Sensorimotor psychotherapy journal

[AnotherUser]

Enough of the diary today. There are new things to report, but they can wait. I want to write about the work I have done with the back/spine in the last month, and about how biofeedback seems to function when you put sensorimotor psychotherapy into practice.

(I apologize that I sometimes write 'psychorimotor therapy' instead of 'sensorimotor psychotherapy'. You know what I mean...)

Extending the spine/back

I wrote in an earlier entry that my T, pleased with the work I began with my feet/legs, suggested that I add work with my arms to my experiments. And I also wrote that I have failed to be able to do that; my arms still just hang at my sides, and I have work to do both with her and with myself to understand why I cannot move and change how I use them; there are deeper issues involved, themes of 'fear to act', and 'freezing', I think. I only move my arms when I speak Italian, but I need to tackle this problem in my native language, with the words (and in the places) which have 'old power' over me.

Since I realized that my arms would have to wait, I turned my attention to my back and spine, about which much is written in Trauma and the Body.

I understood very quickly that I have no connection with my back at all; I cannot feel it. It is quite similar to the situation with my arms. The book describes a torture victim who lost touch with the back that had been literally whipped so often, and how his T gradually helped him to reconnect with it. Obviously that was a far more serious case, but it was interesting even for me to read about.

There was one thing I knew I could do with my back for which I have no analogous possibility with my arms - to stop compressing my spine and stand up straight.

I have now been doing it for two weeks. My absolute total lifetime record in the last forty years is about thirty minutes, with my body fighting that 'standing up straight', so that the experience before had been physically painful and difficult to maintain; impossible to maintain.

But in those cases, the pressure to stand up straight was internal; a girlfriend who complained I was slouching; my dad or some teacher telling me to 'stand up straight'.

It is a very different matter when you do it for yourself, and not the world, and I will write more about that in a moment.

The practical side of standing up straight

When I told her of this back experiment, my therapist asked me how it made me feel, and I answered honestly that I have not got that far with the experiment yet. For now I am just 'doing it'.

How strange it felt at the start! I am 5 "11, and quite barrel-chested, so I felt that I must seem an extraordinary sight as I walked about with this new extension in the body. In fact, I passed a window in the Bucharest old town, and saw that what felt to me 'bizarre' and 'over-extended' just looked like an ordinary adult man standing fairly straight, but still 'vulturing' his neck forward a little bit. So in fact I had to stand even straighter!

Though the book carefully avoids any comparison to hanging oneself (!), it instructs the person attempting to straighten their spine to imagine how the body would compose itself if it was suspended from a line, and this gives a good guideline for the work.

I carry a rucksack most days hung over my right shoulder. I found that if I put the rucksack on properly, with both straps over both shoulders, it really aids me in staying straight - particularly if the rucksack happens to be heavy that day. So that's one external aid that has been useful. If you're trying it, you might find that certain clothing or clothing types makes it easier.

Why I compressed my spine

I slouched my whole life for a number of reasons; early on it was a defense against the bullies and adults who criticized me for being a fat kid and having 'boy boobs'. Since I was barrel-chested, they were impossible to hide.

And besides that, it is about invisibility and trying not to be seen by the world. Slouching is quite intimately connected with avoiding eye contact. They are both examples of magical thinking - the way babies will play the 'eye-hiding' game with their mothers, as if closing one's own eyes could make one invisible to the external world. I think the concept is known as solipsism.

It must be pretty obvious that a guy nearly six foot tall is going to draw more attention and not less by having a warped posture. But sensorimotor psychotherapy illustrates how those defective coping mechanisms just keep 're-photocopying' themselves out of our childhood and into the years and decades of our adult lives, with their own continually damaging and unchanging logic.

I am slowly bringing my 'back work' into times when I am simply by myself in an apartment, etc, rather than in public, but it takes work. By comparison, I have brought my leg-work (feet awareness and leg posture) into the domestic environment more and more.

Facial expression and bio-feedback

When you're out and about, and observing and being mindful about what is going on in your body, you will likely (as I do) be paying particular attention to one or more parts of the body. In my case I concentrate on my feet and legs (whose behavior I am actively changing as part of therapy), and my abdomen (which is the barometer of my anxiety at any given time).

(also, lately, my back and spine)

But the idea is to be aware of what is going on all through your body. That includes your facial muscles, and awareness of your expression. Along with the abdomen, it's one of the key indicators to what is happening in your body as it relates to people and the world.

When I feel my facial muscles tensing up, when I feel that a frown has developed, I take note of it and what is going on in the environment or internally that may have caused it.

But this is super-important all through this part of SP: I do not attempt to change the expression.

SP is not about being 'hard on yourself'; you've probably had quite enough of that in your life. The last thing you need is some imaginary version of R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket telling you to 'Get your act together!'.

So I just keep observing - environment, thoughts...are they negative? What are they? Make a note. Keep watching, keep aware, and leave your face alone. If it needs to frown, let it.

Strangely enough, the frown tends to disappear within less than ten minutes when you approach it with this level of attention and care.

The same applies to the back/spine. Am I slouching? Are my shoulders tense and getting painful? Okay, so I consciously relax them - but I'm not doing it to 'solve the problem'; I'm doing it to see if changing the body's attitude changes how I feel. This is the crucial difference between the Full Metal Jacket approach and sensorimotor psychotherapy.

You must do it for yourself, and you must do it with the kindness and adult responsibility that may not have been there when the debilitating habits formed earlier in your life.

