has incorporated this concept into the aquatic training program for trauma healing that she is currently developing with Inika Sati (a Somatic Experiencing® practitioner).

How a practitioner responds to someone who has entered a trauma state can affect their healing.  Peter Levine sees the immobility response as an 'arrest' after which an animal or person orients towards the danger and moves into fight-or-flight or seeks help. If someone is frightened as they come out of freeze (or the therapist working with them becomes afraid - postural and facial aspects of fear are immediately picked up), the trauma may be reinforced.

Deepening core awareness and the implications for aquatic bodywork, Part 3: Some ways of working with the psoas on land and in water (elsewhere on Aquapoetics) Extract:  Somatic Experiencing®. This body-oriented method of working with trauma, developed by Peter Levine, has been mentioned in Parts 1 and 2.  He believes that trauma is the result of physiology, not psychology, specifically our instinctual fight/ flight drives.  According to this approach, discharge of repressed emotions is not sufficient to address underlying developmental and psychophysiological stress.  A practitioner is trained to notice subtle shifts in posture or parts of the body trembling, vibrating, pulsing, or moving in other ways.  They then guide someone in following their internal sensations while staying very present....This technique appear to have much to offer as an adjunct to psoas-trauma healing, especially where resolution and reintegration is needed in addition to releases.  Read more.

Kundalini and trauma processing

At the end of this NICABM seminar with Peter, I was thrilled to hear his brief mention of the possible connection between effective trauma processing and the release of kundalini energy through the chakras of the body.  This link is something I've been exploring in the water also, as described in An aquatic kriya: the bodywave. 

He pointed out that some ecstatic states include combinations of sympathetic and parasympathetic arousal,  but without the fear that triggers trauma.   This brings me full circle to Bill O'Hanlon's insights into the positive value of trance in the first seminar of the NICABM series. Working in this arena requires skill and subtlety; and also a willingness to explore beyond the boundaries of conventional understanding.

Questions:  1. Have you used the 'releasing and resourcing' cycle in your own practice?  Give an example?  2. Do you have any thoughts on this possible link between ecstatic states and trauma? (Add your comments below. Please be careful to protect the confidentiality of clients in anything you share.)

I'll leave you with some extracts from further posts on Aquapoetics that explore kundalini, altered states,  shadow work, and energy healing in the context of aquatic bodywork and trauma work.  A full list of other posts I have extracted to use in this series on trauma is also given below.  Please enjoy browsing and commenting on the blog or writing to me wherever you feel inspired to do so.

An aquatic kriya: the bodywave (elsewhere on Aquapoetics) Extracts: I have a body that has tended to be physically expressive (especially in water) of the impact of not only physical but also emotional and spiritual experiences in my life.  From a difficult birth to the usual gamut of life challenges, I have found bodywork to be an intriguing way to bear witness to and (in my subjective experience) transform positively the negative effects these mind-body-spirit impacts have had.  The bodywave was an effect that opened me up to this 'healing' possibility more fully than I believe would otherwise have occurred. 

...

There is the additional curious finding that even though an outside person can see the distortions or twitches or jerks the person's body makes, the person themselves is often completely unaware of them. They go into a kind of trance state which seems to prevent 'normal' inhibition of these movements. It is possible that this is just a curious side-effect of nervous system dis-inhibition that occurs in some people and has no benefit or significance regards health or otherwise. It is also possible that it does have a benefit. So far, my informal questioning of those who have neuroscientific backgrounds has not produced any useful insights into this.*

In my own experience as a receiver, there have been phases during which my body repeated strange nervous system effects.  It's important to note that I am always aware of these effects, but I am able to allow them, and that this is a choice I make. After a certain time and repetition, and perhaps the consciousness I brought to them as body memories (reactions to trauma) that were no longer appropriate or necessary, most of these effects have stopped happening. I believe that this made a difference to me - a beneficial one. But it is no quick fix and it requires a certain willing surrender.  Also I can't prove the benefit, or that it was due to the water work.

*I now realize that these insights may be provided by the new studies of trauma and neurobiology.

Read more.

A return to the water (elsewhere on Aquapoetics) This is the first of a series of five posts inspired by my own personal aquatic therapy work as a receiver in 2009.  I worked with Inika Sati, Diane Tegtmeier and Sunheart, all practitioners based at Harbin Hot Springs, home of Watsu.  The series also takes my explorations of altered states, kundalini and shadow work to deeper levels. Extract: My personal experience is that the physical body is intimately linked with and affected by state of consciousness; and that both exist within a dynamic energy field that immersion in body-temperature water can be extraordinarily effective in revealing and transforming.  I believe that attending to the troubles of the body in the purely physical dimension is not as likely to be of lasting value, or as effective in healing, as setting the body in a context where its energy field can be attended to also.  Water offers such a setting.  Read more.

