The Wounded Healer

5. The Body is a Messenger

It’s been a few weeks since I last wrote, mainly because I have been away doing some consulting work on a theatre piece set in a therapy space. Literally no time to sit down at the keyboard and come up with meaningful words.

In a way I am glad because this creative process that I have been through has given me at least some of the inspiration for this chapter.

I first met Amber Jarman-Crainey last summer when I was invited to the press night for her new production ‘Bound’. I am not sure exactly what I was expecting, but what I saw blew me away. This was no ordinary piece of theatre. It was an immersive experience in which you were invited to walk round a warehouse and witness nine different stories of grief told through drama and dance. It’s not possible here to convey how profoundly moving some of what I saw was, but I knew I had to go back again and perhaps follow a different story.

As it happens I ended up there again on the last night and spoke with Amber afterwards. I had emailed her before this to express my admiration for her work, but also because she was setting up a charity to support bereaved people through alternative forms of therapy.

I should explain at this point that Amber’s brother died suddenly a few years ago and what she experienced afterwards was a complete (and perhaps unexpected) breakdown. She found initially that talking therapy did not help her, but fortunately being a dancer led her towards exploring alternative ways of healing through movement.

And this is what she wants to explore with this new charitable venture. It is also what made me want to work with her, because as a therapist myself I have always been the first to acknowledge that sometimes talking is not enough.

It would be wrong of me to comment too much on Amber’s grief journey but what I was able to see clearly through Bound and through this new piece we are working on, is that story telling, drama and dance are very much something she has embraced in order to make sense of her own experience. As I wrote in my last blog this is something that resonates a lot with me. The idea that we can only really process what has happened to us when we make meaning out of it. But how do we arrive at that meaning? For the young girl I spoke about last time it was poetry and drawing. For Amber it is a different kind of story telling, mainly through movement.

However the process through which you tell the story is fundamental. Sometimes the story (the meaning) emerges from a place that is beyond words. For Amber, as a dancer, I would imagine that expression through movement almost always comes first. Even if the germ of an idea is initially written down, it does not come to life until it is embodied.

This is what I want to explore in this chapter. How is it we embody what we are feeling, and how is it possible to bring that into awareness?

I often say that when I sit with a client that their body tells me so much more than their words about who they really are. Yet if you were to ask me directly to explain that I might not be able to put it into words. If we did an experiment, for example, with a random person and you asked me to tell you all about them simply from their body movements and gestures I would probably struggle because it really isn’t that straight forward. If we accept that the feelings they have about what has happened to them (over the course of their whole life) are often beyond words, then so too are the feelings that I might have as I sit with them. Nevertheless all the signals are there and I am picking them up as I listen, watch and feel. And this is what has led me to believe that the healing process for many really is beyond words. Because sometimes as I listen I can sense a real disconnect between the narrative of what they are telling me and what the body is showing.

Perhaps the best way I can explain this is by talking about a client.

However, talking about real clients is tricky (because of the risk of breaking confidentiality) so the person I am about to refer to is actually fictitious but is based on an amalgamation of real people I have worked with.

For the purposes of this we’ll call her Vivien.

She was 28 years old when I met her and would always smile and greet me quite warmly at the beginning of a session but would then adopt a demeanour which was quite rigid and upright. She would barely look at me as she recounted her story.

I don’t want to take up too much space by telling her full story, but initially told me her upbringing had been fairly normal.

(Normal is such a meaningless word, by the way. Every child thinks their upbringing is normal, because they have little or nothing to compare it to)

What emerged however was a picture of a young girl and her elder brother who were neglected by parents running their own family restaurant.

Vivien told me how they barely ever saw their parents and had to amuse themselves in the upstairs flat. She was lonely and bored a lot of the time. Her brother was quite a lot older than her and it seemed he had more fun because his friends would come round quite a lot. I was curious as to what she would actually do when they came round.

She told me she had to keep out of their way. This was significant moment when she said this to me because as I asked the question she looked directly at me, but as she answered she looked away and down at the floor.

When someone doesn’t look at you much during conversation but then suddenly they do it is often an indication that they know what you are going to say. More that that, if it is a question, it is what they want you to ask them. The reply and the looking away tells me that there is more to come. Something perhaps that is difficult for her to say.

Did the fact that her brother’s friends were there make her feel more lonely? Was remembering that loneliness painful for her? Or was there something more?

For me I felt very strongly that there was more, but it is important to stay with the client’s process. Indeed we didn’t come back to this during that or the next session. Her main reason for initially coming to therapy was the sudden death of her father, and this is what she spoke mostly about. However the fact of her not looking at me very often and also how often she paused before mentioning her brother gave me some idea of where we might be heading. I noticed also that when speaking about most people she would use their name, but she would always refer to him as ‘my brother’.