Neither are these exercises intended to make you 'pass for normal' in the outside world. Those people passing by are just fine, don't worry about them; they don't care, and you don't know them anyway. This is your day in your lab. It's enough to make yourself tolerably presentable before you go out, and none of your experiments (most of which involve tiny changes in posture, etc) will even be remotely obvious to anyone else anyway.

However, it is interesting to observe how the changes you make in yourself with SP affect the world...

Hypnotizing the pharmacist

About two weeks ago I had been practicing body observation for about five hours when I realized I needed to go into a chemist and buy a flu jab. After so much effort with the technique, I felt very relaxed, facially and in my body. And that, for me, is the cue to challenge the state and observe the results.

Trying to buy anything in a country where you don't speak the language much is a nice little stressor-test, so this was the moment.

You also need to understand how traumatized the average Romanian shopkeeper is. If they do speak English, you're putting them under stress by making them speak it (usually) imperfectly; if they don't then you're both stressed as you try to negotiate the transaction with semaphore and what few words you might have of the other's language. Romanians, brilliant and loving as they are, have been through a lot of hard times, and they're not usually confident people, particularly with foreigners.

So pharmacist #1 is a girl in her mid-twenties. She already looks alarmed because there's a customer! How much worse it gets as I ask (in Romanian) if she speaks English. Her own facial expression deepens into such a frown, you would think I had walked in there with a bomb-belt.

But though I wish her no harm, I don't care. I'm too busy observing my own facial reactions. Doing that and having a difficult language exchange is as much as I can process in real-time.

She calls her senior colleague, a woman in her mid-thirties, who emerges from the back with an even deeper frown. Waves of hostility are blowing towards me, but they're deflected away like I was a blade in a wind-tunnel; I'm too busy watching the bio-feedback in my own body and trying to explain what I want to buy to engage in it at all.

My face stays calm and even and good-natured, because that's how it was when I came in and I don't have time to do anything else with it.

Pharmacist #2 starts to relax. We work it out, that I want to buy the vaccine. I don't react to her relaxation any more than I reacted to her stress, I'm too busy with the language and with observing my own body language.

After five minutes, pharmacist #2's own face mirrors my own. She is relaxed and happy, and looking at me with a strange kind of impressed amazement. She seems to be fighting the smile that is attempting to light up her face. As I leave, she looks after me as if she is falling in love with me.

None of this matters in terms of anything I want to do with it in the real world. I wasn't attempting to influence, hypnotize or manipulate anyone, and I'm not looking for a date with the lady. But I do observe that my own internal bio-feedback has transmitted itself over to her. She feels better too; and she feels very positive about me, starting from a position of total hostility.

Not all days are like this, or contain incidents like this. But if you put as many hours into body observation the SP way, these events do multiply, and they are encouraging signs for the future.

 

[AnotherUser]

Will write more about my return to the UK for (at least) a couple of months later, but first I thought it might interest others who are curious about sensorimotor psychotherapy to hear my account of an actual exercise that I had in practice with my T today - the first time we have seen each other face to face since June.

It might help to illustrate the role of non-verbal interactions in therapy. It did, quite startlingly, for me.

Towards the end of the session she wanted to do an exercise around ‘boundaries’ - which is pretty much at the core of the whole approach.

She laid down a coat and rolled it into a tube, placing it on the floor equidistant between us.

‘This is my boundary for you,’ she said. ‘How do you feel about it.’

I looked down on the rolled coat, the division, and knew by now, after all this practice and reading, that my T wanted me to give my body’s response, not for me to mull it all over.

‘It makes me feel safe,’ I said. ‘Now I know I can approach you, get closer to the boundary and you’ll be okay with it. Without the boundary, I wouldn’t know if I could approach you at all.’

Then she asked if I would be willing to create my own boundary with my coat. I put it practically on top of hers. I trust her.

She looked around for an object, and found a pen.

‘With your permission,’ she said. ‘I would like to put this on your side of your boundary. May I?’

I agreed. She put it there, a blue plastic pen, set down beyond this Berlin Wall of coats.

‘How does that make you feel?’ She asked. It was a hard question to answer at first.

‘You mean, what is my body’s reaction to it?’

‘Yes.’

So you have to listen. I’ve been listening to it so long, my body, that the answer was surprising.

‘I feel threatened,’ I said. ‘But my instinct is to research it, to understand what it is, if it is a threat or not.’

‘What do you want to do with it?’ she asked?

I listened for the longest time to my body. The pen, on my side of the ‘fence’, seemed like some kind of quiescent spider or predator, not because of what it was, but where it was. I expressed this to her.

‘And where do you feel this?’ she asked. I tapped the right side of my chest without hesitation.

‘How does your body want to react?’ she asked.

I felt in my heart, my chest, that if I moved forward it might begin to move further towards me, and that if I retreated it might ‘notice’ me and - again - start moving towards me.

Intellectually this is nonsense. It’s a cheap blue biro, I know (and knew) that. But you weren’t there. This was the first time my T had tried any of those physical exercises I read about in the book.

If this was an example, these exercises communicate beyond the realm of language, in the shapes and abstract forms of the amygdala, which is hard at work building our capacity to communicate years before we can speak.

It’s the non-language of Zen, dreams and Dali. It is hard to convert how disturbing the experience was so that I can share it with you; and it was an effort during the exercise to convert its meaning and effect into words for the therapist.

So I shall be thinking about the pen that jumped the Berlin Wall for a while. What it signifies for me is it’s own subject. But it is quite a thing for the wordless language of dreams and symbols to make its power so clear while you’re wide awake.

