Wisdom in the Body

by Michael Kern

  Two of the primary elements that constitute a state of shock are freezing and dissociation. Freezing happens when we realize that we can’t escape. There is nowhere left for us to run and we become immobilized. In craniosacral work this is recognized by a sudden cessation of the cranial rhythmic impulse, called a shutdown (see “Shutdown”). Dr. Peter Levine explains, “As in the Greek myth of Medusa, the human confusion that may ensue when we stare death in the face can turn us to stone. We may literally freeze in fear, which will result in the creation of traumatic symptoms.”9 Dissociation involves a splitting or separation of our consciousness from the situation, so that if we suffer injury our experience of pain is minimalized. This is a very intelligent and useful response. A child who is helpless against a bullying teacher may react in the same way. So may a victim of violence, rape or traumatic accident.

  Animal kingdom

  Let’s look at how the trauma response acts as a survival mechanism in the animal kingdom. In the wild, many animals of prey have learned not to eat carrion. Experience has taught them that ingesting dead meat often gives them a bad stomach, so they eat only fresh food. Therefore, playing dead can be a useful strategy when trapped by a predator.

  If you have ever watched a wildlife film with a cheetah chasing an antelope, you may have seen the antelope go into a state of freezing and dissociation if it becomes overpowered. It appears that the antelope is dead. The cheetah may then prod the antelope to check if it is alive and, if there is no response, may drag the antelope away to share later with its cubs.

  Reassociation

  However, the antelope may get a lucky break. If something disturbs the cheetah it may run away. The antelope will then start to come round in a process of reassociation. The energy of shock trapped in its body will begin to manifest and discharge, causing it to shake. The shaking usually begins with the antelope’s legs and may spread through its whole body. It will then stand up and, after a few more kicks of its legs, make its escape. It will have re-entered a state of fight or flight. When the antelope perceives that the danger has passed, it will revert back to a state of active alert. When it feels secure that there is no more immediate threat, it can then return to relaxation. In this instance the antelope will not have become traumatized. It will have passed through a traumatic experience, but will have been able to dissipate the shock. However, a state of traumatization can occur if for some reason the antelope is prevented from processing the energies bound up in its body.

  Social and cultural influences

  It seems that we humans are not as efficient as some wild animals at processing the effects of shock. Social and cultural influences, mediated by our higher brain centers, affect the way we react. Instead of following our instinctual responses, our brain cortex may override the situation. We are often prevented from naturally discharging the physiological effects of shock, and they can remain trapped inside. For example, when someone slams into the back of your car, you will probably feel shaky, but instead of discharging the imploded energy of shock by standing in the street and shaking it out, you may simply exchange insurance details.10 The same principle holds true if you work in a stressful office and your boss shouts out your name. You may go into a fight or flight response, but fighting or fleeing may not be successful strategies as either would probably cause you to lose your job! Therefore, the energy that has become mobilized in your body has nowhere to go. Dr. Peter Levine compares this to putting your foot down hard on both the accelerator and the brake at the same time.11

  Getting overwhelmed

  Essentially, the imprints of traumatic experiences become retained when our capacity to dissipate them is overwhelmed or prevented. There are tremendous forces that can be accessed when we enter a fight or flight response. Great feats of strength and endurance become possible; for example, mothers have even been reported to lift up cars to free their trapped children. However, if all this energy becomes thwarted, it implodes and can remain trapped in the body. We may then lack the capacity to do anything other than contain this energy as best we can. Importantly, if our traumatic experiences become restimulated at some point in the future, unless the resources to resolve them have been developed, we will simply get overwhelmed again. Often, this retraumatization occurs when we are in situations reminiscent of the original trauma.

  Symptoms of trauma

  The imprints of unresolved traumatic experiences may lead to a variety of clinical symptoms. At first a traumatized person typically suffers from extreme sensitivity, flashbacks, hesitation, helplessness, nervousness, mistrust, mood swings or panic attacks. As the body becomes organized in relationship to the presence of trauma, other symptoms may develop such as digestive disturbances, headaches, jaw tension, chronic fatigue, asthma, urinary problems and back pain.12

  An accumulative process

  The effects of stress and trauma can be accumulative, as new incidents become superimposed over previous ones. As the protective responses of freezing and dissociation require a lot of energy to maintain, the available biodynamic forces of the body can become correspondingly reduced, and our resources to deal with new incidents becomes diminished. Because of this, a traumatized person tends to get more easily overwhelmed. Many researchers have noted how chronic and repetitive stress weakens the effectiveness of any future stress response.13 As Peter Levine observes, “When we are unable to flow through trauma and complete instinctive responses, these incompleted actions often undermine our lives.”14

  Long-term effects

  The physiological responses to stress and trauma are the same whether we are faced with a situation of real danger or only imagined danger. For example, if we are walking in the grass, we may see something on the ground that looks like a snake, but on taking a closer look we realize that it is just a piece of rope. Nevertheless, the same physiological responses occur. It’s only when we realize that there is no danger that we relax. As long as an incident is perceived as being stressful, our fight or flight response is activated. If the actual or perceived stress is prolonged, then the fight or flight response continues, possibly for long periods of time.

