It’s been a while since I had a visceral body memory. Yet, it happened this week as I was researching a timeline issue in my book.
I came across an email exchange between me and a journalist discussing a bureaucratic issue I was facing with the Embassy. At the time, the Embassy wasn’t sharing information about dad with me due to the Privacy Act. To get past the Privacy Act, they needed dad’s permission. To visit dad, they needed authorisation from the Egyptian authorities. It took a few months before they were able to secure an authorised visit to Dad and get his verbal permission for the Embassy to share information with me.
File this memory under: Bureaucracy is a nightmare, incident 139,005.
In the 6 drafts of this chapter I had written so far, I had not once mentioned this struggle with the Embassy for information. I had completely forgotten about it.
… the thing is my body remembered.
For weeks, I’d been struggling with editing this chapter. I had been feeling unease and frustration in my body every time I sat to write and I just didn't know why!
By procrastinating my writing through research, I was searching for something that could get me past this block.
As soon as I read that email with the journalist, I felt my stomach roll in recognition. Instead of being flooded with emotion, I felt anger seep out into my muscles. Over the next few days, it just continued leaking through me as a constant buzz of anxiety and frustration as image-fragments emerged into my conscious memory.
I had to manage the physical experiencing of emotions that these memories came with. That physical experiencing is the physiology of emotion; the muscular tension, the prickling skin, the sickness in the stomach, the heightened senses.
I took a long hot bath to relax my muscles, went for an evening walk and napped while listening to soothing music. I also indulged in a bottle of wine with a friend, ate take-out food twice in one day, and didn’t bother with doing any yoga.
Sometimes, healing isn’t about baths, journals, walks and scented candles. Sometimes, it’s being in connection with the unwilling, angry parts of yourself and letting them be.
My personal experiences have a pattern: there’s a feeling that I don’t understand, a piece of information arrives and it connects the mind and body, which prompts the memory to emerge. The memory is then freed from within my body and the subconscious mind pushes up visuals into the conscious mind. My conscious mind then connects my physiological experience to those visuals and begins to make meaning. In the making of meaning, I come into the starting place of integration and healing.
When I re-experience painful memories, I work through it by bringing myself to a place of thinking about what emotions I do want to experience.
Yesterday, I put a short note to myself in my journal:
What needs to be embodied after trauma?
Joy - the vulnerability of happiness
Visibility - to see and be seen
Safety - belonging with people (connection), place (harmony with environment) and self (internal regulation)
Acceptance - validation and support of the authentic self
Trust - to hold and be held
The longer I’m on this spirally little healing journey, the more I’m convinced about body-first pedagogies to guide us through.
Oh, and I finally finished that chapter.
Love + solidarity,
Lamisse