What emerged was that during one of those times when her brother’s friends came round, one of them had raped her. It was, she said, a one off incident and had happened somehow without her brother or his other friends’ knowledge, but some time later, when she had the courage to disclose, her brother had completely dismissed her and said that it could not possibly have happened. She was a liar and an attention seeker trying to ruin the life of a good boy.

She told me all this with some anger in her voice. Her own brother had done such a good job of telling everyone that it couldn’t have happened that for a while she even started to doubt herself. However a few years later this same boy was arrested and successfully convicted of raping another girl whilst at university.

This had felt like something of a vindication for her and had also led her to the decision to cut her brother out of her life. But, of course, now her father had died she was facing the prospect of seeing him again.

This is why it is so important to stay with the client’s process and to wait for the whole story to emerge. It might be obvious to think that this young woman had told very few people about the rape and that this is what she wanted to ‘process’. But actually when she did get round to telling me about this she did so not only with anger in her voice but also some sense of strength in her body. She may not have looked at me very much but her body language was not crouched and defensive. She had, in fact, had some counselling before and had even gone to the police to tell them about what happened to her. But what she had not done was see her brother again.

I remember asking her what her brother’s name was. (More than twenty sessions in and still she had not said his name). We’ll call him Paul. The second she said his name a tear fell from her eye. Despite everything she had said to me previously about her life she had never cried before. That one tear spoke volumes.

I knew her well enough now to comment on the fact that she had not mentioned his name before.

She knew that, of course, but dismissed it as if it wasn’t significant.

A slight shrug of the shoulder, and a half smile. “Haven’t I? Really?”

I asked her how long it had been since she had seen him.

Again her language and tone of voice tried to make light of it.

“Oh. I think it has been about five years. Maybe more.”

Whilst saying this she shifted her body slightly to one side. Not looking at me at all.

It is often said that when people look up and to the left they are reminiscing or trying to remember but looking to the right is trying to access the imagination and may therefore indicate that they are lying. But my observations are that it is a lot more complex than this. Often a person may look down, as she did. Along with the shift of her body I clearly felt discomfort. She would probably know exactly how long it was since she last saw Paul, and it was almost certainly more than five years, but she wasn’t quite ready to say this out loud; to acknowledge this to herself.

However, as I said before, I felt I knew her well enough now to challenge her a bit more.

I said It felt like five years or more was a long time not to see her brother.

Her body became very still at this point and there was a long silence.

Silence is something that many therapists are uncomfortable with and I would say with deep trauma it may not be helpful to allow it to go on too long, as the person may not be able to regulate themselves very well in silence. But Vivien was not in shock, nor did her body language suggest she was frozen as such. Indeed her silence and stillness were very controlled. I felt as if there were different parts of her battling with each other; deciding what she should say. What she could say.

She opened her mouth slightly a few times as if to speak but then closed it again. Her hands rubbed up and down her thighs and over the top of each other. Her left hand made a fist and her right hand gently covered it and rubbed over it. She looked up to the left and the right. She was trying to comfort herself and, as I said, figure out what she wanted to say.

I encouraged her to take her time. She looked me in the eye and briefly smiled. At this point it is important for me not to add to her discomfort. Although I noticed all these gestures I didn’t want to stare at her, but at the same time I wanted to stay connected. When she looked briefly at me I needed to return her gaze, yet at other points I might have looked over at the window or at the floor.

When she looked at me for a second time a few moments later I had the feeling that this was an unspoked gesture of help. She needed me to help her out. So I spoke.

I said again that I could imagine it might have been difficult for her, not seeing her brother for all this time. I intentionally phrase it this way so that it is not actually a question. I am sensing she wants to talk more about her brother but I don’t want to make my words sound like they are coming from a place of my own curiosity. I am simply trying to help her to say what I already know she wants to say.

Indeed I was right. What came out first was how strange it would be seeing him after all this time, but gradually the realisation that, although she still felt deeply wounded by his failure to believe her or stick up for her after her disclosure, she had missed him a lot.

More and more came out in the next few sessions. Through many years of boredom and loneliness in that flat her big brother had been like a surrogate parent to her. Someone she looked up to. So when he betrayed her (sic) she had felt completely abandoned.

I worked with Vivien for quite some time after this and we explored how this betrayal affected her whole view of the world and of herself. The story she told herself was that it is easier to keep people at arms length because then if they betray or abandon you it will hurt less. Yet she had experienced enough genuine love from her brother before the rape, and perhaps some sense of safety and security from her parents to not fully believe this story. She desperately wanted to rewrite the narrative. It might have been difficult or impossible to do that with her brother but perhaps through the therapeutic relationship and then through some other close personal relationship it might be possible.

