Healing Trauma
An iceberg can be a symbol of our different memory system. There is the cognitive part visible above the water line, capable to rationalize and symbolize, and there is the huge hidden part floating underneath the surface. Implicit memory systems are not visible and have little words, if at all. They describe our emotions and all other body memories including learnt action patterns such as walking, eating with a spoon, or riding a bike. Our survival responses from the autonomic nervous system are implicit, just as our heart rate is not something we need to think about in order to make it pump our blood.
Trauma is usually something that happens to our body through violence, neglect, surgeries or accidents. All the research in recent years tells us, it needs to be healed through the body, rather than through cognitive processing. Just talking about what happened afterwards rarely helps. When we tell a friend about it, we are likely to remember her soothing and reassuring hug more than what she said. Most trauma can be healed. It can be healed without long hours of therapy; it is not necessary to painfully relive the memories, and it is possible without long-term reliance on medication. Trauma recovery needs to bring back rhythm and movement into the parts of our body where we froze in fear. With Guided Drawing we can draw the contraction movements, and then the massage movements we wish to have for our stiff neck, braced diaphragm, or cold shoulder; finding simple, rhythmic, bilateral massage movements with crayons or paint, allows our body to wake up and move again.
Trauma is usually something that happened too fast or too big for us to respond in time. Once we are safe, and take the time, our natural biological rhythms can begin to ebb and flow again. These can be hardly noticeable sensations at the beginning; yet, even a gentle swaying or rocking will lead to soothing and reconnecting. We all know the feeling, when someone told us off unfairly and you just stand there and can’t say anything. But once you at home, lying safely in bed, long speeches flow through your mind with all the perfect answers.
Most clients have an expectation that trauma therapy involves sharing it, or that it has to be something dramatic. Many small traumas though happen quite frequently, whenever we grit our teeth, feel our gut getting tense, or our heart racing, and then a bit later, when we know it is over, we exhale and calm down.
What I am saying is that trauma responses are predominantly physiological, and need to be undone though our body. If we understand cognitively part of the story, that is fine, but this is often not possible, because we were either too young, when something happened, or anaesthetized or drugged. Nervous system regulation is actually more important than telling the story; the story is easily retraumatising, especially once the associated overwhelming emotions erupt.
Babette Rothschild[1] talks about “applying the brakes”. We need to interrupt the internal activation, the inner panic and focus on something external in the here-and-now, checking, if we are safe in this present moment in time. Anything that brings our senses back online rather than feeling our blood ringing in our ears, or feeling completely numb. Look at your dog, touch a crystal, switch on the lights…
Pendulation, as taught in Somatic Experiencing[2], is designed to titrate the impact of the trauma. Peter Levine teaches how we can move between the trauma or what Levine calls the trauma vortex on one hand, and our ‘good’ place, our resources, as a counter or healing vortex on the other[3]. Whenever we get too activated, we move to a massage shape in Guided Drawing, or an active response to an issue, and draw that. It is really important to make sure that we do not simply draw in repetition, getting increasingly activated, which can increase the already existing problems significantly.
Through pendulating between the trauma and a resource, where we can stay active and feel safe, is at all times the recommended way to progress. In Guided Drawing this can be easily achieved through shifting the drawing process to massage movements or respond with what needs to be done here.
My training in the nineteen-seventies, when lots of screaming and pillow bashing was fashionable in therapy, still remains a good reminder of how not to proceed. Simply acting out inner distress in chaotic and undirected movements is potentially retraumatising. The other beginner’s mistake is to cut the rhythmic repetition cycle short. We need time to get out of our head and to connect with our inner flow. The bottom-up approach is not an image-based experience, but an implicit felt sense one. Frequently the best part of a Guided Drawing session is spent in rhythmic movements, while sensing their resonance in the body. Cognitive understanding may happen at the end of a session, when authentic answers come from this deeply embodied, non-cognitive inner place. Asking questions concerning the meaning of a drawing too early will cut the process short and disconnect us from inner knowing.
All of this has been extensively discussed in Healing Trauma with Guided Drawing, both the book and the online course. I certainly encourage everyone who has not engaged with those two resources, to do so for a responsible and safe application of Guided Drawing.[4]
At the core Guided Drawing is a skilled dance leading to deepening insight and self-renewal as we move through cycles of everlasting transformations.
Bibliography
Elbrecht, Cornelia. 2018. Healing trauma with guided drawing; a sensorimotor art therapy approach to bilateral body mapping. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Levine, Peter. 2010. In an unspoken voice; how the body releases trauma and restores goodness. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
—. 2015. Trauma and memory; brain and body in search of the living past. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
Rothschild, Babette. 2000. The body remembers. New York: Norton and Company.
© cornelia@sensorimotorarttherapy.com www.sensorimotorarttherapy.com
[1] (Rothschild 2000)
[2] (Levine, In an unspoken voice; how the body releases trauma and restores goodness 2010) (Levine, Trauma and memory; brain and body in search of the living past 2015)
[3] (Elbrecht 2018)
[4] (Elbrecht 2018)
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