Shania Twain and Body Psychotherapy

In Shania Twain’s autobiography, she talks about her history of witnessing domestic abuse, living in poverty, and the tragedy of her parents’ death.  She mentions learning to keep her feelings to herself and learning not to show weakness.  In her life she experienced losing her voice and being unable to sing when she began having marital problems.  In our most intimate relationships, we will often relive the pain of our childhood if that pain has been unresolved.  According to body psychotherapy, our bodies hold the pain of the past at a cellular level.  When we re-experience a traumatic event in adulthood or a re-triggering event, our bodies will respond as though the old trauma is happening again.  In Shania Twain’s case, she was abandoned by her husband in the marriage and she was abandoned by her parents in a car crash.  The pain of abandonment can be overwhelming and devastating.  When we are young, the loss of our parents is a loss of our basic ability to survive in the world.  As an adult, a major loss that resembles the original loss, will feel as devastating as it did the first time.  As for the loss of her voice, the throat segment of the body represents the ability to express oneself and receive nourishment.  In witnessing domestic violence as a child and being helpless to do anything about it, the body will often manifest this trauma as a block in the throat.  As she was unable to ask for help or tell anyone about it and had to continue to live with the ongoing abuse in the home, it is no wonder that she would lose her voice in adulthood feeling helpless once again.  Body psychotherapy can resolve these issues by connecting with the subconscious language of the body using breath and movement and integrating the memories of the past with insight.  In Shania’s case, opening up the held muscles in the throat with breath, sound and movement and expressing the emotional pain of the past connected to the pain of the present, would allow her body to release the pain of the past and find a new pathway in the body to experience well-being.   It is like being released from a cage that has kept you prisoner all your life.  The body may hold the trauma, but it is also the key to freedom from it.  If we listen to our bodies, the body will let us know when something is wrong and the body will guide us to its natural state of openness, energy, and aliveness.

Honoring the Feminine Energy Within

Seeing as Mother’s Day is coming this weekend, not all of us are mothers but we can still use this day to honor the feminine energy within.  In our society, we find ourselves being pulled in multiple directions fulfilling all of our different roles living from a place of predominantly masculine energy.  In Chinese medicine, this is the yang energy which is energy directed outward, being active, and focused on doing.  Often we forget that to stay in balance, we also have to slow down and direct our energy inward.  In Chinese medicine, this is the yin energy.  This is the self-nurturing that we neglect and our bodies respond by experiencing fatigue, tension, weakness and burn out trying to get our attention by slowing us down.  Like the seasons, we have cycles in our energy where we can be more active and times when we need more rest.  By engaging in practices that slow you down such as meditation, relaxation yoga, stretching, deep breathing, nature walks, a massage, a Reiki treatment, or any nurturing activities, you will find yourself restored with renewed energy.  Every cell of your body will respond with a deep sigh of gratitude.  Often my body will respond with the message “welcome home” and I know that I've listened to my body's needs and tapped into a deep well of plentiful, restorative energy.  This year, allow yourself to reflect on a new meaning of Mother's Day that will honor your energy within.

Dealing with Uncertainty

Most of us have no idea how our lives will end up or where we are going.  We deal with this uncertainty by making plans and setting goals.  However, what about those times when things didn't work out the way we had planned and things even went sideways?  This happens more often than we would like to admit.  In our society we are judged by just how well we are able to meet our goals.  I love the expression "God laughs when we make plans".   There is nothing wrong with making plans per se, but when we expect certain outcomes is when we get into trouble.  The Buddhists call this attachment and the more we attach to something, the more we are likely to suffer.  From a body-focused perspective, times of uncertainty are times of growth.  Now this doesn't mean pain-free growth.  Often, when we face our biggest challenges is when we will feel the most discomfort.  Our bodies feel like we are getting ready to brace for an impact.  Our bodies tense up, we stop breathing, our minds race.  Sound familiar?  This is just our bodies getting ready to expand into something new and something bigger.  If we can breathe through the discomfort, take big deep breaths, and allow our bodies to shake out the anxiety and fear, we will come out the other side with insight and a new found peace in the body.  Solutions we could not have thought of before just seem to come out of nowhere.  This is the time for action, not before.  When we can trust in the letting go and allow our energy to expand to a place that can hold more, we know we have passed through the uncertainty. 

Mind/Body Counselling: How do I experience more intimacy in my life?

Mind/Body Counselling: How do I experience more intimacy in my life?: "Do you find it difficult to create intimacy in your relationships? Do you cringe at the thought of being vulnerable with your partner?..."

How do I experience more intimacy in my life?