  For those people who suffer from long-term stress or traumatization, the effects on the body may be substantial. Consider what may happen physiologically over time if our fight or flight response is continually aroused. Muscular contraction will persist, blood pressure will stay high, breathing will stay rapid, digestion will be diminished and a whole host of hormonal changes, which are an integral part of the stress response, remain.15 Sooner or later the adaptive mechanisms to prolonged stress become overwhelmed; it is then that health can start to break down. Furthermore, as this response is not under voluntary control, you can’t ask someone who is faced by threat or danger, or who thinks that they are, to relax!

  Emotional coupling

  When faced with trauma, it is likely that emotions such as fear, rage, grief or despair may arise at the same time. If we become overwhelmed, these emotions can also get retained within any resultant inertial patterning (see also Chapter 8, “The Mind-body Continuum”). Thus, the retained imprint of trauma frequently includes a physiological pattern that has become coupled with intense emotions. If the trauma is restimulated at some time in the future, it is probable there will be a rekindling of the associated fear, grief or rage.

  Our responses to life thus become conditioned by earlier traumas. Sigmund Freud recognized the biological basis of this tendency to remain conditioned. He stated that, “After severe shock … the dream life continually takes the patient back to the situation of his disaster from which he awakens with renewed terror … The patient has undergone a physical fixation to the trauma.”16 Therefore, for a resolution of these experiences the message of healing has to reach directly into our cells.

  SHUTDOWN AND DISSOCIATION

  I’m not afraid of dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

  WOODY ALLEN

  Fragmentation of function

  One of the chief
characteristics of “overwhelm” and traumatization is the instinctual cutting off from sensations. This dissociation is a very useful short-term strategy, but perhaps not so helpful if perpetuated over time. It helps us to cope, but doesn’t help in the resolution of trauma. A person who remains dissociated may appear spaced out, forgetful or out of touch, and cannot function with a sense of integration and flow. This frequently affects the natural midline orientation of primary respiration, and is marked by distortions and inertia in these subtle bodily rhythms.

  Cutting off

  When dissociated we are unable to stay present with certain parts of ourselves. Thus, staying in contact with anyone else is also very difficult. It may be hard to make eye contact, or we may experience difficulty being still. We may respond by filling our lives with constant activity to avoid the painful sensations that come to the surface when we slow down, or we may give up and go into hibernation. To some degree we are probably all dissociated, because it is likely that we all have areas of ourselves that we do not fully inhabit.

  Dissociation always involves some degree of being separated from physical sensation. When dissociated we are not fully in our bodies or fully incarnated and are therefore unable to operate at our full potential. For example, we may not be able to “find our feet” or we may “live in our heads” or we may have “lost heart.” While dissociation gives a certain release from pain and difficulty, it is quite different from the true freedom that results from the problem being resolved. If any sensations are later triggered in an area of the body where dissociation is experienced, they may be felt as threatening or even retraumatizing.

  I was treating a victim of torture who had been subjected to electric shocks and repeatedly kicked in the stomach during a long imprisonment. He was left with a hollow and numb feeling in his abdomen. This feeling of numbness was his way of cutting off from the sensations of his painful experience. However, he was consequently left with digestive problems, headaches and depression. A woman with a back injury described how she had been knocked sideways when her car was hit by another driver and that she had been feeling out of sorts ever since. Her dissociation was created as she became literally pushed out to one side from the traumatic force of the accident.

  Denial

  A degree of unconscious denial is nearly always present with dissociation. Usually, the part of the person that is dissociated doesn’t know that it is. If you ask them how they feel, they will probably tell you (often in a higher-pitched voice than their normal tone) that they are fine. They may even say that they’ve never felt better! This is because the body secretes large amounts of adrenaline and endorphins (natural opiates) when traumatized, that can even create feelings of euphoria. In the course of treating a few religious fanatics, I’ve noticed how they sometimes fit this description. It seems that although some people may describe euphoric and cosmic experiences, they actually seem to be deeply traumatized and out of touch with their bodies. In the same way, a victim of a stabbing or shooting may be unaware of the injury until seeing blood coming from the wound. There are many stories of soldiers at war who have had this experience.

