The article is published at Madamasr
Opinion Article- English version
Published date: 25 June, 2018
Mada masr is one of the most popular platform for independent and progressive journalism in the Arab region.
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Do Human Bodies Act as Archives of Trauma?
By Riham Azizeldin
Triggered
by an article recently published by Mada Masr raising “52 questions about the
archive,” the concept of archiving has led me to add to the list question #53,
from a psychological frontier: Do human bodies act as psychological archive of
trauma? Does this archive carry the possibility of a map for healing if the
compass for reading such a maze is safely triggered? Does this always require a
conscious process?
The
questions I want to raise emanate from a position of curiosity. They are not
the reflections of a trained psychiatrist, nor are they embedded in learned psychological
jargon. They arose through my own journey to discover anchors to greater self-awareness.
Does
the body have a memory?
Have
you ever found yourself while searching for that small shop you visited two
months ago, pausing at the intersection wondering was it on the left side or
the other and at a certain point, you "felt" that it is on this side
and it was. Literally, in such situation your body took the lead and has been
triggered to recall some piece of information from its memory.
Some
scientists and psychologists have hypothesized that memory is not stored solely
in the brain, but in other areas of the body, a concept they refer to as “cellular
memory” or “body memory” — the difference being whether or not the information
is retained in every cell of the body or in the organs of the body. Such an
imprint can be seen, they argue, in cases of "phantom pain," where the sensation of
pain is experienced in a part of the body that has been amputated or removed,
though critics of this theory argue this is due to muscle memory or the remnants
of hormones in parts of the body. Furthermore, there are theories among
psychologists that support
the idea of the body as a kind of sponge for repressed feelings, particularly
in cases of trauma from chronic, long-term, or repeated abuse.
Last
year I was introduced to the book "The Body Keeps the Score" as part
of suggested readings for a special diploma where the main focus is to find
one's rhythm and connection between body and mind. It wasn't only being part of
intensive training on shifting the focus from the mind as a solo dancer to my
being to what my arms, legs, chronic pains at the bottom of my back, heat I usually
feel in my fists when I feel continuously oppressed by everyday situations, yet
it was a sliding door chance to view my body as an archive for all my history
especially the crucial incidents that happened to me as a child. Such
experience of listening to what kind of narratives my boy told, accompanied by
finding myself in many stories documented in the book has helped me to get
placed on a map where possibilities of healing, reconnecting, finding my story
beyond what the mind narrates, respecting this story, owning it and celebrating
my survival.
My
journey, reading the book twice and wishing that I would have enough time to
translate it into Arabic as I believe that such book is crucial to be
introduced to the Arabic reader, I redefined the word "trauma". The
most controversial word "trauma" is usually associated to experiences of war, or
physical and sexual abuse.
Also, it is usually limited to the physical symptoms that can be easily traced
and later on be the focus of recovery. Such trapping of the word into very
limited category has left me in wonder while I was reading and discovering that
this is not the whole story behind such word.
Emotional abuse and neglect especially in the early
childhood are considered as traumatic experiences. Such early experiences of
shaming, blaming, abandonment, loss and witnessing or experiencing direct
violence leave severe imprints on the body.
Such experiences often inform the ways in which we
develop survival skills, or may lead to patterns of behaviour that are
repeatedly traumatic, in which adult survivors of trauma relive their
experiences, drawing from a Pandora’s box of behaviors archived within their
bodies. Van der Kolk in his
book gives a basic example of how the body psychologically and physically
archives trauma from experiences in childhood and manifests them in adult life.
Take a young child whose caregiver looks at him or her in a moment of anguish
and says, “Stop crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about.” This early
memory of not feeling safe and having to subdue or hide one’s feelings can lead
to the pursuit of activities that numb the body in adult life — such as the use
of substances, or force a feeling of physical pain — such as cutting, or lead
to the punishing of oneself — for example by withholding food or overeating.
These are just examples of some of the ways in which the body stores messages
of threat or danger and manifests them physically, as well as emotionally,
later in life. Some
other common physical signs of trauma psychiatrists have noticed include
paleness, lethargy, fatigue, poor concentration, panic attacks, or a racing
heartbeat.
