Ilene Smith. Moving Beyond Trauma. Lioncrest, 2019.
Moving Beyond Trauma introduces the reader to Somatic Experiencing therapy. The basic premise is that to recover well from a traumatic experience or upbringing, we have to involve the body as well as the mind.
The author notes that “talk therapy” works to some degree, but especially if a person experiences fear, digestive problems, shaking, or rigidity when encountering a situation or person, then perhaps that individual needs to have control over the body as well. She notes that many times our responses are automatic, based in what she call the reptilian brain, in other words, the brain stem. Our nervous system, after all, goes through the whole body.
She emphasizes the importance of touch to help with people trying to overcome certain fears or trying to establish good relationships with people. The best part of the book are testimonies of some of her clients. This includes people who experienced sexual assault, raised in abusive homes, grieving over someone’s death, fighting an eating disorder, to name a few.
It is not just our minds that we have to bring into line but our bodies through its nervous system.
As I was reading this book, I had an opportunity to test the basic idea on a small scale. When I was a child, I was terrified of dogs. Even after we had a pet dog, certain dogs still made me uncomfortable. When I was a teenager, I recall taking to my mother about it. She said that when I was a baby, she was walking me in a stroller and a dog jumped into the stroller. I was terrified.
Smith notes that some traumas may happen to us before we can speak, some even in utero. I was walking the other day in a park where there were people walking their dogs. None of this particularly bothered me, until one dog I was approaching started barking at me. I felt the old fear well up. I consciously told my body to relax, that it is all right. Immediately that nervous reaction went away. There appears to be something to this. Most of us learn that in this life the mind cannot be separated from the body.
Some of what Moving Beyond Trauma shares sounds similar to primal integration, another holistic psychological technique involving physical actions and touch as well as talk therapy. This has proven to help some individuals as well.
Years ago when I was a stringer for a newspaper, I proposed doing an article on a couple that practiced primal integration. The editor thought it sounded too weird. I get it, but it is hard to argue with success. There are a variety of people and personalities, and not every technique works with every person.
I confess I prefer the term medulla or brain stem to “reptilian brain,” but that is more a matter of taste, I guess. The term reptilian brain may sound creepy, but somatic experiencing may be just what some people need to help them overcome much greater difficulties than being frightened by a dog when a baby.