"My Whole Body Became Like Stone"
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Carole writes: "As an incest survivor, I have began doing Focusing with a therapist in order to have more access to my body, since I have learned to survive mostly from the neck up. Last week during a session, I began experimenting a dissociative state, I was feeling my whole body becoming like stone, and I was feeling it less and less. My therapist says that my body has been automatically reacting this way when I was been abused in order to survive. My question is this: is it possible for my body to react this way out of my fear today, because I am contacting, consciously, memories of abuse which are surfacing during the sessions? Can Focusing help me free myself from the damage the abuse has had on my psyche and emotions?"
Dear Carole,
How great that you have a therapist who can work with you in a Focusing way, to do this important and sometimes difficult work. We need the safe container of a good therapy relationship for trauma healing, I believe… and a therapist who knows Focusing is a bonus!
So what might be happening at those times when you feel your whole body becoming like stone? Your therapist says it is a reaction that once helped you to survive the abuse, and certainly seeing it that way can help to be compassionate to it.
But I would hesitate to call it "automatic."
That sounds too mechanical to me. Living beings don’t repeat exactly. Of course, something like this "becoming like stone" happened back then. AND it is happening now.
The happening now is more and different from what happened then, not just the same thing repeating exactly. Maybe right now there is something in you scared of the memories coming up, not wanting that to happen, or not wanting them to come in an unsafe way.
Or maybe right now your body is showing you what it was like back then. A "showing" is quite different from an "automatic repeating." The big difference is that we can be in relationship with the "something in us" that is showing this to us. We can say, "Yes, I see, I feel, that’s how it was, mmm, yes, I’m sensing just how it is/was."
(In working with present feelings from the past we find ourselves using funny verbs! "Is" isn’t quite right, neither is "was" — maybe "is/was" will serve! It both is and was this way.)
Respecting the Safety Guardians
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Therapy can be a scary place for parts that might have once decided that your survival depends on not feeling anything at all! Looking at it from their point of view, of course they would make you numb, or put you to sleep, or make your body like stone.
I like to call those parts the "safety guardians" — the same parts that someone else might call "resistance." It isn’t resistance to make absolutely sure that you feel safe enough before you trust.
The therapy relationship itself needs time to become a safe enough place for these inner guardians to decide to let a little bit through… and so does the inner relationship.
In the inner relationship of Focusing, what seems to make all the difference is Presence — that is, whether I can stay in my larger self and make a strong and safe container for the old/young feelings in me that need company and attention.
If I can show up, and be steady and calm and show a quiet inner strength, I can feel that my parts calm down, both the ones that carry the pain of what happened back then, and the parts that have been working diligently to protect me from feeling what’s there.
It takes time, but in the holding relationship of another steady person, and becoming that steady person for myself, in time spring peeks through the snow.