My Body of Evidence
My Body of Evidence
The embodiment of trauma is the invitation to heal.
My hands are clenched brutally into two white-knuckled fists. My left palm grips a soggy tissue like my life depends on it. I’m folded into myself tight as a fetus if a fetus could be curled into the tiniest flower bud. I have made myself as small as I can make myself. With my eyes glued shut, I’m trapped in blackness, completely immersed in the darkness behind my eyelids and sunk deep inside my own insides. My arms are clutching my shoulders; my legs, knees, and feet are turned inward toward each other, which I do not even notice until my therapist points it out to me. I feel as hard as steel. My bones are immobile. I’m bracing for something awful. Something which feels inevitable. Something that I am sure- for reasons inexplicable- is going to hurt me.
Nothing so menacing, of course, is actually there.
For the most part, what’s there is just me bunched up like a basketcase on a couch, my therapist calmly observing the absolutely bonkers situation from her seat opposite me, the hum of a space heater, an indifferent box of almost-gone tissues, and some comically tiny lollipops in a jar on a table next to a chair on which sits a pillow embroidered with a ‘wheel of feelings’ on it. Such is my new radically real life in recovery. To be fair, it isn’t usually so intense.
As a 44-year-old woman who has been through some serious grown-up shit in my life, it felt quite unbelievable to me that when I went back in my mind to certain times of my childhood and brought up some eerily specific memories (which I will not detail here), I could react physically like a 6-year-old cowering under a bed or trying to hide in plain sight (get so small I would magically disappear). Had I not been so blessed to have found my exceptional therapist to work through trauma with, I am not sure I would ever have felt safe enough to process this in front of anyone. Trusting myself to approach this place inside felt like learning to walk a tightrope high above a city street. I wasn’t sure I could do it. Which made it feel exhilarating and insane at the same time.
But somehow in this therapist’s office, in a small building tucked away in the bare winter Bucks County countryside, I could do it. I did do it. I am still incredulous, to be honest. I always thought I was fine holding in my pain and told myself to not be so dramatic when my fear felt impossible to face all by myself. I thought that needing help processing my big feelings made me not just weak but also an asshole. Like needing help to heal big hurt was a huge inconvenience that only a worthy saint deserved and, since no one was a saint in this life (so reminded us every single catholic school teacher multiple times a day during our formative years), ‘help’ was not a thing available to mere mortals as myself. We sinners had to make the best we could out of getting sprinkled by a handful of mysterious sacraments, crunching our timid bodies into stuffy confessionals, and praying plastic prayers against the hardened beads of glow-in-the-dark rosaries (which were admittedly pretty cool).
But I digress.
My therapist, after calling my full attention to the tight, steeled, curled up, painfully stiff nature of my entire physical body in the moment where I’m inside a memory which had remained apparently unchanged and untouched for decades inside my subconscious, suggests I now imagine two small drops of ‘relaxation oil’ penetrating each of my shoulders.
“Imagine the oil can relax your shoulders,” she says plainly, as if that’s possible by any stretch of the imagination- even mine, which is actually probably stretchier than most.
In the walled-off privacy of my insides, I react to her kind suggestion with a complete and visceral NOPE. Body and mind, I am immediately certain this is bullshit of the highest order. I am fully prepared to remain the tightest-ass-luny-coiled-up-nugget for all of eternity rather than dare to believe the gentle words of a highly trained professional stranger.
You think two droplets of phantom essential oils are gonna penetrate THIS metal cage I’m in right now? There is no fucking way, dude. I am clamped down tight af right now. Rock hard. Solid. I could literally feel my bones rigid as steel beams running through my whole body like girders. My body was making sure nothing- not even a thought, let alone an oily one- was getting in.
But then something insanely wild happened.
For one split second, I dared to reach beyond my resistance the tiniest bit and I chose- I’m telling you: for no more than a millisecond- to allow for the possibility of softening, even though softening felt way scarier than clenching. To soften at all meant to also allow the possibility of that sinister invisible nameless ‘something’ hurting me. If it was going to hurt me, it would do so when I let my guard down just the slightest bit. That’s what I honestly believed; even years and years later, even far, far away from any presence of harm.
I think my mustard seed of trust moment was truly only made possible because of the silent stillness that surrounded me like a cocoon in that moment. I didn’t say anything and my therapist didn’t say anything. Nobody moved. Nobody forced me to move. After she suggested the relaxation oil droplets could maybe just be allowed to be a thing, and then after I refused, there was a pause just long enough for my mind to consider it. Like rainwater slipping in through the slimmest crack in a busted window, the drops of relief began to seep in.
