A Safe Home After Trauma
This article appeared in The Art of Healing, Volume 2 Issue 75 jun/aug 2021.
Many years ago, a friend I hadn’t seen in awhile sent me some photos, and, with them, a note. I remember she enquired about where I was living at the time – my home – and then wrote something like, “And how is that other home, the home you were born with, your body?”
I’d met her in my early thirties when she taught a dance class I attended, so I wasn’t surprised that she’d ask how I was in my body. Still, I remember being struck by that connection of body and home. How right it seemed! Karin Lindgaard shares her story, and explains how her journey took her to bodywork and biodynamic craniosacral therapy.
In the following years, in my effort to heal childhood trauma, I tried various somatic therapies as well as meditation and movement practices. My ability to observe my body and my experience improved greatly. I discovered the complexities of this body and its experiences – it’s habits of feeling, its physiological quirks, its diversions and its secrets. And I thought about that connection now and then: my body as my home.
As a metaphor, the idea of the body as a home doesn’t completely hold. Considered philosophically, I prefer not to think of the body as a container. We are not in our bodies in the same was as we are in our houses and the other spaces where we reside. For me, I am my body, or more technically, my body is a perspective from the outside, on the process of myself. This applies especially when I think of my body as a physical entity.
But those feelings of home… of comfort, familiarity and safety, well, yes, those very feelings I might have when I am at home (or long for if I do not have a home), are also ways I can feel within myself, within my body. In that sense, the body as a home is a useful metaphor.
Comfort, familiarity and safety are settled feelings. They allow me to rest and regroup, to find an okayness that means I can then be extended or challenged. Even more deeply, these feelings are ways I know myself.
A calm sense of self enables me to reach out and meet others, to engage, to love and to face conflict and difficulty when it arises. If I cannot feel these settled feelings in my body, the effect is very much like that of not having a home – I cannot relax into safety. I become constantly on guard. I feel too open to the world, or I protect myself by becoming too closed.
Thinking about the body as a home in this way can help us to think about certain kinds of trauma, particularly complex or developmental trauma. This kind of trauma is different from the more commonly talked about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which tends to be related to specific incidents, especially events that are perceived as life threatening.
Complex trauma relates instead to traumas that have occurred over time, particularly in childhood.
Adults with complex trauma often don’t have the same symptoms as PTSD, but their nervous systems may be similarly calibrated, as though they are under constant threat.
This means that stress and tension builds up over time in the body and nervous system, which can lead to long term emotional and mental difficulties, as well as further health problems and illnesses down the track.
As children, we are not formed so much by the actual homes we live in – houses, apartments, rooms. We are formed by the interactions in which we participate. We are formed by the people with whom we interact, as well as our own temperaments.
As babies and young children we learn to find and know ourselves in interactions, as we simultaneously learn to find and know the world.
Each person needs particular parameters for this so that we know we are safe. If those parameters are not provided, we develop differently. Many reasons for this exist within families and communities, but if in our early life we have encountered physical or emotional abuse, stress or neglect, then our bodies – our very physiology – can be different.
In his book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma, renowned trauma expert Bessel Van der Kolk writes:
“After trauma the world is experience with a different nervous system.”
In adulthood this can mean that our present encounters are very much shaped by our past experiences. We might react automatically (particularly with fear, anger or anxiety) without understanding why, and we might alienate ourselves and the people we care about.
Our reactions and the encounters in which we express them can be simultaneously familiar and unpleasant, and that can be very confusing.
Trauma experienced early in life complicates our relationships with others and ourselves because our lived experience helps to form our identity.
Trauma involves strategies that the body has used to ensure survival, which then become unhelpful when the danger or difficulty has passed. Responses to threat can include the fight-or-flight response or the freeze response.
Fight-or-flight prepares the body for action while freeze occurs when someone has been unable to escape a dangerous situation. At its most extreme, the freeze response is the last-ditch effort at self-preservation that we see when animals play dead and become immobilised. Fight-or-flight and freeze involve very different changes in the body. For instance, either an increase or a decrease in heart rate, breathing and muscle tension.
After threatening situations and the responses they invoke, animals will seek a safe place to rest and release tension, such as through shivering or shaking. For us, that safe place should be our home in both ways we have understood it: a safe environment and a sense that our body can do what it needs to do – safety in our own bodies.
If we have never felt safe enough to recalibrate after stress or trauma, we build up all kinds of implicit, fear-based memories, which trigger our nervous systems to react in new situations. These memories tend to include the whole context of a prior trauma and mean that any number of aspects of a situation can set off the physiological responses of stress in the present – even if they were unrelated to the original trauma. We can then become more stressed, confused or avoidant over time.
Memory and physiology are entwined and if those memories involve feeling unsafe, the present body itself feels unsafe – like being homeless. Even so, the body is also resilient and ready to change.
Given the right conditions, the body will naturally unwind patterns of memory, stress and tension.
More and more is being understood about how to resolve and integrate trauma so that people can feel safe to go about their daily lives and create meaningful connections with other people again.
Body-based therapies can make it possible for people to recognise and integrate trauma without needing to go over the story of the trauma and without the need for catharsis.
Body-based therapies involve simply remaining in present time and observing physical and emotional responses and sensations, which helps the mind to understand that the experience is finished and the danger is no longer present.
Bessel Van der Kolk writes:
“The challenge is not so much learning to accept the terrible things that have happened, but learning how to gain mastery over one’s internal sensations and emotions. Sensing, naming and identifying what is going on inside is the first step to recovery.”
Sensing, naming and identifying empowers people, as they find safety within themselves, in their own bodies, even in difficult situations.
Touch can be a powerful therapeutic tool that allows a person to feel supported enough for the body to begin the process of unwinding.
A number of therapies are available, including biodynamic craniosacral therapy (BCST), which is a form of bodywork that evolved from osteopathy and craniosacral therapy. BCST is a gentle therapy where a client lies fully clothed on a massage table while a therapist makes a series of hand contacts or holds, while listening to the rhythms of the body and areas of health and restriction.
The therapist creates a safe environment for a client using awareness of the space around them, creating a perceptual, relational field. This provides a completely safe and neutral environment so that the client’s system can settle deeply, and patterns of holding can emerge and resolve. It encourages the nervous system to slow down and the parasympathetic (or rest and digest system) to engage. The system as a whole can then drop into a slower overall rhythm in which the body-mind recognises its own wholeness and more subtle, holistic healing can take place.
The body will naturally respond to this kind of attention and safety and usually attempt to slow down and relate to itself as a whole being. However, for people with trauma, this process of deepening may not be straightforward. As the body attempts to let go of vigilance, alertness and physical constrictions, the sympathetic fight-or-flight system can engage as the body remembers trauma. Physiological responses – such as increased heart rate and breathing and a sense of panic and fear – can occur.
When this happens the therapist talks to the client and helps to re-establish a sense of safety so that the client can learn to observe, tolerate and regulate the sensations arising. This always occurs well before a person approaches the threshold into catharsis.
The body might also re-engage freeze responses, which can be experiences as overwhelm and shutdown. People might then become numb, dreamy and dissociated. BCST therapists learn to notice these processes of dissociation and gently encourage the person to come back into their body and observe feeling and sensation. Gradually, over a number of sessions, traumatic experiences can emerge and resolve – as the nervous system learns to slow down or to come out of dissociation. People can then experience feelings of aliveness, presence and wellbeing as the body feels safe again. After the pain of long-term stress and trauma, finding comfort, familiarity and safety in the body feels a lot like coming home.
If you’d like to understand more about trauma and the body, you might like my new, detailed article, Trauma and the body.