In an Unspoken Voice

by Peter A Levine

  At this point, I suggest to Miriam that she just sit quietly with her body, that she sort of meditate and wait for any sensations, feelings, pictures or words. She becomes rather still, but not frozen like she appeared earlier in the session. However, after a while she tightens up again:

  “I don’t really have a picture … Well, I sort of do, but it’s more like I’m thinking about him, about my first husband. And I feel tense all over.”

  “Look,” I suggest, “maybe sit with the tension a little longer and see what develops with the feeling that’s in your body.”

  She seems to drop in again. “My belly feels so tight, it could explode.”

  “And if it explodes?” I ask.

  She is quiet; then, a torrent of tears. “I don’t really have a picture of him, but I do have that tightening in my gut again … What should I do?”

  I suggest that she focus on the tightness and make the “voo” sound (see Chapter 6) to help her “open” her guts.

  “You’re always inside of me. I can never get away from you … Why are you there? I don’t understand … Hmm,” she intones, becoming curious as she goes along. After a few minutes, her legs begin to tremble again. The shaking intensifies and spreads—this time, with little jerks into her shoulders. A deep spontaneous breath emerges, and tears stream from her eyes.

  Miriam reaches out tentatively with her arms and quickly pulls them back. After another breath she speaks as if to her first husband: “Evan, I’m holding on to you. You’re in my guts. I won’t open to Henry … I just keep holding on to you.” She starts to cry, but then continues, “I think I’m mad at you. I can’t believe I’m saying it, but I’m mad at you for leaving. You left me alone. I hate that you died.” She clenches her hands and yells: “I hate you! I hate you! … Don’t leave me, damn it! … I hate you!” She begins to cry again, this time sobbing deeply.

  When she starts to talk, I suggest that she should “maybe just let things settle.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right … There’s something I’m trying to get away from.” Some time passes, and Miriam cries gently, her legs trembling softly. “I haven’t opened to Henry. I’ve been pushing him away. No wonder we’re always in conflict. And when he tries to get physical, I just want to push him away … I felt guilty about that.”

  Her hands make a pushing movement again. Gradually, her movements become softer: her hands open out into a supine position, and she gently brings them toward her chest in a gesture of reaching and taking into the heart a tentative embrace.

  I don’t say anything, and Miriam continues, “I needed to protect myself … I felt so hurt and guilty.”

  “And how do you feel inside now?” I ask to keep her in the moment.

  “Well, actually I feel really good.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Well, it’s mostly that I feel a lot of space inside myself.”

  “Where do you feel that?”

  “I feel that in my belly and chest … My head feels like it’s got more room too, but mostly my belly and chest, they feel really open … It feels like a cool breeze is in my body. My legs feel really powerful, and I have a lot of … I feel shy to say it … I feel warm and tingling in my, in my … vagina … It feels like I really want Henry.” She pauses.

  “I did what I had to do then,” she went on, “but it’s time to let go. I was so afraid of my hurt … but even more afraid of my anger. It’s like, if I felt what I felt, I might hurt Henry somehow … It doesn’t make sense logically, but that’s what was all twisted up inside of me.” She adds, “But I don’t need to do that anymore.”

  Miriam takes a full easy breath and says with a broad joyful grin, “That breath took me and tickled me and laughed me.” She laughs freely, looks around the room, then slowly at my face.

  She puts her hands to her face—first, to cover it in embarrassment, but then gently holds and strokes it shyly. Tears roll down her cheeks.

  “I feel finished … for now, I mean,” she says. “I know there’s other stuff, but I just want to sit in your yard by the river for a few minutes, then take a walk … Thanks … See you next week.”

  Bonnie: A Forgotten Moment

  The mind has forgotten but the body has not—thankfully.

  —Sigmund Freud

  Bonnie is not an aggressive person, but she is by no means a pushover, either. Most of her peers and friends see her as well adjusted, even-handed and assertive. It was therefore surprising to her colleagues, and to herself, when for no apparent reason she became increasingly submissive and unpredictably explosive. At the point when her behavior threatened her relations with her colleagues, she became concerned.

  During my Berkeley training class in 1974, Bonnie raised her hand when I requested a volunteer for a demonstration session. This was to be a demonstration that would start solely with symptoms or behavior issues rather than with any recall of a compelling event. I will frequently work without a historical link in order to prevent the client from bypassing bottom-up processing and prematurely jumping to an abstract, interpretational level. Neither I nor Bonnie’s classmates knew her “story” when she elected to work with me on her symptoms in front of the group. Bonnie herself did not make the connection between her behavioral changes and an event that had transpired a year and a half earlier and that, as far as she was concerned, was irrelevant.

  I asked Bonnie to recall a recent encounter with a colleague that illustrated her sudden shift in behavior, and then we both noted her bodily reactions. Bonnie described feeling a sinking sensation in her belly. I noticed that her shoulders were hunched over and brought that to her attention. When asked to describe how she felt in that position, she replied, “It makes me hate myself.” Bonnie was taken aback by this sudden outburst of self-loathing. Rather than analyzing why she felt that way, I guided Bonnie back to the sensations in her body.‡ After a pause she reported that her “heart and mind were racing a million miles an hour.”