Pristine waters: murky depths (elsewhere on Aquapoetics) Extract: We ought to be as willing and capable of guiding someone through the murky, monster-ridden deep as we are at playing in the pristine, glistening realm of spiritual waters.  And for that, it's best to be well-acquainted with both places ourselves.....Ideally we hold space for both aspects when working in water since aquatic bodywork seems to trigger both transcendent and descendant experiences in people.  Read more.

Water bridges a therapeutic gap (elsewhere on Aquapoetics) Extract: Water is not only a bridge between energy and matter, but also between the conscious and unconscious minds, the rational and the emotional, waking state reality and altered states, and the subjective and objective realms.  Currently science does not know how to bridge this gap. Read more.

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)

• 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)

Select list of other posts on this blog mentioned in this review of trauma treatments (click link)

Caught fish or floating seaweed: signs of trauma in the water

Aquatic bodywork and trauma healing: After Diane Poole Heller, PhD. NICABM Seminar title: How Attachment Affects Trauma

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

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the roar of the ocean without the roar of its many waters. Source: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, 1845

Childhood attachment wounds and later relationship issues have been linked with trauma.  In aquatic bodywork with a traumatized person, we may witness this as sudden violent movements or extreme passivity. This post looks at the work of Diane Pooler Heller and gives an example of an aquatic session with someone showing a range of trauma symptoms.

A traumatized person, says Diane Poole Heller can be overstimulated (effectively trapped) in either their sympathetic nervous system (recurring anger bouts) or parasympathetic nervous system (depression and lethargy).  The key in therapeutic approaches is to appropriately restore nervous system balance, so we need to understand how the nervous system works when healthy and when stuck in chronic trauma.

Though it is important to lift the brake that has been applied to the nervous system when it shuts down in the face of life-threatening trauma  (a kind of death preparation), it should not be released too fast, since underneath lies considerable charge and fear.  Allowing time and support to mobilize a safe active response (sympathetic driven) is crucial. 

To illustrate the diversity of response one might see in the water with someone, here is an example from the very early days of my own practice alongside a male partner.  We were working in a spa, not in a clinical setting. In retrospect, it is clear that this person was processing trauma.  We were not trained to work directly with that and did not go beyond bodywork and compassionate support for her own processing.

This young woman is a talented massage therapist and very adept in accessing and working with her body-mind.  She asked for a session in order to prepare for a hospital test following a doctor's appointment that found she had a suspect breast lump.  Having received many forms of bodywork, including previous water sessions with both of us, she entered a deep space rapidly. 

Her flexible, child-like body soon began to lead me with its movements.  Notable were the frequent rapid flutters of her hands .  Around the middle of the session I sensed a rising of emotion and went to the side in order to hold her in stillness - this offered a natural space for the release of deep uninhibited sobs.

At the end of the session, she reported that she had 'seen' a bright lamp light in the area of the lump and that this had grown stronger and stronger as we went on.  The next day, after a long and anxious wait at the hospital, she learned that there was no sign of the lump. 

She was certain that the water session had been responsible for its disappearance.  She was going through a great deal of stress around her womanhood, and perhaps experiencing nurturing and comfort from another woman did remove an unconscious need for a physical manifestation of this stress. 

The same client had a session with X in which she began to pummel him violently and at other points rested in his arms like a very young child  - later she shared that she had revisited the childhood trauma of seeing her father taken away (she had not seen him since) and being raped herself by the same oppressors.

Diane Poole Heller is a trainer in Somatic Experiencing (see Peter Levine) and (like Pat Ogden) specializes in attachment issues and trauma. Her workshop DARE (Dynamic Attachment Re-Patterning Experience) sets out to give therapists and lay people tools for healing attachment wounds and creating better relationships. Topics include childhood bonding, adult relationships, sensuality/ sexuality, and victim perpetrator/ dissociation issues.

Four attachment styles - secure, avoidant, ambivalent/anxious, disorganized -  were outlined in the NICABM seminar.  The DARE workshops go on to address these attachment styles and their dynamics in personal, interpersonal and trans-personal relationships, integrating body-based therapies, psychotherapy techniques, and spirituality.  See more on Diane's website.

Question: Have you ever felt after working with someone, perhaps even over a number of sessions, that they remained stuck in a repeating pattern of trauma and that only temporary relief had been gained?  Share your experience and insights if you wish. (Add your comment below.  Please be careful to protect the confidentiality of clients in anything you share.)

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)

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

Read on:

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

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.

