If someone breaks a leg, is burned, or is otherwise physically injured, it is easy to see. It is shows right there on the surface of their body. Maybe they are wearing a cast, or have a scar, or some other clear sign of damage. But when someone has been traumatized, it is not always so easy to see. Nevertheless, it is there – locked in the body. Often you can see it in someone’s posture, in the way they flinch when a sudden noise surprises them, or in the way they try to hide from a gaze.
We all lie to ourselves and to others, usually in small ways that are not a big deal like, “I am walking out the door right now” when we are still inside getting on our shoes. But we are capable of lying in ways that are quite dangerous, to ourselves and others. Why is this important to understand when dealing with trauma? It is important because lying is conceptual, it is manipulating thoughts and strategies. While the mind can do that quite easily, the body cannot. The body doesn’t operate like that. When working with trauma, remember that words can be deceiving. Words can misdirect the attention both of the patient and the therapist. Instead, trust the body. The body doesn’t have the capacity to lie. The truth is locked into the body, and the body will confirm the words that are true.
Memories of early childhood trauma usually do not come in logical, sequential verbal narratives. This is because it is mostly implicit memory rather than explicit, demonstrative memory. Explicit memory is simply not available when abuse happens in infancy, when it happens to you as a toddler, or when you were a young child. In other words, when the abuse occurred before a child’s developmental unfolding of logic, of conceptual grasping of reality and thinking, one cannot expect to recall it as if describing last night’s television show that you watched as an adult. Abusers count on this, knowing that the child will be unable to express a logical, sequential and, for the most part, fact-checkable explanation of their pain – now or in the future.
As a psychiatrist, my primary concern was with treatment, with healing an injured patient. For both the patient and therapist, my advice is to refrain from searching for a logical, sequential, and verbal expression of the abuse experience. This is personal experiential stuff. If your body is telling you that you were abused, that is the foundational truth. Searching for confirmation of details is not nearly as important as trusting the truth held by your body.
How it happened, when and where it happened, are less relevant unless you are still in the physical orbit of the abuser. Trying to force the implicit bodily memory of abuse into an explicit narrative memory will likely cause further confusion and doubt. The body will allow access to the implicit memory when patient feels safe enough to permit it, or when there is enough stress that the patient’s ability to suppress the implicit memory is overwhelmed.
When the implicit memory arises, don’t dissect or argue with it. It is true on its own foundational terms. Appreciate the wisdom of the body in keeping a record of the trauma, and the wisdom of the child to have survived the abuse. Allow the memory to be as it is, to be expressed as needed, but this time in the safety of the therapeutic environment. This enables the patient to start to experience the distinction between an explicit memory of the past and the present discharge of implicit memory.
Practice the “here and now” formula. In short, you are, at the time of this one breath in the therapists office or in your protected place at home, safe and whole. In the midst of implicit memory, breathe. You are breathing anyway, so why not pay just a bit of attention to it. In the moment of this very breath, one can access a powerful feeling of stability. Practice just experiencing that feeling without trying to extend it, manipulate it or otherwise hold on to it. Why not try to hold on to it? Because it is now the next moment, the next fresh breath, the next opportunity to experience safety.
The more often you can experience the safety of a here and now moment, the more that experience – on its own – will leak into your everyday life. Work on creating the habit of noticing your breath when any past difficult memory starts to arise, implicit or explicit. Each time you connect with that safety in the breath during the remembering, whatever happened in the past begins to weaken its present grip on you.
It is a process of very small steps. The past will not suddenly lose its power, but it will begin to do so gradually. With processing the trauma gently, slowly and safely, the past will cease being so potent. It will become more and more like an ordinary memory, with limited impact on the present.
As the trauma is processed in therapy, the body will shift just a bit, letting go a little bit. What I said to my patients was that I wanted them to leave my office feeling just a little better than when they came in. In that way, there was no pressure to have a giant breakthrough with the attendant pitfalls of loading such pressure on them. Instead, my patients would make small gains without retraumatization. It was with gratitude that I could see a patient walk out of the office a little more gently, a little more erect, and feeling a little more safe inside, than when they entered.
This is not to say that patients were on a continuously uphill trajectory of healing. Everyone’s life has ups and downs. This is true whether seen over the course of days, weeks, or months but also over the course of minutes, at times. So, each session with a patient was a new starting point – how did they come in that very day and how did they leave.
The body keeps the score, and communicates it every moment. Be open to its messages.
