Healing Developmental Trauma
You are not broken.
This feeling many of us share -- I'm broken, unloved and unloveable -- boy, is it miserable. This is not just guilt, "I broke something," or injury, "A part of me has broken.” It's at the core of who we are -- unchangeable, or so we believe. In fact, there are probably no words that can convince you or me otherwise. Here instead is a story from long ago, a story we all have in common. It's from the time around your birth.
When you were just born, you were incredibly vulnerable and totally dependent on care from other humans to survive. Like all of us, your brain was not developed fully yet, so imagine trying to make sense of what you were experiencing in those early weeks and months. Sensing and feeling is all that’s available. No reasoning, no language. Any disruption that comes along threatens your well-being, your very survival, as far as you know. Your systems respond with urgency, asking for help. If your needs are not met, you adapt. One part of adapting is creating stories about why your needs were not met. At this point you still don’t have language, so those stories are held in sensing and feeling. Just a few years later, when you can talk and reason, those underlying sensing-and-feeling stories are still there. You don’t realize it because they are not there in words. It feels like “truth” or just what IS.
But it is an adaptation.
Many of us have gotten stuck in these sensing-and-feeling stories. They shape our adult lives. They limit us. And we can’t talk about it, because, well —- there’s no actual story in words. Sometimes we make up stories that might explain our confusing sensations. More often, a story comes to us that seems to make sense so we accept and defend that story. A baby whose caregivers left her alone comes to believe she is incapable of intimate relationships. A young child undergoing surgery later comes to believe that what they experienced was sexual assault when that did not actually happen.
We use the language of the body.
What does this have to do with me? This is where the type of touchwork that I practice is invaluable. When your needs were not met in infancy, or later in childhood, your “story” was held in sensing and feeling. By using the language of the body (sensation and movement), we can contact deeper layers of being, beyond words. This is not massage, but static touch, of witness, of being with. Wounds of disconnect, trauma in our early developmental years, can be healed through compassionate contact with other humans, with animals, with nature.
The kind of trauma I'm talking about is not just big-earthquake variety. It can be as simple as mis-attunement. Unmet needs for care, for connection. Now, this isn't meant to place blame on caregivers, but to acknowledge this is how we learn. We require intensive care in our early years, and it can't all be exactly perfect every moment.
Through my years of studying somatic therapy and bodywork, I've learned to respect the sneaky-powerful value of exploring trauma. To learn more, I recently attended Kathy Kain and Steve Terrell's class, "Somatic Regulation and Resilience." Leaders in our field, you'll hear more soon about these brilliant teachers.
In my practice, I’ve had the pleasure to work with many who have begun to own their sense of feeling broken, to explore a range of embodied experience, enjoy more creativity, more connection. As many of my clients concurrently receive psychotherapy, I enjoy working as part of a health care team.
I have the same message for anybody I work with: You are not broken. You may be hurting, you may be sad, angry, horrified, a mix — and I’ll support you to feel what you feel. You may be in pain, and I’ll use all my tools to help manage patterns that foment pain. But I am never going to try to fix you.
Because you’re not broken.
If this message speaks to how you're feeling right now, I’d love to hear from you. Contact me so we can chat.
