To be a healer means first to heal thyself

Can we ever heal ourselves completely?  Can we ever truly heal at all, or do we just become more facile at recognising our own traumas and preventing them from triggering us?

I spent the past week in the final throes of qualifying as a licensed Somatic Therapist.  In truth, however, just as with psychoanalysis, the work is never done.  To be a Therapist, you must also receive therapy…and it isn’t enough to just go for therapy, in my discipline, it must also be observed.  In other words, when I work on patients, or I am being worked on, one of the most senior in my discipline, must look on.

I find this added presence a powerful guarantee that something big will happen.  Even when I think it won’t.  Particularly when I think it won’t.

About a year ago, during a session with a colleague—her first observed session as a practising therapist (we have an ongoing requirement as part of the practice), I experienced the most gut-wrenching “discovery”/release/whatever it was.  She and I had been to several trainings together over a period of years, so it was a little bizarre that we had never worked together before.  I think it was because I didn’t like her somehow.  She has this earnest air to her, and that makes me feel a bit of the “I’m going to fix you,” energy that some people drawn to healing work have.

What came out?  Repressed memory.  And by ‘memory’ I don’t mean ‘of the mind’.  What memory I am talking about is in the body.  The profoundest kind.  When we suppress conscious memory, or rather, when the body does that, it does that because it holds in the body the true terror of what lies there.

And as I lay on the table and this woman worked her magic on me, helped in part by the guidance of the supervisor, something shifted inside of me.  Suddenly I had a splitting headache, excruciating, as if a railroad tie had been driven into my skull through my right eye.  I associate this feeling with how I feel when I have cried from the deepest depths.  For a long time.  Profound grief.

And what emerged was something I have mentioned from time to time on this blog but was quite new to me at the time.  What emerged was how my body felt about being forcibly medicated by my mother for an “illness” which I didn’t have.  She was asserting control and was using the psycho-medical establishment to create dominion over my autonomy, and it was soul crushing.

On the table this week, I revisited this, but not from the same place, but rather was able to utter the words, “I’m glad she’s dead.”  What a horrible thing to say, but it is my truth.  And I realise also that I was waiting for her to die to come out. Perhaps not explicitly, but when asked by my siblings how I think she would feel about it, I am certain in the knowledge that her reaction would have only been hurtful, no matter what form it took.

In that same session, I was also able to say that I will not regret my father’s death.  I was ready for him to push off a long time ago.  He is a colossal narcissist and abusive jerk.  I wrote him off as a child.  And I was wise to do so.  People you disregard have far less power to hurt you.

During a recent visit with him, there was a brief moment of softening from me.  Flattery does work.  He was seducing like Scylla and Charybdis, onto the rocks of his own narcissism.  Once I felt warmth towards him, he stuck the knife in.  It was a salutary reminder of his true character.

I also found myself on the table during a group demonstration, where one of the top instructors uses you as a guinea pig before your other classmates.  It is quite exposed.  I felt that nothing would come up.  I wasn’t feeling it, and I had reservations about the teacher.  I wrote once about being touched inappropriately by a fellow student who I now describe as a groomer.  I was admonished by this teacher to not talk about it…and I found her reaction horrifying…questioning whether I had imagined it.

As an aside, I mentioned this to a colleague who said she picked up the same vibe from this individual, so I am glad I finally had the courage to raise it to someone else who had been touched by him.  It’s funny how someone else’s dirty energy can affect an entire environment as they work to distort the dynamics through false innocence.

And for most of the session, absolutely nothing was happening…at least in my mind.  But my body had a different story it wanted to tell.  And what it found was comfort and safety in her hands and words, and suddenly there was a little crack of light and I knew what was on the other side…her fingers were on my sternum, gently touching, as if touching the rim of a glass.

She was touching my legs, and few words passed.  I had this sense of being an outsider.   Always an outsider.  I guess as a trans human, that makes plenty of sense.  We learn at an early age to stay hidden. Society doesn’t like our kind.  I felt relaxed. Rational truth.

“I’m wondering what is under my fingers,” she mused.  And her words gently lolled inside of me, on the peculiar time warp of table time.

