Somatic therapy reaches places that no amount of talk therapy will ever go

Spoiler alert: this blog is a diary. LOL.  Sometimes I write a post that is truly confessional, one just for me, lest I forget.  This is such a post.  But in a way, they all are.  The kinky stuff is just as much a confession as any other.

One day I will become a somatic therapist.  Being “good” at a practice that sits well with my spiritual path, but also one that seems to come to me with a graceful gentleness, is a kind of forever career through retirement.  Healing is a nice way to spend one’s twilight years.

I’ve thought about this a lot lately because I have been on deep training, which involves both treating and being treated by fellow students and practitioners.  One observation is one that some people refer to as being an “empath”.  I can’t stand the love of self-labels, and the word is another one of those back-handed self-compliments that makes my skin crawl.  I also don’t think I am empathic or empathetic.  At least not in a general, day-to-day way.  I am far too animal.  

I don’t have the same social skills as others more practiced in polite society.  Not because of a lack of education in manners, or a life lived in such a milieu.  Nor will I make the excuses of ADD (even though they are described by the condition).  No.  It is more that I am oblivious.  No amount of training has proven to be enough.  I seem to just insult people or hurt people’s feelings, or just blithely disregard the niceties which anyone should expect.

Every now and again I am confronted by this…sometimes gently, but other times quite brutally.  To be fair to me, I do ask from time to time, and when I do, I genuinely mean I want the person to kick me in the guts.  When they do, and they invariably do, I feel it no less keenly than anyone else.  I learned long ago to apologize.  Not as a form of genuflection or as a prelude to a ‘but’, rather acting on the assumption that they are right…

The automatic corollary does not hold—that I am wrong.  No matter.  What does matter is that they feel that they are right and I am wrong.  Argument is futile and counter-productive.  I say to myself, ‘shut up and learn.’  This quality has been valued by my teachers.  And indeed, it is often remarked upon when I am receiving professional feedback of one kind or another…that I don’t have the filter of resistance to the teaching that most do.

This is not a form of submission or conflict avoidance.  It is more a form of ‘why bother’?  We will learn less.  This is predicated on a fundamental confidence in my filtration system—that I will sift through all of the information later, when the emotional charge in it is less poignant and I can just absorb and learn as I have deemed useful to me.  Should a person give me more pain or criticism than I can handle, then sooner or later I dump them.  Ironically, I am not a masochist.

Nor am I a narcissist.  Such a person takes umbrage at these little barbs.  I don’t.  I try to learn.  And when I can’t, because it just hurts, I’ll walk away.  I think a narcissist sticks around and tries to bend reality.  What do I know?  But clearly the accusation of narcissism still stings.  I have begun to equate the feeling like being mis-gendered.  But how are they to know?  They can’t, because they can’t see inside you, and they interpret the outside representation in a certain way, based on perceived motive…but we all know that perception is more driven by our own views than it is by the subject we are taking in.

I have been in therapy my whole life.  On and off.  More off than on.  But it is still a frequent companion.  I have alluded to how therapy was coerced when I was a child, and that it resulted in being medicated…and if I could have been said to have had a will as a child, it was definitively against my will.

My mother had a need to break my will.  And my will had to keep shifting to be able to find new fields of resistance.  It doesn’t matter that all of my Maginot lines as they were no match to her adult skills.  She breached all of them eventually, each one a new challenge, until in the end it was touch.  I denied her touch, and in a way, denied everyone, but especially myself, of touch.  

I have written about how ex-Mistress re-opened my world to touch, and indeed, she was the first person whose touch I can recall truly welcoming since I was a baby.  It was soul tonic.  And from that I learned that my primary love language is touch.

The particular form of somatic therapy I am studying is best described as psychotherapy through touch.  Yes, talk is permitted, but the primary communication link is through touch.

In a session the other day, with someone I have studied with for the past two years, but who has never touched me, I felt a swell of deep emotion that I had not accessed before.  I breezed myself onto the table fully expecting to ignore my way through it, as so often happens when someone who doesn’t yet know what they are doing is having a go.  And there was a little of that, as she, like me, is still a student.  But my gosh.  All she did was hold my hand in a particular way with one hand, and gently explore other parts of me with the other, and suddenly it was there.

This childhood feeling of being forced to see one psychiatrist after another, and righting with all of my child strength and logic to resist them, to throw them off the trail, when the trail was whatever took them into me, prying, poking around inside.  I hate therapy.  I hated seeing them.  I didn’t want to open up.  I could only imagine that my mother was waiting for them to give her a call and spill the beans on what they had discovered.  It was an awful, horrific, experience, and an absolute betrayal.  It eventually involved being drugged.

I believe that she meant well.  I also believe that she was like one of those people who say ‘this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you,’.  The lie in that.

The feeling I am left with, have been lift with over this, was that my mother used therapy to assert control.  She was unable to parent her way to control, and she resented it.  I have this overwhelming sense of impotence from it, not sexual impotence, or something that would have affected my male ego, but rather a kind of inability to do anything.  A sense of helplessness.  Even that is not a perfect descriptor.

In a body work session I was overwhelmed by the sense that I had no hands.  That I was trying to do things with my hands, but I had only stumps there, so was helpless/impotent in that sense.  I think this is what draws me so much to shibari—being tied up, totally immobilised, and learning to shut the self down to that degree, is the hardest thing I have encountered in BDSM.  Psychologically.  My domme’s favourite game is sensory deprivation, but I am not yet ready.  This goes deep, and through somatic therapy, I found it.

I had the same feeling for the drugs that were given to me as a child.  It was an extreme form of controlling me.  But I didn’t to be controlled.  I just needed a mother.  A loving parent.

My absent father was an abusive asshole, a confidence-destroying, belittling man who robbed all of us of our self-esteem, and who had a tendency towards frequent rage or verbal abuse, with occasional physical domination or abuse.  This was pocked by drunken revelries over dinner where he would philosophize about how much he loved us, or about what a great father he was, or about just how great he was, or that he was ‘tough but fair’.  It is hard to square my disdain for him with one act which he did when I went to live with him in Italy as a child after my parents divorce.  Within one day he took me off the medications that my mother had me on to control me.  Even if it is was more about him, he didn’t want a “damaged child”, a child who had something wrong with him.  The effect was profound, however.  He stated his disgust for the drugging.

I never trusted my mother with my emotions, with letting her close, as she used whatever she learned to hurt me.  I could never have unpicked all of this was talk therapy.  You tell me how all it took was a soft voice, a soft hand holding mine, and a gently reassuring voice letting me know it was okay, and then the tears flooded out of me…so much that I had to cover my face.

The ways that we heal are rather amazing if we take them.  And in this one way, I shall forever be grateful to my father.  It is possible to take something positive from even bad people, damaged people, bad situations.