  She then became disturbed by what she described as a “sweaty, smelly, hot sensation” on her back, which left her feeling nauseated. Bonnie now seemed more agitated—her face turned pale, and she felt an urge to get up and leave the room. After reassurance, Bonnie chose to remain and continued tracking her discomfort. It intensified and then gradually diminished. Following this ebb and flow, Bonnie became aware of another sensation—a tension in the back of her right arm and shoulder. When she focused her attention on this, she started to feel an urge to thrust her elbow backward. I offered a hand as a support and as a resistance so that Bonnie could safely feel the power in her arm as she pushed it slowly backward. After pushing for several seconds, her body began to shake and tremble as she broke out into a profuse sweat. Her legs also began moving up and down as if they were on sewing machine treadles.

  As Bonnie’s arm continued its slow press backward, the body shaking decreased, and Bonnie felt as though her legs were getting stronger. She said that they felt “like they wanted to, and could, move.” She reported noticing a strong urge propelling her forward. Suddenly, a picture flashed before her—a streetlight and the image of the couple that had “helped her.” “I got away … I got away …,” she cried softly. It was then she remembered molding into the man’s torso as he held a knife to her throat. She went on, “I did that to make him think I was his … Then my body knew what to do, and it did it … That’s what let me escape.”

  Then the story that her body had been telling emerged in words: eighteen months earlier, Bonnie had been the victim of an attempted rape. While walking home after visiting a friend in another neighborhood, a stranger had pulled her into an alley and threatened to kill her if she didn’t cooperate. Somehow, she was able to break free and run to a lighted street corner where two passersby yelled for the police. Bonnie was politely interviewed by the police and then taken home by a friend. Surprisingly, she could not remember how she had escaped, but she was tearfully grateful to have been left unharmed. Afterward, her life appeared t
o return to normal, but when she felt stressed or in conflict, her body was still responding as it had when the knife was held to her throat.

  Bonnie found herself helpless and passive or easily enraged under everyday stress, not realizing that this was a replay of the brief pretense at submissiveness that probably saved her life. Her “submission” successfully fooled the assailant, allowing a momentary opportunity for the instinctual energy of a wild animal to take over, propelling her arms and legs in a successful escape. However, it had all happened so fast that she had not had the chance to integrate the experience. At a primitive level, she still didn’t “know” that she had escaped, and remained identified with the “submissiveness” rather than with her complete two-phase strategy that had in fact saved her life. Motorically and emotionally, it was like part of her was still in the assailant’s clutches.

  After processing and completing the rape-related actions, Bonnie now reported having an overall sense of capability and empowerment. She was “back to even more of her [old] self” in place of the previous submissive self-hatred. This new self came from being able to physically feel the motor response of elbowing her assailant, and then to sense the immense power in her legs that had, in fact, carried her to safety.

  This is a case where symptoms did not emerge full-blown for twelve to eighteen months after the traumatic experience. Hence, it was not readily apparent that they were sequelae to a precipitating event. For reasons largely unknown, it is not uncommon for symptoms to be delayed by six months or even one and a half to two years. In addition, symptoms may only manifest after yet another traumatic encounter occurs—sometimes years later.

  How many of our own habitual behaviors and feelings are outside of our conscious awareness or are long accepted as part of ourselves, of who we are, when in fact they are not? Rather, these behaviors are reactions to events long forgotten (or rationalized) by our minds but remembered accurately by our bodies. We can thank Freud for correctly surmising that both the imprints of horrible experiences, as well as the antidote, and latent catalyst for transformation, exist within our bodies.

  Sharon: September 11, 2001

  The body has its reasons that reason cannot reason.

  —Pascal

  Through the Body’s “I”

  Just as she did every morning at work, Sharon was reading over her emails. It was a crisp, clear, New York autumn day—the kind of a day that makes one feel excited to be alive. Startled by a thunderous, deafening crash, she turned to witness the walls in her office moving twenty feet in her direction. Though Sharon was immediately mobilized, springing to her feet and readying to flee for her life, she was slowly and methodically led down eighty floors via stairwells filled with the suffocating, acrid smell of burning jet fuel and debris. After finally reaching the mezzanine in the north tower of the World Trade Center one hour and twenty minutes later, the south tower suddenly collapsed. The shock waves lifted Sharon into the air, violently throwing her on top of a crushed, bloody body. An off-duty police detective discovered her, dazed and disoriented, atop the dead man. He helped her find her way out of the wreckage and away from the site, through absolutely thick, pitch-blackness. She met a few other survivors sitting in front of a church, and together they gave thanks to be alive.