  A common experience

  Traumatization is actually a common experience, often arising from events that are widely accepted as normal. It may have occurred as a result of a difficult birth, emotional neglect or surgery. One young girl I was treating had nightmares for months after being traumatized from an appendix operation. An eighty-two-year-old retired doctor came for treatment because he was experiencing an overwhelming feeling of fear. In a recurring dream, this fear came to him in the vision of an icy, cold woman who put an injection into his spine that took away his sense of power. Interestingly, he remembered that some fifty years earlier a nurse had performed a lumbar puncture to remove some of his cerebrospinal fluid for medical tests. Anaesthetic drugs do not detract from the traumatic impact of surgery, they just numb the effects as well as increasing the level of toxicity in the body. For these reasons, although surgery is often a necessary intervention, Dr. Becker refers to it as “organized trauma.”17

  Perpetuation and re-enactment

  Old traumas often get perpetuated or even reinforced in the course of our lives. We seem to have a remarkable and mysterious capacity for attracting experiences that resonate with previous ones. A woman who was physically abused as a child may marry a violent abuser. The violent abuser himself was probably a victim of abuse, and so it goes. How often is it that acts of violence are perpetrated by victims of violence?

  Often it seems that traumas repeat themselves as part of an attempt to seek their resolution. I was working with a patient who suffered from frequent lower back pain. During one of her sessions she curled up and started to shake. She shared afterwards that she was born in a breech position (bottom first) and life had been “a bumpy ride” ever since. That same evening after the treatment she fell bottom first down a long flight of stairs. Thankfully she was able to access the resources to work through the effects of her retraumatization.

  Shutdown

  Craniosacral practitioners have a clear and direct handle into the effects of trauma. Whenever states of overwhelm and freezing are experienced, there is a sudden cessation of the cranial rhythmic impulse and, sometimes in more severe cases, the mid-tide. This is called a shutdown. It is a palpable phenomenon that is felt by the practitioner as rhythmic motion coming to an abrupt stop. Shutdowns occur due to the presence of unresolved shock held in the system, often appearing when a traumatic memory is contacted. A shutdown is a protective response that involves an instinctive contraction from life. It usually lasts from a few seconds to a few minutes. However, where a person’s resources have become more severely overwhelmed, it can continue for much longer. In a shutdown, tissues and fluids are less able to take up the potency of the Breath of Life. This leads to a disconnection from their original matrix of health.

  A physiological stop sign

  When a shutdown happens during treatment, it can be viewed as a kind of physiological stop sign that needs to be honoured. It is actually not possible for trauma to be resolved while still in a shutdown. This is because the Breath of Life can’t be expressed and some degree of dissociation is always present. As with any kind of problem, it cannot be worked with if the person is not actually there! Furthermore, issues of trauma can only truly be healed when resources are present—if a relationship to the trauma is found from a place of health, rather than from a place of overwhelm.

  Rhythmic motion only begins again from a shutdown when the resources that enable us to stay present can be built up or contacted. When motion resumes, it indicates that the process of working through the trauma can then continue. In the mean time, confronting someone in a shutdown will probably only further overwhelm their resources. The presence of resources are critical if states of overwhelm and retraumatization are to be avoided.

  RESOURCES

  Believing that a loving, intelligent Maker of man had deposited in his body in some place or throughout the whole system drugs in abundance to cure all infirmities, on every voyage of exploration I have been able to bring back a cargo of indisputable truths, that all the remedies necessary to health exist in the human body.18

  DR. A.T. STILL

  If patients are in states of overwhelm, the priority of craniosacral treatment is to help build and develop their resources. These resources then provide a solid foundation for the resolution of traumatic forces and the consequent expression of health.

  A resource can be defined as anything that supports our health. A good experience can be a resource, as can a place or an inner capacity from which we draw support. Resources create physiological responses in the body. When a resource is contacted, we may feel sensations of reconnection, orientation, settling or expansion. Resources help us stay present and give the capacity to relate to traumatization without getting overwhelmed.

  Inner and outer resources

  We may find resources in many aspects of our lives. Resources ca
n be physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual or environmental. They often derive from an activity that we do such as exercise, dance or a hobby. Environmental resources can include a place where we can go to recharge, a supportive friend, a pet or a piece of music that inspires us. These can help to access or build up inner resources. Inner resources may include places in our bodies that feel O.K., a happy memory, trust, wisdom, experience, a sense of our own strength, instinctual responses and of course the Breath of Life. Dissociation can also be seen as a kind of resource because it provides relative comfort, helping us to cope if overwhelmed. Other resources include things like family, home, laughter, meditation, favorite clothes, a piece of jewelry, good food, touch, books, therapy, trees and space. Resources are very specific to each individual.

  One man diagnosed with terminal cancer was told that he had only a short time to live. After hearing this he decided to stop work and spend the rest of his days following whatever made him happy. He went to his local video store and bought all of his favorite Marx Brothers films. These films had always been one of his greatest sources of pleasure. He thought that if he were going to die soon, he might as well die laughing. Over the next weeks he sat in front of his television set immersed in laughter. When he returned to his doctor a couple of months later, all signs of his cancer had disappeared.19