Today I’m collaborating with my friend and fellow complex trauma survivor, Cody Taymore. We write about trauma from different angles, so we decided to pick one question and each answer it our own way. Here’s the question, and it’s one that’s close to my heart: You can explain why the way you are the way you are, so why has nothing changed? Read on for my answer, and please check out Cody’s completely different take here.
When it came to personal growth, I was such a know-it-all.
I’m not a therapist, but I was fluent in the language. I’d been in therapy myself for decades, working through my own childhood wounds. I’d read every self-help book, and attended countless workshops and retreats to further my amateur obsession. I analyzed my parents, my kids, my romantic partners, and my close friends.
Looking back, I was truly insufferable. But despite that, people came to me for advice long before I became a coach, because I “got it.” I could tell you exactly why you picked that unavailable man and how the roots of that choice went all the way back to your father leaving when you were four. I could talk for hours about your childhood wounds, your attachment style, your dysfunctional family, your narcissistic mom. I told so many people to go to therapy and even helped them find a therapist, because I knew how to do that, too.
Ironically, despite my vast trove of understanding and knowledge, I was still deeply unhealed.
I understood the impact of my childhood. I had deep insight into my abandonment wounds, my fearful avoidant attachment style, and my patterns of love addiction. But all that understanding, while helpful at deepening my knowledge and self-understanding, didn’t change the patterns that were created by these wounds.
This showed up in my dysfunctional relationships with men, relationships in which any rational person would (and did) say, “She should know better.” I got involved with men who were unavailable, narcissistic, emotionally abusive. I told myself that if I could just love him enough, I could change him. I made myself smaller to be more appealing. I kept my needs quiet for fear of coming off as needy. Then the relationship would end, and I’d look back with a combination of regret and disbelief that I’d let it happen again.
I knew better, but my body kept repeating the pattern. So, I’d return to therapy, tail between my legs. But no matter how many times this cycle repeated, I was seemingly powerless to break it.
…
The first day of sophomore year in college, my English professor shared that the roots of the word sophomore mean “wise fool.” You’re no longer a freshman, so you’re on top of the world, thinking you know it all. Meanwhile you’re still a teenager, your brain is nowhere near finished developing, and having freshman year in college under your belt is not exactly a sign of deeper and higher wisdom being attained.
I think of the time in my life before I learned about somatic work as a metaphorical sophomore year: my wise fool era. I thought that what I knew was enough, but I was missing essential pieces that I couldn’t possibly know yet. And I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
…
I learned to dissociate early, to disconnect my mind from my body. I’d say “I’m fine” even when I clearly wasn’t, even when my body wanted to scream or cry.
Other patterns that kept me safe as a kid included making excuses for people, overriding my body’s signals, fawning, outsourcing my safety and opinions to others, and sacrificing my own needs for the sake of keeping the peace. Those patterns imprinted themselves in my body as successful coping strategies, because they kept me alive in an unsafe home environment. And no matter how much therapy I did, that imprinting was locked in, an internal promise that I had the ability to be ok no matter how bad things got.
I knew I’d developed a fawning pattern. I knew I self-abandoned. I knew I had a tendency to try to fix or save people. And I knew I didn’t feel safe without a man in my life. But this understanding didn’t change anything. It just made me even more ashamed each time I repeated the pattern.
…
All the wisdom I’d gained from therapy and books lived in my mind. What I couldn’t have known at that time was that there’s a vast intelligence that lives in the body, an ancient system concerned only with survival. And that patterns that kept me safe as a kid were still living there in my nervous system, still steering my behavior despite all the understanding and insight and analysis.
This part of me didn’t read books or go to therapy. This part was keeping me alive the only way it knew how. And I had no access to it. I didn’t even know it was there.
…
I stumbled into somatic work by accident. I signed up for a women-only dance class that had no choreography, just unstructured body expression. There were no mirrors, low lights, and loud music, so the environment felt safe, like a warm, dark womb. It was designed that way to help us get out of our heads and into our bodies.
I didn’t know that, though. All I knew was that I was drawn to songs by artists I would have never listened to in real life, like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson (really). I’d put on these angry songs and stomp around the room and unleash my rage. Afterward I’d feel cleansed, like I’d just released something, and I’d feel so alive. I was allowed to feel rage here. I wasn’t in trouble.
I cycled through a whole range of feelings and emotions that I’d disconnected from over the years, allowing them to come up to the surface and have full expression and acceptance.
It took a minute to realize my dance class functioned as a form of therapy for me. That my body was expressing things that had been stuck for decades, things my mind wasn’t even aware of. My nervous system had been protecting me from my feelings for so long, and this dance class allowed them to come back to the surface. It created a safe place for me to feel the whole spectrum.
But there was still a disconnect. In class, I was expressive, angry, disappointed, a beautifully chaotic mess of feelings and emotions that were desperate to be released. But in my real life, I was composed, overachieving, a high-functioning mom of four and business owner who lived in my head, disconnected from the reality that the patterns in my body were wreaking havoc on my romantic life.
…
Finally, at the rock bottom of another dysfunctional, deteriorating romantic relationship, I put two and two together. I decided to add a somatic coach to my care team. And with her help, I brokered a kind of peace treaty between my body and mind.
My mind needed an interface with my body, a way to tune in to the messages and signals that had always been there, that I’d been conditioned to override since I was small. It needed to know the patterns I kept repeating weren’t due to personal failures on my part. It needed to know that the shame I felt was an unwarranted and undeserved old coping strategy.
My body needed to feel safe enough to loosen its grip and stop bracing. To let go of the ancient imprint that said safety came externally, either from a man or from keeping everyone else comfortable or from controlling my environment. I learned to notice the tingling in my chest when I felt something true, to honor the flush of heat in my face when I made myself small. Ultimately, I learned the skills to regulate my nervous system, to expand my capacity to tolerate the discomfort of no longer fawning.
Finally, my body and mind needed to start operating in coherence, to develop a harmony. To do that, they needed to get to know one another. My body, I learned, communicates with sensations and feelings. Once I learned its vocabulary, it became easier to attune to my intuitive hits and trust what they had to say, rather than overriding them as I’d learned to do when I was a kid.
…
I look back on my wise fool years with compassion. The understanding I gained was important, and it was correct. I was right about my patterns, my childhood trauma, and how it impacted me. And I genuinely believed if I kept going with more therapy, more books, and more understanding, I’d be cured of the deep wounds that were still there despite so many years of work.
What I know now is the reason all that insight is so important is that it’s a doorway to a home that’s bigger and deeper than my mind ever could have comprehended. That home is my body.
Check out Cody Taymore ‘s take on our shared question here. While I healed through the body, he did so through taking actions, even when his body was screaming at him not to.
We both got through trauma and landed in a healing place, by taking different roads. I got there through my body, and Cody got there through doing the work. Our shared experience of arriving at similar destinations shows that, when it comes to trauma, understanding matters but it isn’t enough to take you all the way to healing. Pick the road that works for you.
xo Nina
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