The word from go was intense. She arrived with a chaotic personal and professional history. I didn’t give her the questionnaire but as I listened, she had hit 4 on the ACE score within 20 minutes – a critical level in terms of future health risks. ACE or Adverse Childhood Events include physical violence, incest, sexual abuse, addictions, lacking food, emotional negligence, prison and mental health issues in other family members. There were probably more to add to her list but she was already agitated, jumping from one thread of thought to another, as if trying to untangle herself and ever failing.
She had committed to different therapies in the past which she spoke about in an enthusiastic almost flamboyant manner. It was like she was trying to convince me she had done well so far and would I be ok to continue working with her. I felt a strong dissonance between her official narrative of therapeutic success and the agitated, bordering on distraught state emanating from her body as she shared her story.
A tornado was whirling round inside me as she jumped from one tragic detail to another, like she had a remote control of some kind, channel hopping like crazy, in a maddening, unconscious attempt to escape from all the wild fires blazing inside.
After a few sessions she went to visit her family of origin. To her surprise, she felt more emotionally detached than expected and was capable of confronting several family members who had displayed violent behaviour towards her in the past. This was a new and surprising experience though she didn’t connect this evolution to our therapy work.
She had also decided to find herself a job, something impossible to envisage during our first session. Despite these changes the visit to her family had triggered her and we began working with the agitation she felt bubbling up inside.
As soon an we found an ocular access point, her body began to twist and strain violently, shoulders turning, pulling her head away involuntarily from the access point. Then she let out a high pitched sound, a muffled shriek, before her body twisted again into another position. She kept talking and talking as her body gyrated – following different narrative threads, sometimes coherent, sometimes incoherent sets of words, an emotional blitzkrieg following the twists and turns of her physical body. Sometimes the words just didn’t come fast enough and she spluttered foam.
And for a moment, all would go quiet. She remained immobile, staring at the access point with great intensity, as if she was taking time to assimilate the multi-tracked narratives she had played to herself at maximum volume. Then out of the stillness came a sudden, explosive laugh before her body twisted again. She sighed, lifting her eyebrows as if she was tiring of what was happening. But she went on, following the torrent of words, the body movements, flipping in and out of different sets of characters, talking to one person, then another, angry, laughing out loud, then to another place at another time, and back again to someone else. Impossible to follow all the emotional treads she was juggling.
Then another sudden pause. And in the stillness she breathed deeply, pulling the air inside voluntarily to fill her lungs as much as possible. And of course there were tears, unspoken tears of unmentionable things. Her body convulsed and heaved as if something was being thrown out. She glanced anxiously at me, no doubt to make sure her bizarre expressive form wasn’t too great for me to bear. And when she saw I didn’t budge she continued cycling through phases of intense physical agitation and twisting, shouting, laughing, criss-crossing through fragmented narratives, picking up where she had left off earlier on, in a seemingly desperate headlong rush into the unknown.
Then after a long silent pause she lurched over and confided to me in a low voice the little girl was now safe from the staring gaze of others. Because it resonated so strongly I repeated to her “the little girl is now safe from the staring gaze of the others”. As the phrase landed she broke into a flood of tears and the sudden surge of emotion caught me by surprise. As she wiped her face she sniffled and told me the little girl was now having a good time. A wide smile crept across her face. And then she cried again, deeper and deeper.
Later when we debriefed, she told me that in those moments of stillness, when seemingly nothing was happening, different people’s faces and animals had sprung up from her past. They had come to help move forward on her journey she said. And this experience reminded her of a powerful dream she had after our previous session where she had been able to remove a huge thorn lodged in the palm of her hand. Now she was feeling more coherent and connected to herself in some way.
In certain aboriginal cultures, the elders say if something isn’t working in your life, it means you need a new story. You can heal your sickness by getting rid of a bad story and replacing it with a better one. Our bodies are full of hidden stories, sometimes bad stories, just waiting to be told, waiting to be held and heard.
