Befriending Dissociation:
a Focusing Journey
into the Not-here Places
In December 1999 I was
stationary at a road junction waiting to turn right when a car accelerated into
the back of mine. This changed my life. Gone was my career in acquired brain
injury rehabilitation, my ability to drive, to enjoy my hobbies, to live life
like my peers. I found myself stuck in a world of severe chronic pain
exacerbated by a vestibular disorder. I had joined the ranks of a group of my
previous clients who, like me, suffered a whiplash injury but achieved little
or no recovery. Like them my life became about micromanaging everything so as
to ‘control’ the pain and the vertigo. And like them no doctor could explain
why my body could not recover. My only gut sense, which came from my
professional experience, was this was not ‘all in my mind’ but very much in my
body.
Quite early on I became aware
that, whilst most of the time my inner experience was taken over by physical
pain and a spinning nausea, sometimes I had times when something in me knew I
was in a lot of pain but I could not feel
anything. Sometimes ‘the something in me’ encouraged me to take some
pain-relief medication and I found that by doing this I was able to feel the
physical pain again and this felt ‘better’. I felt more real, more here. I
preferred the pain to the other vague-somehow-not-here place.
For over ten years I had no idea
why my body did this and then, by a wonderful serendipity, I made two
discoveries: the first was a book called “The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma,
Dissociation, and Disease” by Robert Scaer, a neurologist, and I also found
Focusing. Out of this came a rapid cognitive awareness that this
vague-somehow-not-here place is a physiological state called dissociation and
that I was, unknowingly, a
Nobel-prize-winning expert at dissociating. Indeed the whole reason why my body
had not recovered from the accident was because it was literally stuck in a physiological
state of fight/ flight and freeze. My body was just yo-yoing between overwhelm
and severe pain to dissociation and chronic nauseous exhaustion, it was hypersensitive
to the smallest thing.
Through reading Scaer’s book and
some email correspondence with him, I came to realise that, despite many years
of therapy about my very difficult childhood which had given me a lot of
insight into my past, it had not enabled me to release from my body the layer
upon layer of trauma created through living in a household where we breathed in
fear not oxygen. Scaer’s book outlines in great detail how such a childhood had
created a particular neural architecture in me to do with the autonomic nervous
system. This meant that, as he put it, I had been left with ‘… a greater
tendency to freeze at the moment of … [future] … trauma and to develop
dissociative symptoms’ (p. 108), and the accident had
been the final trigger to activate the whole dissociative reactivity
that had been stored in my body for years.
I now understood what was wrong
with my body, this left me with the questions: what does my body need to heal?
How do I teach my body not to yo-yo between overwhelm and dissociation? I
quickly found that the body-based trauma therapies, such as Somatic
Experiencing, were mostly just ‘too much’ for my body and its hypersensitivity.
However the fortuitous
suggestion of something called Focusing, mentioned in passing to me by a
Mindfulness mentor, opened up for me a way forward that was about letting my
body take the lead in this healing process
This process has been a highly
challenging journey that started with a something in me needing to find out as
much as I could about trauma, attachment and neuroscience. For me, growing up
in an academic family, the default place of ‘safety’ was reading books. My head
needed to understand, to make sense of, and my body needed to feel safe and
chose the then only way it knew how: the left cortex. Then my goal was to get
rid of dissociation – I viewed it as ‘the problem’
Two books however offered me a
more compassionate perspective: “The Myth of Sanity” by Martha Stout, which is
an exploration of dissociation, and “The Boy who was Raised as a Dog” by Bruce
Perry – a heart-warming book which showcases how a lack of love traumatises children and impacts on
their neural development. Both books felt full of humanity, care and hope.
Focusing enabled me to take some
of Perry’s neurodevelopmental approaches in working with children, such as
Reiki, massage and music, and adapt them to supporting me as an adult to start
to create some safeness within me that was body- based I realised, when my
father died, that I had never been able to feel safely embodied, which is a
core developmental need in a child.
So these unmet needs were still
driving my physiology and I had to find creative ways as an adult to complete
this process. One of the most potentially challenging areas, to my head, was
how to help the dissociated/ overwhelm places that came from a start of life
trauma. By listening to my body, I found myself experimenting with the senses –
particularly those of smell, touch and sound. I discovered that a particular
brand of pink grapefruit shower gel made my body feel safe whereas others
didn’t.
So I harnessed the power of
neuroplasticity and used this shower gel daily plus I wrapped a soap of the
same fragrance up in my pyjamas, so when I go to bed I smell the pink
grapefruit and it strengthens the neural loop. I created different playlists of
music that have different effects depending what I need and I also put together
a ‘feeling’ bag made of fur and containing various things like a wooden apple.
As layers of terror came up I will sit and hold/stroke these items and anchor
on them to support my body.
The beginning of being in my
body led to a further awareness that when I had to make the shift from the
internal orientation of Focusing and Mindfulness to reconnecting with the
outside world, my body would immediately default into dissociation. So with Focusing I learnt how to help my body
through a simple three-stage sensory strategy that utilises both the witnessing
left cortex of the brain and the experiencing right cortex, and in so doing
brings the whole of my nervous system ‘online’ and into the present moment. All
of these strategies were about building into my neural architecture ‘feeling
safe wiring’
This last year has been the most
powerful as I embarked on a training to become a Whole-body Focusing
practitioner. I began to be able to live on a day-to-day basis in my body, and
then discovered that this is not a state of ‘happy ever after ending’ but has
its own challenges like actually feeling frightened in the present moment when
I found myself trying to deal with a friend who was drunk and abusive. It was only
later that I came to realise how ‘well’ I had done – I had not defaulted into
stoical dissociation.
Then, a couple of months later,
I discovered that I had had an
unconscious place whose sole agenda was still all about fixing/getting rid of
this troublesome pesky annoying part – namely dissociation. And yet in
discovering this place I became aware that implicit in this awareness was
actually me now being ready to welcome and befriend the places of dissociation.
That far from being pathological – the places in me that are ‘not here’ have
saved me and my sanity. Martha Stout opens her book with a quote from Joseph
Conrad
How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do
you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by
its spectral throat?
quoted from Conrad, Lord Jim, 1900, p. 296
And my answer now, to Conrad and
to myself, is to befriend the fear, the spectre. Dissociation no longer haunts
me – I welcome it now, like Rumi’s Guesthouse Keeper, as a dear, dear friend of
mine.
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.as an unexpected visitor.
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honourably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
as a guide from beyond.
Jeladuddin Rumi
Written December 2015 and
published in the British Focusing Associations newsletter April 2016
