Today, in the depths of a “not progress” feeling that I did not want to label “struggle” but had to face was definitely a thing that needed to be processed. I went to my songwriting class. As a trauma therapist, I can be prone to absorb the struggles of others because I get into their story with my whole being in order to help them with the healing through process. I can sense their stuck points with a training I have called Somatic Experiencing, which means I have to understand where pain has landed in you beyond the narrative of what happened. I have to feel profoundly with the sense called interoception.
There are times in life when you suddenly feel very happy, and you literally experience it as a tingle of energy running down your spine and arms, this is interoception. Another example of interoception could be horror, such as in, “It made my skin crawl.” On the other hand, peak emotional experiences during exposure to emotionally meaningful songs, speeches, or art pieces will universally produce what scientists refer to as aesthetic chills or frisson. Opposites of peak emotion, like nausea, disgust, and sudden loss of bladder or bowel control, are still expressions of embodied feelings. This is remarkable access, if we were to only focus on the skin’s reaction such as in chills that "made the hair on my back stand up," this alone is a remarkable embodied feeling and access to a resource of what is happening beyond words. It acts as a somatic marker (body memory) that is tied to this abstract emotion and it is unique to your power of interoception that you interpret as a meaningful moment or a terrified one.
What I have to do through Somatic Awareness is “sense” how a comment from childhood that my client is sharing, for example, “you are a failed abortion”, jams my own system. I sense this in order to guide them to where it is stuck in theirs and for relief that it can be known and released without the rehashing of talk that would likely not get very far. If their eyes shoot daggers at me and their jaw locks, I hold it and understand it has to be at me temporarily so I can see it and understand.
My songwriting class is my outlet for the felt sense of understanding burnout I can experience. However, today it became a platform for a message I didn’t know I was holding inside me; “Try a Litte Tenderness”. By this I mean, try understanding that someone else has a process they are going through. Allow yourself to feel it without diagnosing it or psychoanalyzing. Understand through the felt sense and release from the idea we trigger each other intentionally.
The songwriting class prompted me last week to “write about someone you know”. I wrote about my “triggered” neighbor upstairs and it became a profound metaphor. The Lady Upstairs is someone who needed my understanding. The Lady Upstairs is Me and You. I hope you enjoyed listening to this side bar on understanding today. Here now is the song and please consider clicking on the link to the article Does Time Heal?
Try A Little Tenderness