My shoulders slowly dropped all the way down, which caused all the tension in my neck and spine to gradually melt away and disappear. A warm, velvety sensation bloomed inside my chest and moved out all the way into the entire length of all my limbs. My arms uncoiled and rested at my sides. My fists unclenched and my hands settled comfortably into my lap. The little wet tissue I had been strangling, battered and gasping for air, fell limp. My legs loosened and spread wider apart. It was as though I was physically thawing from the center of my body all the way out to my extremities, my fingers, my toes.
I wasn’t tight, frozen, or frigid anymore. I wasn’t tense in any way. I wasn’t small anymore, either. I was right-sized. Correct-sized. Real-sized. I expanded into me-sized, exactly. And it felt weird because I had more space to inhabit than I had ever realized before.
Space that was mine all along but I didn’t even know was there, safe and warm and available for me to exist and breathe and move inside. It was like I had been crouched down living in a tiny attic my whole life and then suddenly discovering I could actually move into all the other rooms in the three-story house, too. For the first time in perhaps my whole life, I realized that the house that was me was all mine.
“It’s okay to have these big feelings.”
My eyes are still closed when I hear her say this. And then I feel the warmth that has spread all through me, from my chest to my limbs to my neck to my face, pour softly from my eyes.
“Thank you.” I manage to say in a voice that is so quietly, innocently earnest it feels like it comes from a place inside that is completely new to me. I think, maybe, it is. It had never occurred to me that I would need permission from someone else to enter a body that was already my own.
The realization nearly takes my breath away with its brutal, tragic, miraculous beauty. Never in my life has anything felt more intimate than this moment when I finally understand and accept that I am allowed to occupy my whole entire body. And not be afraid. And not cringe in apology. That this body is mine and no one else belongs in it. And it can feel good, warm, and safe for me to be in it. Not only am I allowed to occupy it all. I am meant to. This safety in my own skin is how it was always meant to be.
After 44 goddamn years. I finally know: I am home.
Not as in: “Hi honey, I’m home!” after a long day’s work ‘out there’ in the world. Not a place I enter and exit as the world sees fit. But that I am my home. This is where I live all the time: in this body. My body. This is the place from which I operate. I work from home. I play from home. I do everything I do from inside my home of this body. I don’t know that there is anything more holy or sacred or important to understand as a human being than this. That I am the home to my own earthly existence.
There is so much more I want to write about healing from trauma and what that means for my body, mind, and way of being in this world. All in good time. I do get very tired. It all takes a lot of slow simmering patience. I’ve been through a lot. And I do not say that lightly. And I do not say that in any way as a comparison to anyone else or what anyone else has gone through or is going through. Comparison has absolutely NO PLACE in addiction or recovery or anywhere else.
But I do say it, and own it, now: I have been through a lot. And yet even saying that is a bit deceiving. Because it implies I have been through things and come out the other side and now it’s all good. But I haven’t come all the way through yet. There are still pieces of me stuck back there that I need to excavate, heal, and reintegrate. Fragments of me that got lost in the corners of the complexities of my own mind while the rest of me was running, running, running- away, away, away. Corners I didn’t know existed. Twists and turns and shadows I couldn’t see.
For now, I am processing. In my first year of sobriety, I was mainly focused on not physically picking up a drink in any given situation. Now, over a month into my second year, I am coming to no uncertain terms with what it means to do the difficult work of maintaining emotional sobriety. Healing what was causing me so much trouble. Learning to understand and have deep compassion for the parts of me that clung to addiction to survive.
In many ways, it is as though I am learning my own story for the first time. This time with clarity. This time from a much safer, stabler, healthier place. It is all becoming very real. What once felt scattered, fuzzy, blocked and disjointed is now clicking into place. Some of what happened to me in the past still lives inside of me in the present, playing out over and over like an old war movie, in black and white static in the background of my life. It is very hard. It hurts. It is a miracle. It is the strangest goddamn thing.
And so it goes. I am learning to operate from a new kind of home- my home- that is free not only of toxic chemical substances but that is also, little by little, becoming freer and freer of the poisonous remnants of trauma which go back decades, lifetimes, generations. Ages and ages of pain that- despite the passage of time- haven’t actually aged a day.