My Body and Me: A Trauma Love Story
Part two of how my body and I shifted from a long-distance relationship to making a home with one another.
A few hours after posting part one of this essay, I received the devastating news that my honorary little sister Elsie had lost her life to mental illness at the age of 23. Her death has caused tectonic shifts in my life over the past two and a half months, and I’ve been consumed with grief, weeping as I try to write.
But writing about mental illness brought her into my life and the years we spent in close contact are a gift I will cherish for the rest of my days.
I ask myself, “What would Elsie want me to do?” The answer has been: “Write.”
The intermission between these two acts may have seen the entire theatre burn down, but we play on regardless.
And soon, I will write not just for her, but about her.
She deserves an entire library.
Listening to my body
Until two years ago, I believed my intuition resided in my spirit alone. I read “mind, body, spirit” as a list of disconnected entities I possessed – all important in their own right, but to be dealt with separately or sequentially.
As a trauma survivor, my body felt like my betrayer.
So much of my wounding had entered me through my body and she often reacted to the echoes of trauma in ways that were disruptive and inconvenient to my plans. Especially when those plans took place in the summer.
But after years of embodiment work, I now know she’s the one with the wisdom.
When I speak of “we”, “our” and “us”, I mean my body and me. Before I went to residential trauma treatment in 2018, we were completely disconnected.
“You could cut off my head, put it on another body and it would make no difference,” I described us to a therapist. If pressed, I would have likely defined her in more sinister terms – I thought of my body as parasitic.
Today, we are in a mutually symbiotic relationship, living life in tandem.
So how did we get here?
First, EMDR
Nearly a decade ago in London, after the usual NHS waiting list hell, I received my official diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
I was enrolled in a treatment plan that included EMDR (eye movement desensitisation reprocessing). However, my masking coping mechanism had disguised the severity of my symptoms during the diagnostic consultation. My nervous system was shot, my window of tolerance was extremely small, and triggers would constantly upend me.
Four months into treatment, I was raped again, further compounding my PTSD. I ended up spending nine months in the safety phase alone before we began EMDR.
EMDR was the first miracle I experienced in years of trying to recover.
I would recall specific incidences of trauma, while my therapist moved her fingers back and forth quickly as I followed them with my eyes. As rapid eye movement took over, I could speak more deeply about the events without going into distress, and the intensity of the memories was reduced.
In only a few sessions, I felt hope for a future free of the shackles of debilitating symptoms.
While my screaming nightmares, vomiting panic attacks and daily flashbacks had disappeared, I was still mostly dissociated from my body – she was an alien to me. At the time, I didn’t know that my chronic spinal pain, which originated from congenital disc fusions resulting in arthritis, was being compounded by my PTSD.
Fear and pain run along the same neural pathways, and I was always in fear; hence, I was always in pain.
Checking out from my body was the way I’d survived.
Second, Breathwork
In 2018, in the desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico I spent 28 days at the Life Healing Center (a casualty of the pandemic - it no longer exists). In individual and group sessions, I was treated with somatic experiencing, acupuncture, trauma-informed bodywork, breathwork and art therapy.
Discovering breathwork was the key to the first of many locks on my body’s doors. With the guidance of my therapist Juli, I’d spend an hour using my breath to move emotions and memories through my body.
I had been sober for over five years at this point, and breathwork created a natural high that provided calmness and clarity. I felt my head and body start to shift into alignment – still a couple of feet apart, but an improvement upon the previous miles.
I had been under psychiatric or therapeutic care since I was 14 years old, and none of it truly began to connect me with my body until this work at the age of 33.
PTSD had inhibited my ability to work full-time for years, and the cost of this treatment had made it inaccessible. My health insurance paid for some of my treatment, but I had to crowdfund the remainder from friends and family, to whom I remain forever grateful.
It is abhorrent to me that the right to life is reserved for those who can afford it.
Third, Traditional Chinese Medicine
Those integrative modalities all started me back on the journey to myself. And in doing so, the medication regime I was on became both redundant and harmful.
I had been medicated in one form or another since I was 14 and had become medication-resistant. With the support of my psychiatric professionals, I spent two and a half years slowly coming off my meds and in May 2020, amid the height of the pandemic, I returned to baseline.
On medication and off, I had experienced episodes of psychosis that I now consider to be deep spiritual experiences. After watching Crazywise, a documentary exploring Indigenous cultures’ views of what the modern world calls “mental illness”, I was even more determined to find alternatives to medication.
But my brain and body didn’t know how to cope with medication or without, and every day was torture.
Minus the bloating caused by anti-psychotics plus the impact of withdrawal on my body, I dropped down to a fragile 120 lbs (for context, I’m 5’8”). I continued twice-weekly talk therapy due to the generosity and caring of my psychologist. While I was unmedicated, it’s important to note I was not untreated.
However, I needed more support.
That support came through the hands and knowledge of Dr Reginald Cann, a traditional Chinese medicine doctor who is legend in Bermuda for his healing abilities. Through supplements, acupuncture, and energy work, Sifu Cann has completely altered the way my body functions. I now use both Eastern and modern medicine for all my ailments and I understand they are not either mental or physical, but always both.
Finally, Dancing With My Pain
These modalities, as I was practicing them, required another person and constant expenditure. Then, in 2023, I was introduced to Ishtara, a moving meditation and somatic healing technique, by my friend Amy Jubb as she completed her teacher training.
