Dealing w/ disassociation through drama
Drama as in theatre, baby! (but also, drama as in its gonna get emotional lol)
It’s been a weird week.
First of all, we’re two weeks into a three-week lockdown.
Secondly, my boyfriend got COVID, despite being triple vaxxxed. At least, with him being vaccinated, it hit like a short, sharp cold and he was up and active again after a few days. However, despite being asymptomatic, he’s still testing positive and we’ve been in our apartment now for 7 days without a break; no walks, no trip to the shops. Despite us living together, I’ve tested negative this whole time. Hi-5 to my immune system and/or the vaccine.
Lockdown lifts on Monday so fingers crossed we both test negative and we can leave the flat again! Yeeeeeee!!!
That said, these moments in life are trying times for our coping strategies; especially if we’ve been working on cultivating new patterns. Not going to lie, I slipped into disassociation - I noticed the signs as I became more forgetful, less connected to my body and felt like I was living in a fog. Lol, I just wrote a typo: I typed god instead of fog, and I must say living in a god sounds pretty cool.
One of the most significant tools I found to manage my tendency toward dissociation has been through body centred practices. For me, this has been physical theatre, dance and yoga. Meditation is helpful, but I prefer engaging in movement and coordination. It forces my mind to come out of itself and enter into the body and the present.
Of all the practices, theatre has had the most profound impact on my being. It is something that I reflect on often as I try to unpack the varied experiences and sensations and realisations I gained through this performance art; asking myself why it worked, and how?
Let me share an anecdote which might illuminate what I’m trying to share:
I was in an acting class, and I was required to be angry at my scene partner. When the moment came, I spoke my lines with hesitation. He looked at me confused, “that’s not anger - be angry!” I tried again, and my voice strained.
“I can’t be angry.” I said.
I remember his brow furrowing, and he said: “yes you can.” Then he said, “why don’t you just tell me to fuck off. Tell me to fuck off like you’re really mad.”
I felt my body constrict in fear and the “fuck off” came out of my mouth in a whisper.
The teacher called an end to our practicing and my scene partner wandered off to join the group. I stood there feeling disturbed: why couldn’t I be angry?
The following day, I went to university. That day we had voice training in Linklater Technique, otherwise known as Freeing the Natural Voice.
For two hours, we lay on the floor and breathed. We rolled on our sides and we breathed with our ribs. We lay on our backs, knees up with feet on the floor, and breathed with our pelvis. We explored our breath in alignment with our spine. We sent our breath - and our voice with it - traveling down our arms, traveling up our spine, sending it out toward corners and walls in the space. My voice kept breaking. It was like my throat was a rusty treasure chest lid being unlocked and lifted. My chest felt both heavy and shaky. By the time the class was over, a storm was brewing in my body. I couldn’t look anyone in the eye; something had been rattled and opened and I didn’t know what it was.
After class, I raced to my car in the underground carpark, jumped in and turned on the ignition. I needed to go home, I needed to get to a place where I could be safe enough to spill out whatever this was.
As I started driving, my body shook. I started to cry, those cries turned into screams. I had to pull over but I was on the highway. I finally pulled over into the emergency lane. The screams felt both beyond my control and from deep within my body. I was connected to those screams with all the fear and anger that they expressed. It was wholly mine. It was all the fear and rage I had held inside during my father’s imprisonments. Words formed out of the screams: “Stop! Stop! Not my dad! Stop hurting him! You’re hurting me! Stop!”
Here I was, pulled over on a highway in Brisbane, experiencing a release of the fear and anger that had been trapped in my body for three years. I somehow gathered myself enough to continue driving, stumbling into my parent’s house crying and snotty. In that moment, I was grateful to receive soothing from them and as I returned to a regulated state, I felt lighter.
Something had been released and I felt freed from its weight. I felt like I could breathe again.
Yet, there are a couple of crucial things here: one, this release was also a panic attack. For me, PTSD has felt like the delayed processing of trauma; what I couldn’t process in the moment had to be done later. I felt like it had to be done because the body and mind needs to process the emotions in order to undertake integration of the experience. Without processing, these things remain fragmented and trapped inside you. Yet, that processing is unbelievably difficult; you’re asking your body and mind to deal with the terror, the anger, the fear, the rage, the unbearable and excruciating pain of the moments that shattered and froze you. Not everyone can do that; not everyone is in a safe place, not everyone has safe people they can go to, not everyone feels the support in knowing they can break down and someone will hold them, and perhaps help them stitch themselves back together. Without safety, love and support, I feel that we remain too afraid to let go - and that makes total sense. I would never judge anyone for this; there is so much more to healing than clinical therapy.
I also later saw this moment not just as an experience of trauma, but a meeting with my shadow self; the shadow I had carried was the anger I repressed. When I was asked to ‘be angry’ in the extremely low-stakes environment of an acting class, I was triggered. One, there was no threat to expressing my anger and two, it was being asked to be seen. It was being invited out of the shadows and into the light. In being provoked by the scene, it started to wake. Then, it fully woke-up with the breath, as the tension in my body was released through the two-hours of focussed deep breathing. Anger makes you hold your breath; it tightens the body and stiffens the muscles in preparation to fight. Breathing demands you loosen up in order to expand; that demand provokes the body into releasing whatever it is holding. I wondered, what else am I holding in my body? And how is that contributing to my disassociation that manifests in the avoidance of my body?
I decided I needed the full spectrum of emotion had to be accessible to me. No more blocking out, no more disassociating! A big ambition that feels like a life-long work in progress.
What this experience allowed me to see was that without the ability to hold the embodied truth of emotion in my everyday life, I couldn’t bring the emotion into being within the constructed environment of the stage either — it would remain inaccessible to the actor-me. And that, without allowing myself to experience the spectrum of emotion and learn how to manage it, I would continue to struggle with connecting to my body.
I realised that separation between the actor-me and me was false; I bring who I am to everything I do and I repackage it into the required art form. Yet the essence - the emotional truth underneath all that is displayed – is me.
This is also how I approach my writing. I ground my work in emotional truth so that the necessity of creative license within a memoir is justified in the service of telling that truth. I do not make anything up, but my role as a writer is to carve the mess that is life into a linear narrative. That necessitates difficult decisions on what to tell and what not to tell - it is in that work and those decisions that you are exercising your creative license.
It is an accumulation of these kinds of experiences that has led me toward thinking deeply about the creative therapies; what does drama, visual art, dance, writing and movement do to us, for us? What is this spiritual underbelly that exists in the arts? How can I engage with it? How can this serve us in our healing journeys?
So, maybe this letter is all a mess, but maybe there’s some logical thread weaving through it. It’s an experience I had and how I’ve understood it. Have you ever had an artistic experience that has unlocked you? Perhaps, a work of art you’ve witnessed, or a moment you’ve embodied and been changed by? I’d love to hear about it. I’d also love to hear from you if you’re a therapist with a creative practice, I would love to hear your experiences and how you understand them.
In a last note, I had an amazing typo in my last newsletter:
“I knew I needed three things: time and support.” I hope it made you laugh as much as I did when I saw it.
I guess I should let you know that I don’t really edit these newsletters. It’s part of my practise of vulnerability and kicking my misguided attachment to perfectionism in the butt (that Capricorn Moon curse). These letters are a conversation, not an essay or a book. It’s a sharing of the mess and finding the threads that connect us.
Big big messy love,
Lamisse xx
This is my favourite essay so far! I am loving how your authentic voice is developing and deepening with each piece