Once she had felt safe enough to talk about her brother with me it then felt safe enough to explore how she embodied her story. It can be very difficult to know when and if I can start to draw attention to my client’s body, especially if they are female (and remember I have worked with a lot of teenagers which is even more dangerous territory). Yet this kind of work can be transformative.

At first I just drew attention to how rarely Vivien would look at me when she spoke. I had her repeat certain things whilst intentionally looking at me. This involves literally stopping them and saying “What you just said sounds really important. I wonder what it would be like to say that again, but looking at me when you say it.” The first time I say that to a client it might feel awkward but I felt that I could do this with Vivien because she had acknowledged in an earlier session that she did have an issue with looking people in the eye.

The part of her that couldn’t look people in the eye was telling her “you are not important . People don’t care about what you have to say.”

But in later sessions we also explored how she felt about her body and herself generally. There was a long conversation about how, at the weekends sometimes she would be allowed to come down into the restaurant after closing. There would sometimes be regulars who would stay behind and they would have a few drinks and play music. She remembered being encouraged to dance by her mum, and her mum would say to everyone how beautiful she was.

I noticed how much looser her body became when she was talking about this. She gestured with her arms and her upper body as she relayed parts of the story.

I commented that it sounded like those were the best times for her. I remember her slumping back in her seat, still with a smile on her face but letting go of the moment.

She said something like “Yes. It wasn’t always bad.”

Right there was the chink of light. I look for it in everyone I work with, and I have never yet failed to find it. Of course Vivien’s childhood was not all bad. She knew that. But this one devastating event had overshadowed so much else.

For me these comments really need to be reinforced and so I think I asked her to tell me more about the dancing. I had a hunch that maybe dancing was something she had enjoyed. I was right. She told me that she did some classes at school, but her big regret had been not going any further because her parents never had time to take her to any out of school activities. I wondered if she had ever considered taking up dancing again. Unsurprisingly she dismissed this idea.

“It’s a bit late for me now.”

Usually I would not challenge a comment like this so directly but I remember saying “But you’re only 28.”

This actually opened up an unexpected conversation about how self conscious she actually was and it led us back to the subject of her looks. Her mum had told her she was beautiful, but I wondered if anyone else had ever said that to her.

(She was, in my opinion a very attractive young woman and I would not have been surprised if quite a few people had said that to her)

Her knees closed together and she sat right back in her seat.

She said one word. “Maybe”.

I knew I’d hit a nerve, but again perhaps unconsciously her body language would suggest that she wanted to talk about this. She was getting braver now and it didn’t take her long after this to tell me that her rapist had often told her she was beautiful.

“So now when people say that to me it makes me cringe.”

But she wanted to tell me more. She was a very pretty girl aged 12 and how sad it was that she had been made to feel that her looks were a curse. She said that since this time she had made a conscious effort to dress down and not show off her looks or her body in any way. Perhaps the real reason why she never danced again wasn’t because her parents could not take her to dance classes, but because she never asked.

And so we talked about her body, and her looks. A risky thing to do perhaps, but everything we did was always with the preamble “What would it be like ..?” or “Would it be ok if we..?”

In one session we stood in front of a mirror and I asked her what she saw. By this stage our relationship was very strong and even though I knew this could have backfired it proved to be a real breakthrough. She actually laughed and said that some days she could look at herself and think she was as rough as f**k, and other days she would think she was as hot as hell. We messed around with the postures of the rough and the hot Vivien.

This brought some real humour and fun into the therapy room and I am fairly sure from this moment on she changed a lot. She started to turn up to her sessions in more colourful clothes. And she was much more able to hold eye contact.

The meeting with her brother at her dad’s funeral was a while before these sessions and it had been hard for her but as she gained confidence she was eventually able to meet with him again and get the long overdue apology she needed.

But she was also resigned to the fact that she would never really be that close to him again.

I think the way I conduct therapy sessions now has changed so much because of people like Vivien, and the young girl I wrote about last time. Of course talking is still a big part of my work, but if I can find a way to help people express themselves that goes beyond words then I believe I am giving them a means to help themselves heal.

This is the true gift of therapy and I say this without a hint of arrogance because it is not something I am simply giving. I share it.

It is as much a gift from my client. Every one of them is teaching me and helping me to learn about myself and about what it means to be human.

As I said at the beginning sometimes words are inadequate.

Ironically however this poem does express beautifully in words exactly what I mean.

Speaking gutturally in the fractured
fragments of a foreign language
a tongue unknown to her

She is come from another country
gesturing with her hands
between the islands of broken English

Within her hesitations are the silent
stutters of clarity.
Using her body as a language,

I know what she is asking.
Between the atolls of words
are oceans of sterling imagery. (John Thomas Tansey)