What
might your body as an archive include?
When we consider the archive, it often triggers images
of papers, files and folders, organized according to a certain kind of system,
and ordered in terms of perceived importance. But what kinds of files are kept
by the body, and what determines the information that is retained or not? And
before identifying what this archive is all about, there is a crucial question:
how to get there from the first place?
In
motivational lectures, I usually left with the sentence "listen to your
body" and I hardly relate what it means. Yet, gradually scanning my body
as an archive for my history that was difficult to my mind to fully stored or
sometimes having crashed or distorted patterns of interpretation as one of the
survival skills, I rephrased the confusing phrase into "I want to find my
compass and I trust my body as an archive for showing me the way out".
Accompanied by curiosity and sincere attempt to find out what is there, I
decided to walk this journey hand in hand with compassionate understanding for
my body. It is a journey that sometimes I feel it eats my soul, ruins the
narrative of the world I kept holding for too long because I was scared to get
closer to my Pandora's box. It is a journey once I started I realized that
there is no coming back and it has no final destination it is rather a process of walking through mountains
and valleys of many untold stories that were kept in my body, in my legs,
hands, shoulders, chronic pains in different places in my body and losing hope
to relate it to any well- known physical diseases. I believe that my body has
archived my history and waited to the moment I decide to open the Pandora's
box. Although I was scared at the very beginning, yet being empowered with
grounding and mindful practices has helped me to navigate among all the
archived stories on the shelves of my body, listen compassionately and
re-giving birth of one single possibility that there might be a totally
different narrative of the trauma and there the healing might be possible.
At
the age of 27, I found myself standing in the street in the foreign country and
started crying of being "lost". As a young woman who experienced
living into three different countries by her own, why it was so dramatic being
"lost", isn't it part of the package of "being adventurer and
wanderer"! It was a turning point as I felt my whole body
"freezing" and it was my first time not being able to move my legs
for almost three minutes. Surprisingly after three minutes, my body get back
into, what is so called, "normal" functioning. Years later, I
recalled this small incident, and being part of a safe nurturing, compassionate
environment, this small incident has triggered many other traumatic ones of
"being lost" coming back from my early childhood, unresolved
conflicts, and repressed feelings that
accompanied them.
As
a child of age of three, I was told by my family that I was lost while they
were performing pilgrimage. The story is kept in the family archive as a funny
piece of incident especially when I am teased that I don't look like my two
brothers and sister. At the age of ten I experienced kidnapping and after a
long night of details that I can't till the moment fully remember, I was brought
home safely. As a child that has no tools to narrate such two incidents, the
narratives of my family was registered. Beside the early exposure of threat,
fear and losing safety, I was blamed for many things among one of them is
"We will never forgive you for making us suffer like this". "We
thought that you were smarter enough to resist being with a stranger". On
the curve of healing, where I stand now, I can tell away from putting the anger
and blame on my family and how what they might consider as their own definition
of love and protection, I can tell that there is another narrative of
connecting all the disconnected incidents that were archived and there was no
one single way to trace them. What helped to me is knowing, educated by the
previously mentioned book and digging in other resources, that in case of
experiencing extreme fear and threat, the body goes into "fight" or
"flight" modes. They are the body’s
response to perceived threat or danger. During this reaction, certain hormones
like adrenalin and cortisol are released, speeding the heart rate, slowing
digestion, shunting blood flow to major muscle groups, and changing various
other autonomic nervous functions, giving the body a burst of energy and
strength. Originally named for its ability to enable us to physically fight or
run away when faced with danger[i]. Although
such modes are one of the tools that are classifies as innate enablers to
survive, yet they ring the alarming bell when they are repeatedly occur when
the threat is over. In other cases, one might go through the experience of my
"body" is far and away. One might feel disconnected or disassociated.