 

[AnotherUser]

I almost regret writing yesterday’s post describing the experiment my T made with me in her office, because this relationship with the body under sensorimotor psychotherapy is practically impossible to put into words in a way that doesn’t seem dumb, obvious or trite. I feel that I could do more harm in trying to explain it than to discuss the results.

I have made a living out of words for a long time. My T has read some of my posts in this thread, and yesterday she said to me ‘You should write a book!’. I hear this from people as often as a beautiful woman will hear ‘You should be a model!’. Even a familiar compliment is welcome, particularly from someone that you like and respect, which is how I feel about my T.

But in truth, some part of me groans inside to hear it, the way an attractive woman with an interest in botany or economics (for example) would love to push past the firewall of attraction she can inspire in men and really connect with a kindred spirit. This, I guess, is how a visually uninspiring man like Arthur Miller ended up married to Marilyn Monroe, still considered the most attractive woman of the 20th century.

I first came to see my therapist in April because I had been on 150 dates in the three years since my last relationship, and formed no connection on any of them. Sometimes the women had been clearly disappointed, sometimes interested; but in all cases I hid behind my own erudition. I just ‘performed’.

I have a way with words, even in real time in the real world. I can charm, if I want. One time at university a teacher said I should become a television presenter - just about the last job I ever feel that I have the level of confidence to do.

But this ‘skill’ does not constitute communication, or the ability to connect. It is ‘broadcasting’ - the same thing I attributed to my step-sister in a recent post in this journal.

Yes, I should write a book. I would enjoy the process, and it might even be worth reading.

But that would be ‘action’ - cardinal force, the act of creation.

Action is the decision to write a book; it’s going for a kiss on a date which has gone well and where the cues are favourable; it’s saying ‘Hey, let’s [insert enjoyable suggestion for outing or activity] today!’.

Action is risk and collaboration. I came to see my therapist in April because after many years of more or less ‘getting by’ in terms of developing dates into relationships, my capacity to act had completely failed.

I freeze. In the previous post to this, I wrote how my therapist asked me what I wanted to do with this symbol of invasion into my boundaries. I said to her that I didn’t want to do anything. Not to go forward or back. I freeze.

I wake up every morning ‘frozen’. I did this morning too. It takes a lot of coffee and some new habits (showering every morning, forcing myself out of the house) to even begin to unfreeze me enough so that I can get moving, at least physically.

My feet are doing great. They ground me now, and I know now that they can get me anywhere I need to go.

But my arms are frozen; arms are action, reaching out beyond my boundaries and into the boundaries of other people; to play, to interact, to work, collaborate, learn, develop and grow.

My broken dating life was only the extreme manifestation of what has haunted my life these thirty or forty years - the lack of that spontaneous impulse.

So here I am in London again - the language barrier is removed for the time being, and there are plenty of groups to join, events to attend, and a handful of women interested in spending time with me.

But I am going through the same syndrome I went through shortly after moving to Bucharest - I wait, wait, wait, for others to suggest, to initiate, to act.

I am supposed to be doing this stuff to; to get out and push; to look around me and explore, to follow fractal routes into novel and reasonable experiences, and to invite other people to join me.

But already I am waiting for them to do it all. The same syndrome I went through in all the jobs in my life, in my years in Italy, in my time in Bucharest. I am here to provide novelty, stimulation, entertainment and new things, as well as to receive them. I am supposed to ‘get out and push’ too.

But that is not what I do. Yesterday I bought a small cake I had never tried before in a supermarket, and it was delicious. It took a great effort this morning to try a different cake. A conscious effort!

When I went and had a mad love affair in Italy in the early 90s, the aftermath of that brand-new experience did not teach me that exploration is good - it taught me that ‘Italy is where you find love’ (!). And so I lived all over Italy for years. By sheer numbers, I did find love a couple more times there, but everyone was amazed that I could make such a big move and yet not move further once I was there.

Exactly as has happened this year in Bucharest.

In Italy I waited for the next person capable of acting (a girlfriend, friends, etc.) to carry me to new experiences and growth, like a passenger in a car.

Exactly a year ago I bought a new car. I loved it. Just before I moved to Romania in July, I sold it. It had less than 150 miles on the clock.

So here I am, seated at a Costa Coffee in London with plenty of opportunity to act, in groups and on dates.

And I know that a beautiful woman should be glad to have a useful social trait (physical beauty) to add to her life-experience, and I too should be glad to have erudition and wit at my command sometimes.

But if it is so useful, why did I nearly drink myself to death in March?

Why did I repeat in Bucharest that old syndrome of mine (the ‘big move’ followed by ‘the big freeze’)?

Whatever you thought of the experiment my T and I made yesterday, what I took away from it was my own reaction to it; the ‘freeze’.

And this is what I have woken to now, today. The flight is done, I am all settled in, and I am used to travelling through my home-town, as I have done in Bucharest this past month.

The question is, can I now extend my experiments beyond this ‘exposure therapy’ of being in a busy city all day and remaining increasingly integrated..and actually take an imaginative leap with people, in groups or singly?

I do not know how to approach this problem, even as an experiment. My arms are stuck. Well, I will let you know. There are plenty of invites, plenty of signals from people, groups and individuals, to take action.

I will take some action today, if I can; and observe the results in my body, and objectively. And we’ll see how that goes.

 

[AnotherUser]

So...dear diary...

About 3pm I finally decided to act, and joined an after-work drinks meet through one of the London socialising sites. It was an immense relief to have acted and decided. This was what I had not done in Bucharest when I arrived (not this specific action, but any kind of action).