Do you find it difficult to create intimacy in your relationships?  Do you cringe at the thought of being vulnerable with your partner? Being intimate in relationships requires a level of opening ourselves up to another person and exposing our vulnerable side.  If we feel like we will lose ourselves to our partner, we will cut ourselvesoff from an intimate experience.  There is nothing more profound than connecting with another human being and feeling completely safe and seen by another.  If we did not receive the love and nurturing that we needed growing up, we will find this loving place difficult to access and share with someone else. The key is to learn to be comfortable in our own bodies.  When we start to become aware of the feelings and sensations in our bodies, we will get in touch with long buried emotions which we have been shielding ourselves from our whole lives.  By breathing through the pain and expressing our feelings with the support of another who can witness us, we soften up inside and connect to our heart.  This process can be scary and anxiety provoking, but like a wave, we experience the intensity of the emotions and the pain and let it pass through us, feeling washed clean on the other side.  Part of the beauty of the human experience is to feel like we belong and that we matter.  With a loving and caring partner, best friend or trusted counsellor, we can open ourselves up to connection that can heal old wounds. With increased intimacy with another, we then become open to more profound relationships with others on our life's journey and feel an ever-present sense of belonging that becomes a part of our daily lives.  This is our natural state of being in the world and we all deserve to claim this natural birthright.  

The Body Remembers: Working with the Body in Therapy

The body is the blueprint for all of our experiences.  Whatever has happened to us in our lifetime can be re-accessed through the body-the body remembers.  Any traumatic or wounding even will negatively impact the functioning of our body, emotions, thoughts and behaviours.  If we need to either tighten or collapse to restrict our energy and movement, and if this strategy is used frequently, it becomes chronic and fixed in the body.  Body psychotherapists will diagnose the body by observing areas of stillness or blocked movement in the body. 

Treatment consists of a client having direct physical experiences that promote healing.  Simply talking about an issue is not seen to address the root causes of trauma.  Breath is the primary intervention used in body psychotherapy.  Clients do breath work by lying down and deepening their breathing until it stirs up energy and feeling or they are asked to breathe more deeply as they feel and report memories, emotions and beliefs.

A second intervention used in body psychotherapy is expressive movement.  Since a primary goal is to re-establish movement, body psychotherapists encourage their clients to allow their bodies to move with what they feel.  Movement enters into healing all the way from subtle shifts inside the body to expressive gestures such as hitting and kicking.  Sound is also regarded as movement and clients may be asked to make various sounds or be encouraged to vocalize their experience as a way to re-establish movement processes that have been blocked. 

Most body psychotherapists see in the future a deep reclaiming of and regard for our bodies and that all transformational work will involve an emphasis on the body.  It is my hope that by returning home to the body, we will find power, joy and aliveness which has always been our birthright.

How are Trauma and the Body Connected?

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a psychophysical experience which disrupts the functioning of individuals afflicted by it.  A traumatic event continues to intrude with visual, auditory or body symptoms such as accelerated heart rate, cold sweats, rapid breathing, heart palpitations, and jumpiness.  Victims relive the life-threatening experience, reacting in mind and body as though such events were still occurring.  Symptoms of PTSD can be brought about again by external and internal reminders of the traumatic event.  Internal reminders of the event can be as simple as increased heart rate and respiration or body posture reminiscent of the event and external triggers can be things such as color, sight, taste, touch, and smell. 

It is thought that what causes PTSD is the storage of traumatic memories in implicit memory that are not linked to explicit memory.  What this means is that the traumatic memory gets stored in our automatic and unconscious memory system and bypasses language and our ability to express the traumatic memory.  Implicit memory is at the core of body memory.  One of the goals of trauma therapy is to help individuals understand their bodily sensations.  If we can identify and name our emotions associated with internal body states using awareness, we can reconnect the bypass that took place.

Some people can be predisposed to PTSD from stressful events during early development: neglect, physical and sexual abuse, failure of the attachment bond, and individual traumatic incidents.  It is thought that individuals who suffered early trauma and/or did not have the benefit of a healthy attachment may have limited capacity for regulating stress.  With assistance from a loving caregiver, an infant learns to regulate their emotional responses with touch, sound, and eye contact. Without this early learning to regulate stress by an attuned caregiver, later traumatic experiences might be remembered as highly charged emotions and body sensations or it may be that survival mechanisms such as freezing and dissociation have become so habituated that more adaptive strategies never had a chance develop.

However, infancy is not the only chance an individual has for developing healthy attachment.  Many children make up for it later in life with a best friend or special teacher.  And many adults find a healing bond with a mature love relationship.  Others find the bond in the psychotherapeutic relationship where developing attachment, body awareness, and learning boundaries assist in creating resilience and building resources.