“It feels as if you have opened a well which extends down deep inside of me.”

“I wonder what is at the bottom of the well.”

“I am.  It’s me.  As a little boy,” and when I said that the tears began to flow.  “He was such a good boy.”  That’s what I said.  And what I could remember was how unseen I felt.  I get that it is strange to grow up a white boy in a sea of privilege and still feel like an ‘other’, but that was my truth.

If people actually knew me, they would hate me.  As a result I became bad.  Naughty.  What did I have to lose.  Somehow, we become the trouble that people project on us, even if it manifests differently.

I was a boy that my friend’s parents didn’t want hanging out with me.  I threw rocks at cars. Or walnuts.  Or snowballs.   I set fire to someone’s bamboo forest.  I shoplifted.  I was also filled with rage.  I don’t feel pride in that…or resignation.  I always knew that I was “good” and I don’t mean the “crook’s code”.  I mean deep down.

What makes me so sure?

Because with people I was always gentle.  I hated fighting.  I can count the times I hit someone in my life on two fingers, about a year apart, both to close friends who were screaming in my face, taunting me, daring me to hit them.

I also existed on the edge of being bullied.  I was never a bully.  But my “secret”, this inner world which I couldn’t share and didn’t really understand, was enough to put me in danger.

What do I find in coming out?  It is to confront this legacy of existence as an other that makes me want to fight.  I am not a fighter.  Not at all.  I hate conflict.  But if I am a woman, or a trans woman, I still stand with women and what we represent in society.  And I have very little time for the patriarchy.

My kids are politely reassuring, “we will never be like that.”

“You better not be.”

Being a dominatrix is a logical progression.  But I wonder how many men will be deterred from seeing me because of my “radical” feminism.  Do I even care?

I shared with my colleagues and teachers that with every passing day I feel I know myself less and less.  When we “know” ourselves, we impose rules, strictures.  The corollary for me is to stop thinking about what I do and just do.  When I get it wrong, or am confronted by my actions, then I think about it…even if it is uncomfortable.

Letting go.  Surrender.

I get to explore these topics with the Dominatrix I see myself, and who I have now been seeing semi-regularly for four years.  Our ‘relationship’ stands out in part for its contrast to my first domme, a woman I adored, but who was ultimately toxic for me…because she is naturally natural with me.  In other words, she treats me like a human, and she has from the start.

She said, “now that you are becoming a domme, if you don’t want to see me anymore, don’t worry, I will still be your friend.”  And while on one level that might have been appealing to me, it terrified me.  I knelt on the floor before her right then and there and rested my cheek on her knee.

“Please tell me that I can still come to you,” I said.  “I don’t understand what’s happening in my life, and while I am not as generally submissive as I used to be, I feel more submissive to you, and I don’t want that to stop.”

“That would be wonderful,” she said.  “I think its kinda hot that you are out there domming other people, but you kneel for me.”

“Me too,” I smiled.  “As long as you’ll have me…”

She whipped me that day harder than I have ever been whipped.  Including with a “new toy” which was a flogger whose strains were light gauge metal chain…about the weight of dog leash.  I can take it, even though her beatings are quite savage.  This hurt more than anything I have ever felt, and the marks will linger for weeks I fear.  I moved after the blows.  I couldn’t help it.

“Wow, that really hurts.”  She tried it on her own leg.

“It does.  I guess I just don’t know my strength.”

She worked her way through a series of whips, stingers, paddles, floggers.  Nothing like that chain-link thing.  I am not a masochist…and she is not really into corporeal punishment or impact play.  But we do it.  Mainly because I ask if she will do it.  I have no idea why.  I must like it.

She finished with a bull whip where every blow was loud and cracking, with each one leaving a deep, long mark.  She stopped when I said, “I feel faint.”

I didn’t cry that time.  Usually I sob.  The mark of a good session.  But I had already cried the second we were in session, when all I did was kneel before her and she touched my face, my hair.  Is it a Pavlovian response?  My appreciation of her, the impending feelings of overwhelm, and the weird comfort of her pointing to the ground in front of her, telling me exactly where I need to be…how that simple gesture is enough for me to know that for the next few hours she’s got me.

Surrender.