I arrive at 6:30 at the Covent Garden pub. Only the hostess is there, a woman in her late thirties. She can hardly vocalise, and for sure she is immune to whatever charm I might be demonstrating.

Then the robust female IT specialist arrives, who has met the hostess once before. She is confident and social and initially likes the look of me, positioning herself closer (wow, this evening really re-illustrated for me how political seating can be; no wonder it’s even mentioned in the bible).

My legs hold, things are okay. I don’t really fancy the IT lady much, but I’m not here for that.

For nearly an hour, it’s just the three of us, and in that time I think IT lady decides I’m not her cup of tea after all. Positions shift, the ranking changes.

IT lady takes away charge of the social situation from me, a duty that had fallen firmly to me at last week’s Bucharest dinner. This time it is for her to seek to draw out the quiet ones (well, the hostess, still sitting there apparently unhappy and hardly able to join in).

I accept the de-ranking - I’ve been rejected by someone whose rejection is incidental to me, and I accept her appropriation of the role of MC for the evening. In this group she ranks highest socially, and the actual hostess can barely function as a member of this group, never mind its leader.

I keep my feet, and even though I’m being pushed further out of the group, the experience is well within my own ‘window of arousal’ tolerance (see Trauma and The Body).

The other three ladies are no-shows, but eventually two pretty dapper Indian-born IT/tech gents arrive within fifteen minutes of each other. These two don’t know each other but they gel immediately. I have never seen contact details swapped so quickly after first meeting.

Now IT lady is their adherent; they’re nearer her age, and just normally ‘cool’ - two ordinary, pretty well-adjusted guys who have found each other - and a female fan.

At one point I return from the toilet to find the hostess completely alone. Apparently they all went out to smoke a cigarette (which, though she doesn’t know it, makes the socially crippled hostess the only non-smoker in the group).

So after two hours of pretty much uninterrupted lack of interest from the hostess to me, we finally have to talk again. This time her eyes show so much gratitude to me, since the ‘band of three’ ar eno longer doing anything to get her into the group.

Truth is, the hostess is a beautiful woman - a slim brunette with lovely skin and a most fetching face. She is ready for Professor Higgins, if she ever finds him.

Except that unlike Eliza Doolittle, her lack of belief in herself is so severe that it distorts her entire body, and issues out from the deepest part of her. She is very, very broken.

We talk. She despairs that she could ever buy even a modest home in London, or anywhere; she misses her job as a teaching assistant, and now works from home all the time. She seems of limited intelligence, but when someone finds language and communication so hard, how could even an expert judge?

After fifteen minutes, I feel my heart breaking for her. I see myself telescoped in her. Am I wrong to think she is so unlike Eliza Doolittle? At least she organised this hit-and-miss shindig; the rest of us are passengers, if (in my opinion) some of the others are a little ungrateful to her.

The pub is now deafening. After two and a quarter hours, I make my valedictions and go, and think of little Eliza, who organised it all, and watched from the sidelines. And I feel like thanking her again in a message. But I somehow feel that this lost little Cinderella might like some younger and more charming prince to make her feel better. I hope she finds him.

She haunts me as I write this in the pub, now late in the evening. I feel like crying for her.

And me, what can I conclude of this first experience of walking into a room of strangers?

I dunno...snake eyes? The house wins. So what? Last week my own organised dinner led to a great day-long date with a lovely lady who I’ll see again, even if I have no ambitions for that connection beyond a friendship.

And tonight I was superfluous, extra material, as it transpired.

Except that I saw something in that broken young woman that I’ll never forget. It’s a damned shame. I’ll have to carry it with me in silence and quiet reflection. And perhaps that’s what it is - a reflection.

 

[AnotherUser]

These two months in London were kind of accidental. They came out of a desperation to ‘go home’ which has haunted me my whole life, and which is the primary work I will attempt with my T.

I told her in our last session that though I am now committed to working with her on sensorimotor psychotherapy, I do not think she can really help me with this deepest and most destructive obstruction in me.

It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try. In Trauma and the Body there is one tale of a lady called Marina who continued with her SP work even after a terminal diagnosis, and how that work improved the quality of her remaining life.

I kind of feel like that; hanging over me are two quite monstrous images: one of me in the ER late last winter, and then the unravelling of my Bucharest life a month ago as that sense of panic overtook me as it has done at periodic intervals in the last thirty or so years; an atavistic feeling of complete and pending primal destruction.

And at the moment I feel like it has given me a recent and thorough kicking, and said ‘Sure, go and play with your therapist if you like - but you shall not pass!’ (Copyright Tolkien)

But what the hell - I could be wrong. So here I am, in London for two months. If I can return here by finding a job and a workable place to stay, I will; but it is only because my T has said several times that Skype cannot replace her physical presence in ongoing therapy.

If I return to London eventually, find those necessary means, it could still take a while. A lot of to-ing and fro-ing between Bucharest and London.

I do not love this place, my birth-town. If it was practicable, I would do this work in Romania, or somewhere else.

But one way or another, I am determined to give SP my best effort, fail or succeed.

So anyway, this supposed ‘return home’ has become a long-term therapy holiday. Actual therapy (finally seeing my T in person again); exposure therapy (walking the pre-Christmas streets of London in an atmosphere which always made me run home the last thirty years, 12 hours a day!); and sensorimotor psychotherapy (constant practice of old techniques learned both from my T and the books, and learning more about the road ahead with SP).

Tonight I do it again - attend another ‘blind’ social, this time with more people but in the company of one person from a socialising group, with whom I have been chatting the last few days.

