Since time immemorial I have had a complex relationship with my body. By age 11, I was in the grip of what I later came to learn was anorexia, a baffling interplay between control and utter loss of control. I was ferociously “disciplined” and able to resist food while having no effective will to eat even when at least part of me knew I was doing something very dangerous. I was driven. It was the early 1960’s and one of the great influencers of that time, although we did not use that term then, was the supermodel Twiggy, who was tall and willowy like a stalk of bamboo, with dramatically eye-lashed eyes. She was the icon of the times. We all wanted to look like her, and I was getting close, although I would never be that tall. As I shrank away no one appeared to notice. I floated about ghostlike, in the universe of neglect.
When the “will power” flipped on me and I was gripped by ice cream in massive doses, I discovered running. This, my next compulsivity, came to be the daily ritual, hardly ritual, more like executive order, and went like this: wake up at the crack, creep like a silent mouse out of the house, run twenty miles in the dark streets, and upon return, after hiding my sweats in the back of the closet, surreptitiously slip back into bed, so no one knew I had ever left. It was a fierce training regimen, but I had to do it, in flight from the vast army of calories I had compulsively consumed the night before, dreaded weight gain nipping at my heels. One morning I actually did literally get bitten in the butt by a bullish German Shepard.
Of course, skeletal, the tragically undernourished vehicle of war, my body got injured at times. That was of course terrifying, throwing my whole defense system into jeopardy. Injury became a desperate secret. Once, not surprisingly I had a broken leg, a fatigue fracture from running on cement with those bamboo-like bones. It hurt like mad and I secretly limped around on it, until finally after about six weeks told my mom and got an X-ray. By then I had begun a ritualized swimming regimen which I did not like at all, but it was something…And it kept the enemy pounds at bay.
I had my first boyfriend when I was 13. He was 24. No one seemed to think that was weird. I was with him for seven years. He was old enough to introduce me to alcohol, although he himself was a pot smoker. Marijuana did not work well for me, it seemed to make me frighteningly paranoid, so I did not take to it. I also found him and his friends, all of whom were artists, intellectuals, and self-styled poets, to be excruciatingly boring when they were all high and I wasn’t. The wine was a solution to many things. Alcohol soon joined my eating disorder in the arsenal, in my undying quest for who knew what? My body was the battle ground, the vehicle, the container for what I now understand as the war on dysregulation.
In 9th grade Advanced Placement English, we learned to write research papers. I remember I chose the topic of rape. At that time, my early sexual abuse a deeply hidden yet to be excavated dissociated part. I only remember the title of my paper: “An Inquiry into Forcible Rape.” What inspired me to choose that topic at the time? I did not know. I wish I could find that paper, I’d be interested to know what I wrote.
Emotion
I continued to be very busy, a rat on an eternally spinning wheel. As I got older and my desperation landed me in therapy, I found I had a fascination with the body: bafflement curiosity, wonder, even awe, and admittedly rage and resignation. It was the locus of my various compulsivity’s. As much as I feared and hated it, I also had a sense there was a something there to learn. My therapist recommended a friend of hers who practiced a body approach called Self-Acceptance Training (SAT), a combination of Gestalt Therapy and Bioenergetics, a body approach that emerged out of the theory and practice of Wilhelm Reich, author of The Function of the Orgasm, a book that fascinated me then and to be honest, still does. It was 1979, the world of somatic psychology was a marginal minority then. I don’t remember much about SAT. The group sat in a circle for three days and there was a lot of emotion and catharsis. The SAT teacher used to say to us, “You are a body with sensations, that’s all.” I didn’t really buy it, but I went to all the workshops I could.
My teacher’s son Kevin was an accomplished Rolfer, a method of body work, also called “Structural Integration,” developed in the 1940’s by biochemist, Dr. Ida Rolf. The idea was to manipulate the body’s fascia so as to improve posture and body alignment and harmonize with gravity, whatever that meant. In those days I was game to try most anything that might help me, I undertook the standard 10 session sequence with Kevin, where I made an unexpected discovery. Kevin worked the energy and I remember lying face down on the table, with Kevin barely touching my back. I guess I must have been talking about something emotional, that I don’t remember. I only remember Kevin softly saying to me, “come back…” I did not know what he was talking about. I had no idea that I was “going away,” leaving my body. But he could feel that I was gone and call me back. We began the practice of noticing when I in effect dissociated, which I had never been aware of before. What a discovery! The ghostlike child of neglect in her invisibility, got seen. And I had a visceral experience of how emotion, whatever it was, was the catalyst of the powerful sweep of numbing. I wonder what happened to Kevin. He was a gamechanger.
Attachment
Fast way forward to 2026, much history in between. By now I feel like the cat who has progressed through a sequence of lives, perhaps like the Rolfing protocol? No, much messier and less orderly. After 4 decades in the trauma field and a deep immersion into the study of attachment trauma and neglect, I was invited to the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium to speak. The Networker magazine had been in my life my entire professional career and it spanned the entire gamut of the psychotherapy field. What an opportunity to advance my mission, to a wider, more diverse professional community, my first time in effect, preaching to the non-choir. In my still somewhat OCD way, I have been wildly preparing and undeniably moving too fast. About a month before the conference, I had a freak accident in of all places, my own beloved kitchen, where I all too often try to do too many things at one time.
Carrying my laptop, I slipped on our beautiful but undeniably rock-hard tile floor, and fell. A year after a similarly freaky fall that ended up with a complex fracture in my right wrist that required surgery and a measure of pain and nuisance, I was careful to protect my arm and my computer. But I landed hard on my hip and my head banged on the cabinet. As a neurofeedback and brain-oriented person, I worried most about my head, with visions of traumatic brain injury that would wipe out my Networker presentation and leave me dissociated. Blessedly there was no bump, and no observable brain consequence. What I did silently notice however, was that a week later, my hip was still sore. And revisited by the compulsively driven running girl, who never told a soul about her various injuries, as if that would keep them from being real, I kept it to myself.
When a client told me about a friend of hers about my age who had a fall and broke her hip and required not only surgery but protracted rehab, I began to feel worried. It was not getting better. As it happens, I am in a process with a wonderful trauma informed yoga teacher, De West in Boulder, Colorado. I always hated yoga or any isotonic exercise, preferring the sweat and friction of all kinds of cardio. I can honestly say, although I still don’t much care for yoga, I love my teacher so much that I stay with it and reap the benefits. And I have had another major discovery: the fear made the pain and disability undeniably worse; and inversely the connection and the mutual love: feeling heard, understood, honored and helped by an attentive other, facilitated function and healing, as well as pain management. Not that it can magically remove any pathology or bodily disruption, but what a difference.
A colleague of mine, a super intelligent scientist and researcher, has been working through terrible grief from a precipitous and profound loss. I asked her how she was doing with her grief. Her answer really surprised me, well not the answer itself, but the fact that it was coming from her. Her un-hesitating response was “the greatest help for me has been body work.” She said grief work is best done on the table.
I write this on the plane to Washington DC for the Networker Conference, filled with excitement and passion. I am on a mission, even though I hobble a bit and slowly through the airport and have to arrange myself very carefully when I sit, stand or walk. I promise I will get an X-ray when I get home. I have not been to DC since probably 1990 to attend the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS). It was all we had back then, and I floated around there, what seemed like a tight club of white guys in suits with briefcases, scurrying around with no time for a little ghost like me. Everything has changed.
The last time I was in DC the biggest van Gogh exhibit ever in the US was at the National Gallery. Admittedly that is what I remember best. If you are at the conference, please introduce yourself! I would love to meet you!