  In the weeks following her miraculous survival, a dense yellow fog enveloped her in a deadening numbness. Sharon felt indifferent by day, merely going through the motions of living with little passion, direction or pleasure. Just a week before she had loved classical music; now it no longer interested her: she “couldn’t stand listening to it.” Numb most of the time, she was periodically assaulted by panic attacks. Sleep became her enemy; at night she was awakened by her own screaming and sobbing. For the first time in her life, this once highly motivated executive could not imagine a future for herself; terror had become the organizing principle of her life.§

  Sharon’s terror was not focused on anything in particular; it appeared everywhere, projected “out there”—onto a world that felt threatening, even when everything was objectively safe and predictable. It kept her from flying, riding the subway or being in public places. She was constantly on guard, whether awake or asleep. Sharon saw me on a television interview, tracked me down through my institute and then traveled four days and nights, by train, to see me in Los Angeles, where I was teaching. On December 1, 2001, we did the session summarized below.

  When she enters the room, dressed smartly in an orange business suit, Sharon walks straight to a chair and sits down without seeming even to notice me. It makes me eerily uncomfortable when, almost before I had introduced myself, she begins talking about the horrors of the event, blandly, as though it had happened to someone else.‖ Had I not comprehended her words, I might have thought she was talking about a boring office party rather than a personal confrontation with death and dismemberment. Listening to her emotionally disconnected narrative left me squirming, wanting to get up and leave the room. I am unsettled at what lies hidden underneath her blandness.

  My introspection is interrupted, drawn to the intimation of a slight, expansive gesture made by Sharon’s arms and hands as she speaks; it’s as though she were reaching toward something to hold on to. Is Sharon’s body telling another story, a story that is hidden from her mind? I ask her to put her verbal narrative aside for the moment and to place her attention, instead, on the nascent message her hands are communicating to both of us. I encourage her to pursue this avenue by slowly repeating the movement and keeping her focus on its physical sensation.a

  Moving slowly and focusing attention on a movement allows it to be felt in a special way. When clients do this, most often they will experience their arms (or other part of the body) moving as if on its own (“like my arm is moving me!”). People will often smile or laugh because the sensation of the arm moving itself seems so unusual.b

  Perplexed at first, Sharon describes the gesture as though she is “holding something.” A noticeable shift occurs in her body; her face is visibly less strained and her shoulders less rigid. Unexpectedly, a fleeting image of the Hudson River appears in her mind’s eye, the daily view from the living room in her apartment across the river from Manhattan.

  Jumping back to the narrative story, Sharon becomes agitated as she tells me how she is haunted, revisited, by the smoldering smoke plumes, which she now sees every day from this same window. They evoke the horribly acrid smells from that day; she feels a burning in her nostrils. Rather than letting her go on “reliving” the traumatic intrusion, I firmly contain and coax her to continue focusing on the sensations of her arm movements. A spontaneous image emerges, one of boats moving on the river. They convey to her a comforting sense of timelessness, movement and flow. “You can destroy the buildings, but you can’t drain the Hudson,” she pronounces softly. Then, rather than going on with the horrifying details of the event, she surprises herself by describing (and feeling) how beautiful it had been when she had set out for work on that “perfect autumn morning.”

  This process is an example of expanding the “aperture” of an image to its pretraumatic state (as described in Chapter 7). Up to the moment before the impact of the jet, it had been a perfect day, infused with vibrant colors and gentle scents. These sense impressions still exist somewhere in the catacombs of consciousness, but they have been overridden by the traumatic fixation. Gradually restoring the full spectrum of the disparate parts of an image is an integral component of resolving trauma.c

  Sharon’s body and images are beginning to tell a story that contrasts markedly with the one her words are relaying, almost as though narrated by two entirely different persons. As she holds the images of the Hudson River, along with the associated body sensations, she becomes aware of a tentative sense of relief. She now innocently recalls how she had been excited to come to work that day. Her gesture is stronger and more definite. Continued attention to the physical feeling of the gesture deepens her sense of relaxation, stimulating an almost playful curiosity. As she
looks quizzically at her hands, first one then the other, I breathe a sigh of relief. Such a seemingly insignificant shift has profound implications—playful curiosity being one of the prima facie “antidotes” for trauma. Curious exploration, pleasure and trauma cannot coexist in the nervous system; neurologically, they contradict one another.d

  This capacity to experience the positive bodily feelings (of interest and curiosity), while remaining in contact with her feelings of terror and helplessness, allows Sharon to do something she would not have been able to do a few minutes before. She can now begin to stand back and “simply” observe these difficult, uncomfortable, physical sensations and images without becoming overwhelmed by them.e They are, in other words, kept at bay. This dual consciousness induces a shift that allows sensations to be felt as they are: intrinsically energetic, vital and in present time, rather than as fragments, triggers and harbingers of fear and helplessness from the past. This felt distinction makes it possible for Sharon to review and assimilate many details of the horrific event without reliving it. This new “dexterity” for revisiting, without reliving, a traumatic experience is essential in the process of recovery and reengagement that I call renegotiation.