The objective is the same as yesterday - exposure therapy and observation of my own body. You have no idea (or perhaps you do) how terrifying these events are for me.

But the skills involved in doing this and at least learning that I can survive such experiences are essential for my life, in a literal sense. There is no situation in urban life where you don’t need these skills, and they have been either vestigial, contextual or non-existent in me my whole life.

So this London trip is a long workout. But not every day - it is too much to challenge yourself and not give yourself time to breathe, absorb the results of your experiments and reflect and internalise your reactions as best you can.

So not only might SP not work (for me), but like any other therapy, it just can’t be rushed. I joked with my T the other day of how much effort and money it cost me to a) let her get to know me b) start trusting her and c) actually begin the work.

But you can’t trust someone with something that important just because you’re in a rush. This is long work.

It really is work - I would like to actually be in an office again, and be an employee again...but not if I end up where I was before: with all the boxes ticked but literally committing suicide through complete isolation from the human race.

I am, at any given moment, about seven litres of scotch from that point. It was a long journey here, but I’m well aware how short a journey it is back.

So...in a few hours, more strangers, more challenge.

And then, frankly, some Netflix. This is genuinely exhausting, for the body as well as the mind. :S I am certainly no ‘shut-in’ in this period of my life!

 

[AnotherUser]

A problem in my London social experiments has become obvious to me this evening, and I don’t know how to tackle it, because I really don’t know if it’s physical (organic damage), psychological or cultural in nature.

The venues where these social events take place all have very, very loud music running. The volume seems to rise throughout the evening until I literally can hear nothing people are saying to me and I can feel my throat becoming raw from trying to scream a conversation at people I really don’t know well yet.

It could be physical, since I have had a punctured eardrum since birth. I can’t prove it, but I don’t think I have ever heard the world the way other people hear it. It could be that I don’t have the actual physical capacity to pick speech out of loud ambient noise; that my timpani are so damaged that the sound waveforms just blend together in a way they don’t in normal people.

It could be psychological because I have had various ‘issues’ with noise all my life - tapping radiators when I was a kid, keeping me awake; in a recent job the level of pinging of cell-phones made it practically impossible to concentrate on my work in an open office. Many such examples.

Or it could just be cultural; I see movies and TV shows where even hip young people are screaming to hear each other in bars and nightclubs.

But if everyone does this, and everyone wants this experience, I have to consider myself an anomaly, whatever the reason is.

(By the way, I should add in my defence that I am quite happily typing this in a Wimbledon pub where a band is playing at full volume, and I’m enjoying the oldies they’re playing as I write)

The problem this gives me is that the music interfering with communications causes me so much stress in these situations that I cannot distinguish my own body reactions to the social events that I am creating and interacting with from the general high anxiety the music is causing me. The music turns my own ‘stress volume’ up to 11 throughout the whole experience.

Take this evening, for instance.

I met a very nice scientist from north China, resident here for 15 years, for a bite to eat prior to the social, and we had a very good time together. But we agreed that we don’t like the noise levels at these socials, and I did ask her not to take it as any reflection if I left the one we were to go to this evening early (or even very quickly) if the volume was cranked up.

So after an hour we took the ten-minute walk to the social, which was composed of about 15-20 people, and...wow. Absolutely deafening.

Well, I couldn’t just leave immediately, without making a single experiment, but really it was pretty pointless once I heard the decibel crankage.

We arrived together, but she left for the toilet almost immediately. I went and introduced myself to a few people; a Spanish guy; a woman in her sixties; a Polish guy; the host...

There were language barrier issues, personality clashes, relative accords, many were non-plussed...but the act itself was new for me. I have never done that before. I don’t think I’m very good at it yet, and maybe I’ll never be any good at it, but it was cardinal action; it was new, for me.

But trying to pick out the reactions of my body was like trying to spot a white ball in a snowstorm, because of the noise.

Why would anyone want to go through this? To go to a social venue where technology is used to prevent or impede people getting to know each other, or talking to their friends?

But I get it, I get it, the problem is mine. I just don’t exactly know what kind of problem it is right now.

My scientist companion found a very entertaining young French man, and the three of us talked and laughed quite happily for half an hour. It wasn’t my best material, but I listened and reacted as best I could when I was neither sure exactly what had been said nor if my response was decipherable, because I could not hear my own voice above the music.

And far as I can tell, every bar in London is like this in the evening (and every bar in Bucharest, I know).

When my throat began to hurt too much, I absented myself with as much good nature and compliments to my friend and the nice French guy as I think could be heard, and had to abandon the event.

Within half an hour the lady sent me a lovely text saying how much she had enjoyed our conversation before the event, and I reciprocated the sentiment. I don’t know if that was a cue for further engagement, but at that stage my mission to develop my ability to ‘take action’ intersects with the fact that I am not looking for a relationship at the moment.

Not that I wouldn’t like a roll in the hay, or that I would turn away something deeper that seemed to have unusual possibility for me and the other person. But I feel that such things are very advanced material for where my experiments are at right now, plus I do not want to play with other people’s lives or trifle with their feelings. So I am content in these instances (the long date in Bucharest last week, the scientist today) to let it be unless the other person is very keen. And it’s okay.

As for the noise factor - clearly I am ‘wrong’, and I don’t know what on earth I am going to do about it.

 

[AnotherUser]

Several disturbing and internally disruptive events today, and several positive ones.

Stood in freezing wet weather for three hours in Trafalgar Square this afternoon with a very small handful of vegan campaigners, including the lady from whom I am renting the room in London.