Ishtara smashed open the last lock on the door between my mind and body.
Through dancing with my feelings, I began to understand that my body had been constantly speaking, but her language was foreign to me. Trauma had separated me from my mother tongue at too young an age to recall its meaning. My Ishtara practice gave me the Rosetta Stone to translate the messages she sends me.
It was not, however, all the dance party with myself I’d envisioned it would be. I experienced epic emotional ruptures when I started moving in, and into, my body.
Dr Hillary McBride, author of The Wisdom of Your Body, explained on a podcast, when you start to engage with your body again, “you touch what you felt right before you shut down.”
I left my body in childhood, in the midst of fear, panic, searing physical pain, and sexual violation. I came back right where we’d left off.
Both Amy and Ishtara’s founder Tracy held space for me and my nervous system in the months it took me to adjust. When I finally did, I learned to love the dance of rupture and rapture.
I now have a practice I can do alone, or in community, where whatever I’m feeling has the space to move through me, changing me as it does, taking me deeper and deeper into the truth of myself.
Freeing up on my wedding day, 6 months after I started Ishtara.
How listening to my body led me out of depression
I used to hold a deep loathing for the saying “It’s always darkest before the dawn”. It was not what I wanted to hear when the dark night of my soul was one without end. What I’ve since learned is that the change doesn’t happen just because of the darkness; it happens when I fully surrender to it.
By writing, sharing and claiming how much it was consuming me, I accepted where I was.
And then, I asked my pain to dance.
Beyond being able to hear my body’s messages, Ishtara has allowed me to fully embody the most agonising parts of my experiences. I then not only survive them but alchemise them into hope, love, and power.
When we lost Alora, my body wanted us to grieve her fully, but my mind was concerned about our financial survival. Pregnancy loss is catastrophic, but capitalism comes calling for mothers whose babies have died inside them.
The bills were mounting, but the more I pressed myself to get better, the worse my postpartum depression became. My mind was impatient for the process to end, but my body needed us to keep grieving.
We had carried my daughter so beautifully together, sustaining her in our waters with love. After my surgery, Alora’s remains were sent away for testing and a month later we discovered she’d had a chromosomal disorder - Turner Syndrome - and had developed as far as she could. My body held her so well that there were no external signs that she had died until a routine ultrasound revealed a missing heartbeat in place of the bright flicker we had seen before. I was in shock, and angry that my body had lied to me.
Except she hadn’t.
For the first time in many moons, a panic attack woke me out of my sleep the night before the appointment that dashed my dreams. Alora was the perfect size for her foetal development date, meaning her heart had stopped only hours before the ultrasound.
My body had told the truth. It was my mind that needed time to catch up.
These constant conflicts between myself and my body led to suicidal ideation and my husband spent most of the summer on watch.
Four months after losing my daughter, I woke up more desperate. I’d had a colonoscopy and biopsy and had stitches where the sun truly does not shine. I have been clean and sober for over 12 years and had managed to avoid general anaesthetic until the last year. Two cycles of IVF, two resulting D&Cs and the colonoscopy had seen me under sedation five separate times, and I was feeling hopeless.
I used to imagine I’d welcome these brain breaks, but I am now so in tune with myself that I cannot tolerate the fracturing of mind, body and spirit that occurs.
That morning, I learned that a sweat lodge was taking place at Spirit House. In spite of the intensity of my suicidality - or likely because of it - I felt called to attend. Building the lodge with old friends and new, and making my prayer ties, prepared me for what was to come.
The next day, under the stewardship of Lakota Wisdom Keeper Kari Black Elk, I experienced my first sweat.
As we prepared to enter the lodge, Kari told us:
“It will be very dark in there. The darkness is not frightening. We consider it the same as the day.”
“The darkness has a purpose. It is there to remind you that you are the light.”
While a heat more intense than I’d ever experienced permeated all my cells, I tapped into the discoveries of my Ishtara practice. I dove into the underworld of my experience, welcoming every uncomfortable sensation.
Combining these two practices of complete surrender triggered a cascade of healing for me.
I had spent the summer living a nightmare, feeling deeply alone and abandoned after losing my daughter, and scared of my own mind. My deepest fears had come to life, and I held them with open arms. I listened intently to the pain and where it was guiding me and I finally heard my body’s cries of mourning. The learnings from the sweat lodge rang true for me – that only by venturing deep into the dark can we see our own light.
I didn’t need to be rescued from my sadness, I needed to feel it.
Two weeks later, the clocks changed. I’d lost my daughter during the summer solstice; on the same day we’d married one year before, and summer was finally over. The relief in my body was palpable. The darkness of the night came earlier, and I embraced the blackened skies.
They accentuated my light.
My mother birthed me, but all being right in the order of things, I will outlive her. While my spirit is always held by the Ancestors, my own is the only body who will be with me from my first breath to my last.
She knows me best and I trust her wisdom to carry us through.
A healing note
There is one more modality I started last year that, in tandem with my movement practice and talk therapy, has altered my brain-body connection and created new neural pathways. However, it requires the space of its own essay, which is forthcoming. I’ve only briefly touched on the somatic modalities I’ve used in this piece but they have impacted me in profound ways. Let me know in the comments if you’d like to know more about any one of them in particular.
With love.
Thanks for your vulnerability. Sending Love and Light
I love you my dear sober sister. ❤️