'Magical' Moments In Healing Trauma

By Eleanor Lew

Therapy, as many know it, is a process that may take years. This is particularly true of psychodynamic analysis. When I came into the field I did not expect to see immediate and positive results with clients right away. Especially with clients who have suffered severe traumas, I expected my clients to heal very slowly.

Then I trained in sensorimotor psychotherapy. Basically, the goal of the technique is to find "a body movement that's waiting to happen." To do this, the work involves engaging emotions, feelings, cognitions, sensations and body movements that got frozen at the time of the trauma. For the purpose of this short article, let me define trauma simply as any event that stopped the body from completing a process, like the fight/flight response.

Clients are taught in previous preparatory sessions how to get into "mindfulness" and to "resource." Mindfulness is the principal means for the client to self study, to passively witness inner experience of bodily sensations and movements. Resourcing is the client's inner ability to find their body's resilience and wisdom to cope with trauma.

Magic moments began to happen on a consistent basis as soon as I began to adapt sensorimotor psychotherapy to my clients. The most important aspect of this modality, I believe, is that the therapist need not interpret and can remain non-judgmentally accepting.

A client who had been experiencing agoraphobia since a child came into a session frightened that she had experienced paralysis in her forearms and hands while driving across the San Francisco Bay Bridge. In mindfulness, she slowly re-experienced the body sensations that were in her body such as eyes orienting to danger, tensions in her chest and throat, and an idea that was associated with the tensions: "I need to feel safe."

The client found several movements in her body "waiting to happen," such as her arms needing to push out, and her hands wanting to be held for a feeling of safety. At the end of the session, the client had the insight that the paralysis in her hands had to do with her anxieties to move from the East Bay to San Francisco and her fear around letting her partner know this. Asked how she felt at the end of the session, she replied: "calmer and closer to myself." The client reported weeks later that she no longer fears driving over the bridge.

Another client who has been in therapy for most of her life suffers from chronic major depression. She came into a session reporting that she was experiencing the worst depression in several years. In a couple of sessions with the client when sensorimotor psychotherapy was the main modality used to work with current cognitions, the client reported afterward that she felt for the first time she finally understood why she was suicidal earlier in life – that she wanted "to die in order to feel safe." She later stated that for the first time in her life she felt "happy."

Animals, as Peter Levine observed in his book Waking the Tiger, are able just to shake off their trauma. Not so with human beings. Every time a client is finally able to "shake off" a trauma is a miracle moment for both the client and for myself. This is when I feel closest to my soul.