I’ve never done anything like that before. The group seemed to be divided between females holding placards and the alpha leader (a male) out in the flow of the crowd handing out leaflets.

I was happy to be there, despite the conditions. However it seemed a bit passive just to stand there with a placard, so I took a bunch of leaflets.

For someone in my position, this particular exercise is very useful. It involves a ton of initiating eye contact with the passers-by. These exchanges cannot be explained in words - it’s a very suitable exercise for sensorimotor psychotherapy.

Eventually a madman came along and challenged one of the female protesters, the smallest. The alpha and I had to intervene as the interloper stood literally inches from her face. This guy was very far gone. Incredibly, not one other person thought to maybe go and look for a police officer, since this was a very tense situation about one mad moment from becoming violent, as Alpha and I warned the guy off, but he would not budge for ages.

I returned to equilibrium quickly, but the situation seemed so serious that it was hard to monitor myself much. I know adrenaline kicked in, and so it should if it seems likely you are about to engage in some kind of combat.

What was more interesting was how easy it was to return to a normal window of arousal within about ten minutes, and return to leafleting and conversation within this small and frozen group.

What was far, far more disturbing was when I asked someone to take a picture of me for my vegan friend in Bucharest.

I am not ready to see myself in photos. My dysmorphia is very severe. I was smiling and genuinely happy in the pics, but I cannot bear what I see in them. I don’t know how long I can keep them undeleted in my photo roll on this phone.

How I feel about those pictures does not agree in any way with how I have felt myself reflected back from the eyes of the world in the work I have been doing in London since I arrived. There isn’t any cross-over at all - it’s a severe and negative reaction; utter non-acceptance of myself when seen from outside.

The photos upset me a lot, but I decided to deal with it later, and still enjoyed the rest of the afternoon. Smiling at people good-naturedly and seeing the almost universally positive response, even from those who refused a leaflet, is a good feeling.

Incidentally, this activity is not random - I became a vegan in April of this year.

After my flat-mate had moved onto another demo elsewhere, the smaller group surrendered to the bad weather and we went for coffee in a blessedly warm Pret-a-manger nearby.

They knew each other, these 4-5 people, and they are talking about a movement and about themes which range (in general public perception) from benign to (in state perception) ‘terrorist threat’.

No-one at that table was actually crazy in service of animal rights, but they all know someone who is (and so do I, as you know by now). I felt physically on a diaspora, and a dangerous margin somewhere in the vicinity. I decided during this coffee-shop chat to be very circumspect about further involvement in the vegan movement, though I am inclined to help.

Mostly I listened; these people have their familiar web of topics and themes, and they’re welcoming enough. It made sense to me at that stage to listen more than talk.

Eventually I had a long chat with Alpha, a man around my age. He’s way, way more reasonable than my step-sister (who he knows better than I do), but even in him I felt flashes of passion and zeal that set my arousal level higher than it had been. I noticed that I was sitting next to him with my legs crossed in their classic super-tight configuration. In that moment I didn’t feel like experimenting with the wider stance!

Earlier in the day I also took a risk in an ongoing email exchange with the woman I had the very long date with in Bucharest a week ago. I told her exactly what I am doing here, and trying to achieve. This was in response to an increasingly intimate string of emails between us (intimate in terms of honesty, not in terms of trying to chat each other up).

Since I have no specific romantic or sexual ambitions with her, the risk is limited, but it was a risk. I did not feel it at all at the time I sent the mail, but in the hours afterward.

In the last five minutes I read her replies. Phew, that is some hot stuff in there! In terms of communication she and I seem to now be at a very intimate level. The details are confidential, of course. I wouldn’t tweet someone else’s heart.

But I am glad that I have just left Bucharest for London. This work is more important than what clearly was about to develop between us. I’m looking for a road, not a car. Find the road first, then the car.

But it is nice, to be honest, to have a positive effect on attractive women like my Bucharest friend and the Chinese scientist yesterday. Today it reminds me that my horror at seeing myself in a few photographs is out of synch with my reality in the world. The camera may not lie, but the observer can; certainly the observer who has had body dysmorphia for forty years.

 

[AnotherUser]

South Bank, London, Sunday 19th November 2017 (non-diary entry)

Some practical observations for those who might later find this thread and wonder about how you actually practice body observation and regulation.

SURE-FOOTED

If you read all through ‘Trauma and the Body’, you’ll find that severe setbacks are likely even in far, far later phases of treatment than I am currently in.

So while your own treatment and practices may and must advance and develop, those core grounding techniques one starts with will likely always be where the day’s work begins.

For me, that is the feet, and there’s a pretty good chance that work with them - and your legs - will be the central foundation of all other work.

So on days like today, where I feel I have lost touch with this, or am about to, it’s time for me to concentrate on the feet again.

It is easiest to do this when actually walking, and easier too if your shoes are solid and provide good, flat and comfortable coverage on the ground. Yesterday I went out for a few hours with my older, tired trainers, and it felt like trying to use ice-skates on the pavement.

The feeling of solidity in your feet is two-way; you are driving them and they are carrying you. Hence the need to look after them with good footwear.

NEW POISE

The person who is paying attention to their feet in sensorimotor psychotherapy never bumps into anyone any longer, even in a nightmarishly crowded city like London. Very few of the people around you (particularly phone-fixators) are putting anything remotely like this effort into their gait and their attention to where they are going and the obstacles in their way.

If, like me, you are using exposure to crowds as therapy to habituate yourself and feel comfortable in that previously uncomfortable situation, this added benefit of rock-solid sense of direction and movement will feed back to you in a very positive way. You’ll find, without any aggression, that you’re moving like Shaft or The Terminator, and it’s a good feeling!

