Healing Trauma
DISCOVERING THE RESILIENCY OF CHANGE: My Story
Originally entering into the helping and health professions as a licensed bodyworker in the late 80’s I had the privilege to work with a community of incredible women committed to God and looking to recover their own wholeness. These nuns had been sexually abused early in their lives before entering a life of service in the church.
All “hell broke loose” in my work with them as you may have imagined with me being a man and working with therapeutic massage all which ended up being an amazing blessing for me. What I did not know at the time was the bodywork I was trained in was reactivating the trauma memories hidden away in my client’s nervous systems. Overwhelmed, confused, and wanting to help, and especially not re-traumatize these women, I began to seek guidance.
THE MIND BODY RELATIONSHIP
I studied with several extraordinary pioneers in the emerging field of the mind body relationship. Ron Kurtz, originator of Hakomi, Stanley Keleman founder of Somatic Therapy, teachers in the early work of Peter Levine and Somatic Experiencing, the Bodynamics of Lisbeth Marcher, along with brilliant body re-education founders, Milton Trager and Emily Conrad Da‘oud creator of Continuum. They all taught me about the resiliency and fragility of being an embodied being and how trauma and shock can remain in our body years after their original occurrence. They taught me the skillful means needed to help the bodymind to robustly heal.
My own journey of helping these women free themselves from their history brought me onto a path of gratitude and humility… and in what I saw as a necessity— to enter into a healing process of my own early attachment wounds (growing up with a mentally ill mom). I wanted to be as available and in relationship to my own heart and mind as I could be help others courageously face and heal their ruptures with their own happiness and reality.
GOING FROM BODY, TO MIND AND BODY, AS A PSYCHOTHERAPIST
No longer working as a body worker, (I had gotten carpal tunnel from working too hard and earned my social work degree) my work began to emerge as a healing modality for treating the “impersonal” aspect of our lives. I was engaging with the neurobiological and energetic aspects of my clients suffering as well as the whole of who they were. The ways evolutionary biology had kept them in safe-keeping, albeit in a constricted and painful survival mode showed me how to help them shuttle out of their trauma and come back into a nourishing resiliency and fulfilling life.
Hungry to be as skillful as I could be in helping clients mend their connection to themselves, I immersed myself in Gestalt training and studied the work of Dr. Daniel Siegel, developer of interpersonal neurobiology. At the same time, I went deeper into my own meditation practice when the impact of neglect, abuse and shame on the nervous system underlying our personality became crystal clear. I saw how an informed and genuine, respectful and caring relationship with my clients was essential to helping them embody their wholeness. As I worked with broken hearts, minds and bodies, my clients began to heal the shock, trauma, neglect and shame that had been memorized in their nervous system below their conscious thoughts and best of intentions to survive.
WHAT DOES HEALING MEAN?
Then the question of what healing means and was it different than psychotherapy came up strongly in my life. How could I learn more about the nature of healing? The therapist I was seeing at the time told me about a training program that spoke directly to this question. That’s when I decided to enter into what has become a significant part of my spiritual path, nondual Kaballistic healing.
Many of my clients, men and women, who previously did a lot of work on themselves spiritually through meditation, 12 step work or specific paths to awakening, as well as in psychotherapy, seamlessly slide into states of confusion, darkness, anxiety, fear, and shame. Judgements and fear arose. Places that had no words, no names to be called or directly known by. Places that were not rescuable by logic or reason of their intellect alone.
While they could verbally tell me an in-depth story of their life and difficulties, I saw how their bodies were remembering without them having conscious recall. Without words to describe or give meaning to their story I saw how they were experiencing memories without knowing it. Their nervous system was doing what our nervous systems are supposed to do, protect us from danger. But there was no threat present in the moment outside of them self. The threat had been memorized. These experiences became the doorway into their healing.