Fire and water: what happens in the brain during trauma

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.

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.

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)

Subscribe to Aquapoetics: In the Flow

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).

Bad trance to good trance: finding resource in the (aquatic) trance state

Aquatic bodywork and trauma healing: After Bill O'Hanlon, LMFT. NICABM Seminar title: Trauma as Bad Trance: How to Use Ericksonian Hypnosis 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.)


One of the things that fascinated me from the start about aquatic bodywork was the way in which it can induce a state of trance that involves a merging of mind, body, and medium.  An aquatic session is non-verbal and the movements of the body in water often enable a very graphic expression of any trauma that is present. 

It is not unusual for such trauma to have been locked in the body, remaining hidden or contained on land.  The watery medium and a skilled practitioner can make its physical expression possible with safety and support that is much harder to achieve on land. The body tells a secret story if we can only translate it.

Bill O'Hanlon described trauma as an event that results in a kind of trance state, which in itself can be seen as a survival skill.  He suggested that other ways of entering trance, such as his own work with Ericksonian hypnosis (or aquatic bodywork I suggest), might help with finding ways to transform 'bad' trance into healing trance.

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

In this realm you have allies: fluids and the potency within fluids. Yes, you can start to sense potency within the fluids, the ocean. Fluids that pass everywhere, go around any obstacles and patiently try to erode the barriers. ....The fluid may be your ally provided that you learn its language, know how to work with it and know the nature of these forces that move it. Candice Marro

Trauma research based in neurobiology is indicating that the long-practiced approaches of talk therapy often risk re-traumatizing clients.  Many of the newer methods being adopted are now body-based.  Aquatic bodywork (Watsu and related modalities), the focus of this blog, has unique potential when it comes to trauma healing.

However, these are not waters to dive into lightly.  As trauma expert Peter Levine's book title Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma suggests, we may need to be ready to face the wilder - more instinctive and unconsciously expressed - sides of ourselves and those we share the water with.  Water seems to be an effective transmitter of these submerged messages of hurt and healing.

If you've had a client thrash about in the water, or go strangely floppy in your arms, or go into undulating body waves, you might have witnessed trauma symptoms.  If this is so, what you do next matters.  If someone thanks you but leaves looking shocked, you may have tapped hidden trauma, and perhaps left them scared or vulnerable. Read on to learn more about working with trauma.

Alternative aquatics research

The intent of my recent post on documenting alternative aquatics practices was to bring to attention aspects of aquatic therapeutic bodywork that are based on principles that don't easily fit the current medical model, including what is widely known as evidence-based research.

Western-style medical care predominates in our culture and many bodyworkers realize that finding a place within this system is most likely to be effective in gaining credibility and promoting their therapeutic work, including opportunities to participate in serious research programs.

Those who do not ally themselves with the prevailing medical model often find that, owing to legal implications aimed at protecting the public, they have to be very careful about how they report their success in healing work even if their clients have chosen that path. 

The growing willingness to adopt and adapt such alternative methods into clinical practice (rendering them complementary rather than alternative in current terminology) is an important step forward but this is not the same as truly acknowledging the different philosophies underlying alternative methods.

Review: Bodyway as in Waterway

  

This extract from Mirka Knaster's valuable book on body-oriented practices, Discovering the Body's Wisdom, uses water as its metaphor for the constant change and movement (circulatory and interrelating) that characterizes the life of a human body.  Mirka writes:

There's a lot of name-calling in the field of body practices.  It's not mud-slinging, but a habit of differentiating and labeling.  Some practitioners are engaged in bodywork.  Others consider their approaches therapy.  Still others say they're neither, but rather somatic education, movement awareness, structural integration, or even emotional integration. ...

To get around the divisions in the field, I created the term bodyways.  It broadly incorporates therapy and education as well as relaxation, while still allowing for each separate category of  practice and its distinguishing characteristics.  I chose way (from the Old English wegan, "to move") because it suggests a pathway or process, as in waterway.

Think of the many different waterways through which water moves: creeks, streams, rivulets, rivers, channels, brooks, rills, seas, oceans, bays, sounds, and lakes.  All of the bodyways involve movement, and often the least effortful way can bring about the most ease.  Life is, after all, movement.  We are living bodies, always in process. As 70 percent water, we are in constant flux, just like a stream.  And just like a stream receives water from various sources, so too do we take in new information from a variety of bodyways.

From Discovering the Body's Wisdom: A Comprehensive Guide to More than Fifty Mind-Body Practices that can Relieve Pain, Reduce Stress, and Foster Health, Spiritual Growth, and Inner Peace by Mirka Knaster,   p. xv-xvi (Bantam Books, 1996).