It’s harder to connect with the feet at home, in repose, for early users like me, since the feet have more limited context there. Today I was home for about three hours longer than usual, and felt uncomfortable, because foot-work is where my SP day begins. So I have work to do on that.

REBOOT

So what is the process of grounding yourself with your feet (at least in motion, as I do)?

First of all, whenever I stand up, I look down at my feet and acknowledge them, even at home - just for a moment; the way you might playfully throw your car keys in the air before setting off on a trip.

Then I stabilise myself physically, which means balancing out the backpack and ensuring my clothes are set for the journey, and then set off.

As I set off, I’m aware of my feet as a vehicle for movement; I am both controlling them and they are carrying me. I stay with the awareness of them as I walk.

If I’m destabilised, I make such mental notes as necessary about how that feels in the body (tightness, frowns, pains, etc) but I keep concentrating on the feet, and feel strengthened both by their apparent independent sense of purpose and surety, and by the fact that they are under my control.

Pretty much invariably, there is at least some improvement in whatever else was bothering me in my body.

And this is the core process that I expect to follow me (or lead me, if you prefer) through however long my journey into SP may be. If I have a bad episode tomorrow, the remedy starts with the feet; and if I go all the way through to the later stages and falter then - the remedy still starts with the feet.

Cognitive Therapy is about drilling for oil. Sensorimotor psychotherapy is about creating a new face on Mount Rushmore.

In CT there will be several ‘very exciting’ moments; in SP, you will need a kind of internal time-lapse photography to understand your progress.

But then, that’s how we learnt what didn’t work; slow, long, deep, and enduring over decades. The remedy is approached in the same way.

From Pat Ogden’s accompanying worksheet-driven book to ‘Trauma and the Body’:

‘It is important that you help your clients understand that the physical habits and symptoms that were developed as adaptations to extreme or stressful conditions can be unlearned, and that new responses better suited to current reality can be practiced.

‘It took many repetitions to create procedural patterns when they were young, and now it will simply take many repetitions of new actions to create new patterns.’

 

[AnotherUser]

More non-diary notes from London’s South Bank, Sunday 19th November.

I have said before that when my therapist asked me how I felt with my straighter back, I told her I was not ready to respond - that it was just an experiment which I was doing for its own sake, and whatever benefit it might have might eventually become apparent to me.

I can report now one distinct benefit for the ‘slumped’ user, of having a consistently straighter spine: you will be able to notice far more easily those stimuli that cause you to slump down again, The contrast will become evident immediately!

This happened in last Wednesday’s session with my T, as we entered a topic that challenged me, and I was able to pick up on my body’s instinctive slouch response to this material even before she could comment on it.

That’s the kind of insight that you need in work on the body; if the ‘hunch’ is allowed to stay in (what I presume by now is) its customary and permanent ‘down’ state, your back posture becomes ‘white noise’ which cannot distinguish the feelings of victory and defeat which might be distorting your posture.

Again, this is about using posture as litmus paper for potential healing. The ultimate aim is to heal the posture permanently from the inside out. The procedure, as far as I understand it, is something like this:

A) The ‘thought’ changes the body (i.e. distorts the spine, causes facial muscles to fall, droops the shoulders, etc.)

B) You notice the body change and attempt to identify the stimulus that caused it, which you’ll either deal with in tandem with your therapist, or else acknowledge as an already proven false belief.

C) Having used the ‘litmus paper’ of your old response, you adjust the body (i.e. unhunch the shoulders or straighten the back, etc) back to its pre-distorted configuration to gain the benefit of bio-feedback (letting the body make the mind feel better by posture associated with better feeling).

So, to recap: the thought changed the body; you recognised and acknowledged the effect the thought had, and either made plans to work positively on it or else put into effect your existing plans for it (if you had them); you completely reversed the polarity of the initial distortion by using conscious change in the body to ‘correct’ it.

This is very different from reluctantly straightening up because your dad is moaning at you about your posture.

This seems to be a biofeedback-driven process which acknowledges the problem inherent in it (i.e. whatever made you feel ‘sad’ or ‘defeated’). If the problem is new, it may represent a new project for you and your therapist, or at least merit particular attention from you both.

But if you have already established with your therapist that the problem is just a vestigial and mistaken response, a useless ‘echo’ which has no real trauma to trigger it any longer, then you’ve simply corrected it - again.

And this long process of attention and appropriate response (see end of previous post) is intended to eventually ‘code’ the correction at the same deep level of your brain where it was first imprinted, back in the time of trauma.

 

[AnotherUser]

South Bank, London, a few hours later.

This one is a diary entry and details the physical process from equilibrium to internal disorder, this evening, over a period of about 90-120 minutes.

It includes details of the triggers and the apparent results, as well as I was able to observe them.

None of the events involved are ‘major’, and all the ‘triggers’ in this event seem to be related to past trauma, not all of it in the very distant past.

I had been exploring the South Bank for some hours, posting on here, corresponding with friends and people I had met through social events since coming here, when I decided to wander into the South Bank Centre, a large complex from the early 1960s which is a popular hub for London culture and music, seated on the Thames near Waterloo.

This evening I decided to set myself two social tasks: to ask the Chinese scientist out for some weeknight evening meeting or event, since we seemed to have enjoyed each other’s company last week; and to set a definite ‘date’ with a woman I have been communicating with on a dating site for two weeks.

