Mary Oliver opens her poem Wild Geese with “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles repenting. You have only to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Being raised steeped in deep dysfunction and guilt, this poem guts me every time. Mary Oliver herself grew up in a dysfunctional family with early abuse and would escape out her window into the woods where she found her own personal salvation. She says of the trees “I would almost say that they saved me, and daily”.
Ten years ago I went back to school to study Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy. While the therapy is more than this, facilitation of trauma integration through and from the body perspective is a part of its scope. The course is cleverly set up making it almost impossible to graduate without looking into one’s own dark corners. It opened a lot of questions, questions I’m sure I’ll never fully answer.
While the course has a focus on grounded presence and non judgment, anatomy is also studied and how the body physically moves through stages of activation, stress, and calm. The big question is, “Can we, and how do we move through states of stress and trauma? Can we heal these things?”
I started my career excitedly wanting to “fix” anyone and everyone. My family and I had experienced great things with this therapy. Things like less allergy symptoms, less chronic pain, and for myself greater capacity in life.
Many people experience this therapy as deeply relaxing, coming out of a session feeling like they’ve “returned home”. I started noting though that for some, as body tissues soften and open up, stored trauma suddenly has space to show itself. This only happens because in some sense the body feels safe enough to start laying down its defenses. The paradox is, that feeling safe can feel pretty alarming when a nervous system isn’t used to safety. The sensations that arise can be pretty uncomfortable.
My question has always been, how do we navigate this in the safest possible way, avoiding retraumatization when at all possible? Sometimes the body does enter deeply relaxing states that allow for things to process easily and effortlessly. What happens though when something opens up, and it feels messy?
A lesson for me, with both myself and others, is that we can’t always save ourselves and others from deep pain. Usually the thing causing the pain has already happened, often long ago. As much as we are averse to sitting in pain, sometimes we have to sit with ourselves and each other up close, in very uncomfortable states. At times, it can be incredibly overwhelming and that’s when we need to reach out for safe connection and to whatever other resources, professionals, and help available, as we’re not always able to get out of these states on our own.
Mary Oliver’s poem continues: “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscape, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.”
When we have received help, what from there? What of our endless search for healing? How do we keep healing? Are we ever healed? How do we embark/continue on this journey with the least amount of harm?
I found it so easy to get caught up in the “If only I dig enough, if I can find and express all of my trauma, if only I cry enough, purge it enough, it will be gone and I will be healed.” The model of trauma catharsis is a model of trying to dig it all up and express it through emotional states. Where this model gets it right is that when the nervous system gets caught in certain trauma states like freeze, flop and dissociation, it can become averse to feeling and expression as a form of self protection. This is often very protective while still in the adverse situation. When we move out of the difficulty, these states are no longer needed and can be difficult to leave behind. Learning to feel sensation and express emotion are incredibly useful skills to possess and is often a step in healing.
But what if it becomes a dopamine hit chase, a goal to complete, to catharsis, excise all? I am so grateful to the Body Intelligence school I attended for Craniosacral Therapy for introducing me to the thought of being wary of catharsis and emotion as a goal in and of itself. “Seek not, forbid not”. It is against our code of ethics to push for emotional release. It happens and that is within our scope to support, as release can be incredibly helpful and sometimes needed.
I continued to roll with the question, “what is actually helpful?” Over the pandemic I was mentored with Steve Haines, Author of “Trauma Is Really Strange” while taking the TRE (Tension and Trauma Releasing) course. Steve Haines brought home the point over and over again that this was not about seeing how much trauma one could excavate and emote, instead it was about how to support the nervous system to come back to center and regulate. When trauma does come up, as it can very quickly with TRE, the skill then becomes to catch it early, and introduce the body and nervous system to simple tools of regulation. Many people are surprised at how fast the body can come back to normal, that it doesn’t have to stay stuck in fight, flight, freeze, or dissociation for hours, days, or weeks.
Steven Porges, author of the book “The PolyVagal Theory”, says you can predict which babies will be resilient based on how they react to normal stimuli. Resilience is when the nervous system goes up but comes back down in a reasonable amount of time. Staying up for a long period, or having no reaction (think of the super calm baby), were both considered to have less positive outcomes when it comes to resilience.
Our bodies are made to react, and then come back to baseline. This serves us. Trauma happens when our abilities to react and respond are overwhelmed. These experiences can imprint us, and serve us for a time. Have you noticed, different people have naturally different coping strategies? Fight, flight, freeze, and dissociation can protect us when in overwhelming situations. Sometimes these situations last for years. And when these adaptations no longer serve us, we want to learn to come back to center.
Recently I had a full circle aha moment, reading a paper by Michael Shay, PhD LMT where he talks about the model of self regulation, where self containment and regulation are the goal, versus emotional release. After grappling with these ideas for years, something clicked for me. Trauma therapy can be about acknowledging our activation, having space for that, and learning how to come back to center. Examining my feelings more closely, I think I felt like I was abandoning the wounded parts of myself when I had a choice to self regulate and move on. But we can learn to pause, reach out for help, and move on when the time is right.
We start to walk differently with ourselves, hurt parts included. More gently. As we heal, we learn to come back to the present, and feel the goodness of our own bodies and surroundings.
Mary Oliver’s poem finishes: “Whoever you are, however lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like wild geese, harsh and exciting- over and over announcing your place in the family of things”
While May Oliver’s poetry doesn’t deny pain and trauma, it does offer the simple practice of coming back to the things that ground us, over and over again.
The path leads upward. The air is textured and warm, the horizon meeting my eyes with a dazzling array of pinks and oranges. Everything is different as my body exhales into this world that has come to meet and hold me, and I am once again undone.
Dedicated to my siblings, my OG’s
