Yoga for Trauma Healing

I am finally beginning to understand my body better – all the weird things I tried to hide from people because they did not make any sense before beginning trauma therapy. For example, I had no idea that it is not normal for my body to not physically feel things….for my brain to not know what my body is doing. I didn’t know that’s a trauma thing. A PTSD thing. Apparently that is part of my high pain tolerance too. My body is simply numb much of the time. In addition to therapy, yoga is helping me change this.

PTSD can numb your body – even with sex

I have a deep love for my husband, and I have always wanted to love him physically, but for years, I could barely feel anything during sex. It’s better now, not always at first, but once I can turn inward and calm myself, I begin to feel the physical sensations and can enjoy him and sometimes even appreciate my own body.

trauma causes communication problems with your body

How the hell did my body know what was happening before I did? The rheumatoid arthritis started during my first marriage. There is never a day that my body does not ache. So many headaches. All the problems with my gut. And the fatigue. Years and years of fatigue that became debilitating. And now 14 vitamin and hormone deficiencies and autoimmune disorders.

I read that our bodies protect our minds by not having the brain process too much but instead manifest the pain in physical ways over the years. That’s kind of a shitty way for my body to protect me. And how did my body decide when it should let my brain know? Talk about communication issues! I thought I had issues communicating with other people, and now I find out I can’t even communicate with myself.

In the future I fully intend to tell my body everything that is going on for two reasons:

• so that it will be honest back and let me know just what I’ve been involved with in this life
• so that it doesn’t passively aggressively attack me while I’m just quietly going about my day trying to be a nice person.

I will be like, “Hey Body. I put lots of kale in your smoothie this morning. OK, also some beets and collagen because it’s good for you. And full disclosure body, because I hide nothing from you, collagen is made from a dead cow’s bones and hide. I already knew this Body, but you probably do not and I don’t want you to find out later and give me another killer headache during the night like you did yesterday. I don’t even know what the hell I did to you for that one.” OK, my therapist would say I’m deflecting with humor now.

 Since my divorce I have been obsessed with exercise. I would tell people it is for my physical health and to set an example for my young daughter. In reality, I was obsessed with being strong.

yoga

But as the years progressed and I became happier in my life, my workouts also progressed from only strength training to including yoga. I began to find a balance in which my mind and body could start working together. In the last couple of months I’ve learned that with PTSD your body cannot always feel things correctly – physically. Once I learned that, I started to understand myself so much better. And I better understand why making my brain in sync with movement is so necessary for my healing process.

I think my first realization of how out of sync I was with my body was when I began doing yoga. I started taking yoga classes about 10 years ago. I found it incredibly challenging both physically and mentally.  Never before had I done such methodic movements in which my brain needed to be aware of my body. I remember saying to my sister the first year I began yoga, “You have to try yoga! It makes you actually feel your own body during the day!” She said something like, “Why are you always so weird!?”

I was not trying to be weird!

I was truly astounded by the sensations I had discovered. I began to feel my posture. I felt my pelvis bones sitting in a chair. I felt my actual skin and muscles and bones instead of only aching pain. And most significantly, after holding very difficult poses…for longer than I felt was physically possible, I felt a release in my body that unnerved me. She was right, that sounds so weird.

Yoga makes me aware of the extreme tightness in my hips and low back. It makes me feel the tension in my face and neck and shoulders. My pain has not gone away, but yoga helps with that.

In life, yoga is making me aware that pain does not last forever. There is relief after feeling pain. If I’m aware of the painful emotions in my body, I can love myself enough to take a bath, to take a nap, to see a chiropractor, to get a massage and sometimes to ask for help.

hyper-arousal and agitation

And it wasn’t only being out of sync. My body was in a state of hyper-arousal, aware of every slight movement around me with no internal sense of calm. A state of PTSD although I did not know it then.  I was constantly agitated and never knew why. I could not sit still. I could not take anything in. There was such a high level of agitation with the world around me. I cannot say it is significantly better now, but again, I am far more aware of it. I’ve learned that the awareness is key as I begin to develop tools to dissolve the agitation, the anxiety and the pain.

yoga helped my brain synchronize with my body

I continued yoga for years. When I attended classes in a studio setting I always walked out when we reached the short meditations at the end of class. It took me five years before I could get my body to move beyond the agitation and lie still through an 8-minute meditation. I only did this once or twice a week, but it made my body start processing much more.

Processing memories was not the intention, I did not expect what was happening. I did not expect to have a steady stream of tears during sun salutations. I did not expect the overwhelming sadness or anger as I moved through different hip stretches. I did not expect brief frightening flashes of buried memories that had no story around them as I lie on my back.

In the beginning, I became so agitated during yoga that I often walked out of classes or turned off my TV. I even switched from Friday classes to Wednesday classes just because the Friday teacher had seen too many tears on my face and I was embarrassed to keep showing up.

Recently, as I moved through my yoga poses at a class, I kept having flashes of the ugly red brick buildings from when I attended college over 20 years ago. The administrative buildings, not the classrooms.

Days later in another class, it was layers of snow between the buildings flashing in my head. And the next time, I was there on the university campus but nobody else was. I was so agitated with all of these flashes, despite nothing apparently wrong. I would leave class feeling raw and hurt instead of refreshed or calm.

In the next class, I had the same images, and then it was winter break and all the students were away. It was empty. There was no one to help me. Help me what? I had no idea why I was looking at these stupid brick buildings in the snow. Nothing more. It was so frustrating.

Finally the next week as I moved through the same yoga movements, all the flashes came together – still fuzzy but pieced together. My Ex ended the fight, pushing me against one of those brick walls and then down on the ground hidden by a row of bushes and forced me to have sex there out in the open. I remember the cold and the dead leaves in the trees above.

my body reacts to the memories as if it is happening today

My tears would not stop. The shame and fear is as real as ever, as if I am still in that part of my life. My fear is not just of him this time but fear I would be seen and kicked out of the university. I was not just there as a random innocent student, I was there as a wife with my husband.

As always, I question whether these memories are real or made up. There is so little background around them. There is no time-frame, no context. But when memories come like this, they consume me for days, sometimes weeks. When these sort of pieces are trying to fit together the rest of my life always falls apart for awhile. Parenting becomes far more difficult. I push away all physical touch. I forget to cook dinner. I stop showing up for my commitments because I cannot concentrate. I am very restless, tense, angry at everyone around me and distracted.

getting my mind to work with my body has been a long, slow process

I am learning to embrace the emotions that accompany my movements. I might always have triggers and I have so far to go, but it’s already been a journey of much healing. I can finally  see that now. I’ve told my good friend several times that yoga classes were my therapy for years, just keeping me coping until I reached the point to handle seeing an actual therapist and begin saying things out loud. I was unable to explain to her or even myself why the classes felt like therapy, but I see now it has been a very real part of my healing.