I should add, for context, that these are ‘stress tests’ for me - opportunities to observe my body under pressure in situations where it has routinely failed me on many occasions. Getting a girlfriend or getting to an intimate stage with a woman is not the objective; right now I don’t even know if my future is in Romania or Britain. I just need more information about my body’s reactions to this kind of stimulus/experiment.

But having successfully engaged two women via social events in the last ten days, what can I do...continue rebooting the whole process over and over again? The point of this work is to go forward, or at least attempt to go forward, in some way, and to observe the results for further work with my T.

The two women I have engaged are my Romanian ‘long date’ from about eight days ago (see previous entries - we now correspond at length several times a day in the context of a possible romantic relationship, though I have made very clear the nature of my ‘lone’ work in the UK in this period) and the Chinese scientist.

The dating-site woman feels like a far more toxic prospect for me, because of the context, and because of the terrible dating-site experiences I had in the three years prior to first seeing my T.

Anyway, the first challenge was one of imagination and ‘action’: I had to suggest locations and situations for both these meetings.

I kind of cheated with the dating site woman by making my first suggestion (of two) the bar where I had had such a nice time with the Chinese scientist last Friday. But it is a great place.

The second place I suggested to the dating-site prospect was a bar at the South Bank Centre, and I sent these suggestions to her while I was actually in there examining the bars and the ambience.

As for the Chinese lady, she responded positively to my suggestion of either a drink/coffee or an exhibition, suggesting the latter.

So I again used the material at hand, and one of my two suggestions to the scientist was an installation that I liked the look of, listed in a leaflet at the South Bank Centre. The other suggestion, also very ambient, I plucked off the internet (Time Out London).

I cannot easily describe what a difficult act it is for me to make these suggestions. It is ‘cardinal action’ - it’s an act of imagination from a man with ‘broken arms’.

At this time the scientist has responded back enthusiastically saying she will look at my choices after Blue Planet, and I have not heard from the dating site lady yet.

But after sending these suggestions to both these women, my body slowly began to betray me, and revealed how negatively I feel about these actions - most particularly meeting the woman from the dating site.

One thing that the SP books have only lightly touched on so far is how stress affects the voice, but vocal distortion’ is as much of a fact in an ‘episode’ as slumped shoulders, etc.

I found when I made enquiries of three different people about the availability to the public of the South Bank Centre bars during weeknights, that my voice was raucous and difficult to hear. I could feel tension in my face as well, reflected back at me in tension from the people I was talking with.

Biofeedback works both ways; good feedback gears you up into a positive social loop, and bad feedback does the opposite. So the more I asked, the worse the reactions were. The more evident my own stress was.

Additionally I felt tension in the shoulders, and great difficulty in maintaining those ‘purposeful feet’ which I have written of today; those ‘grounded’ feet whose surety feeds right up through the body into the face and general relaxed demeanour.

This, then, is a minor illustration of the kind of crisis escalation which has sent me back to the UK. This one is manageable, but the model holds good for the ones that are not.

I felt the best thing to do was observe it and record it here in this diary entry, for further analysis with my T, or alone with my thoughts as I might gain some perspective on them later.

It is hard to reconnect with your feet and ground yourself after a spiral of this nature. Before I came into the pub this evening (I now have a temporary ‘local’ in Wimbledon where I tend to close my UK days), I walked the forecourt a few minutes concentrating on my feet, and did some damage limitation.

But I could only get so far. What I did this evening and how I regarded it had manifest consequences for my body, posture, tension and disposition, and this is still in progress.

But there, in any case, is the record of all the physical manifestations of the process that I can recall as it was happening (and I hope that I have expressed clearly that this inner discord transmits itself clearly to the expression too, which further aggravates one’s sense of ‘paranoia’ out and about in social situations).

 

[AnotherUser]

Today I have resolved to at least do something with my ‘dead’ arms - that, barring very bad weather or other exceptional circumstances, I will keep them out of my pockets.

I have not encountered so much internal resistance to any postural change I have attempted as this one. My hands want to get back in those pockets as bad as Punxsutawney Phil wants to get back in the tree for another year.

It has made me realise that putting my hands in my pockets is yet another lifelong gesture of defeat, submission and an absurd wish to be ‘smaller’ in public (like avoiding eye contact and hunched shoulders).

No wonder the police pay so much attention to the hands of someone they are trying to arrest. I think they have a lot of policy meetings about hands!

Tracking the legs is now becoming a lower-brained habit for me; the straight back requires constant attention; but nothing is likely to be harder than keeping my arms out in the world.

 

[AnotherUser]

My voice has been affected now for two days - raucous, hard to hear. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy concentrates so much on gait, posture and expression, but in this moment I wish the source books had acknowledged a little more just what a significant signal of inner disruption changes in vocal tone are. For sure I have always noticed it.

Sometimes there is nothing amiss in my expression. My inner biofeedback observer notes good response from others in casual encounters - until the moment I speak.

Along with every other physical manifestation of disruption or what SP calls ‘high arousal’ (nothing to do with sex), vocal disruption has familiar patterns of repetition: wavering cadence, inconsistent delivery...it is the same as the difficulty in my arms. There is conflict in the will to act.

That conflict was most obvious in me aged 11, when I developed a stutter bad enough to be sent to a speech therapist. I was so smitten with her and safe in her company, she never once heard me stutter! I think psychotherapists sometimes face the same problem with patients, perhaps even my T with me.

I feel weary of the work today, of the drudgery if re-finding my feet yet again. But this is the nature of SP - the wearing away at the stone, and the long commitment; it is a leap of faith which needs unusual and consistent effort.