Again, according to Van der Kolk, blocking the traumatic experience by depending only on the
narrative told by the mind as registered by voices of caregivers doesn't mean
that the trauma disappear. It re-invents itself over and over and manifests its
existence in later stages of life where there is no clear sign of threat or
fear. In that case, the body in a very unique way is designed to draw one's
attention to one area of the archive kept in the Pandora's box that needs to be
revisited, digested and processed in a complete different narrative.
Does
the archive of the body follow an organized form, similar to the so-called
regular archive?
Yes.
There is a complicated connection both ways between mind and body through which
human beings, like other mammals, have shown amazing abilities for formulating
patterns and codes for survival. These patterns are constructed over years of
experiences, and reinforced by certain behaviours, such that many of them are
hard to break or change.
Many
of us, for example, feel as if our bodies know the way to get to the office
every day or home, as a result of cognitive and social programming and
conditioning, and we sometimes make these trips without fully processing them
consciously.
On
the other hand, Kolk claims that trauma often leaves one in a state of
disassociation, where one’s inner archive is fragmented or split. This can lead
to emotions, sounds, images, thoughts and physical sensations related to trauma
taking on a life of their own. Often, the sensory fragments of memory intrude
into the present and are literally re-lived, sometimes in ways that are more
extreme than the original incident of trauma itself. In the above mentioned
example of "being lost", it was clear for me that after all these
years I was triggered by what happened in my childhood. Moreover, the
"freezing mode" I am naturally equipped with but how it kept showing
itself when there was no "extreme threat" has introduced me for the
first time to such a pattern. I believe that that was my first step of finding
my compass by observing my body, the kind of patterns triggered and later on
finding how far we might be reliving the past experiences of trauma, staying
there feeling stuck, losing control over your body. No wonder I was 27 and I
felt like a helpless child I was once experienced. This should not be understood
as the cliché of being an adult means that you experienced everything and you
shouldn't feel or acts like a child. This is destructive. I would rather
embrace that moment when such observation happened and with long journey of
reconnecting to my body and inhabiting this amazing co-piloting partner, I can turn
my archive to a theater where I restore my energy back, my strength of
realizing what is threat and what is not, and most importantly when threat
happens, as inevitable component of life cycle, what are the possibilities of
surviving, that kind of survival that encompasses conscious awareness of
already existing and functioning patterns and finding alternatives of
inhibiting one's body, finding your own rhythm that doesn't trap you in one
narrative of the past.
Can
your body be your compass to find your voice to narrate your story?
It
is very clear for me after examining the book of Van der Kolk that he is an
advocate of therapies that focus on the body, such as improvised theater and
yoga, in addition to more traditional forms of therapy, as they can often help
people to regain an element of control over their bodies that may have been
lost or fragmented. Kolk suggests that many paths to healing following
traumatic experiences are based on learning new ways of trying to break these
subconscious patterns and hence changing how your body navigates the map of
trauma.
I
am not in a position to recommend one single approach of finding your way out
of the maze over another, yet what I can share is that we usually refer to
having safe nurturing environments where one can safely express herself. We
usually tend to spend time and effort in searching in these environments
whether we might do a great deal of the search of something physical or even
emotional by sometimes being in human relationships where we seek peace and
connectedness. What if what we were searching for was that close, what if our
bodies were not only our archive for the untold history but also our loyal
companions in the journey of finding out our own narrative of whatever you have
been through, what if by empowering oneself by tools and techniques that sharpen
your awareness of your body, there would be a possibility of taking
responsibility of gluing your pieces your way and finding your rhythm. One of
the simplest techniques I can wholeheartedly recommend is to
"observe". I was introduced to this via my readings of an Indian
guru, Krishnamurti who said that in order to break a pattern[ii],
at least you need to observe what is there. It is the kind of observation where
you can compassionately receive all the noise whether from outwardly or
inwardly conditioning and programming. It is a kind of silence where you can
practice in the most chaotic places; you find a point where the observer
becomes the observed. It is silencing all the voices that genuinely don't
belong to you, and listening with the ear in the middle of the heart to
silence, carrying your body as your loyal temple, being wholeheartedly engaged
in ongoing prayers that only belong to your revelation and salvation. At a certain
point, you will reach out for your own voice as it has been always there waiting
for you to listen.
