When Your Feelings Themselves Need a Therapist.

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Last year, in early 2021, I began a new relationship.

Because I have a panic disorder, which organizes itself around separation, getting attached to someone can feel, well, dangerous. It takes me a while to trust someone—I am often filled with uncertainty, which (as those who regularly read this newsletter and/or experience panic and anxiety will understand first-hand) feels terrifying.

The initial ascent into coupledom was marked by bouts of paralyzing dread (mine).

I felt incapacitated.

I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t focus, and the dread—an inescapable sense of impending extinction filling my body—felt so palpably awful I knew the only way to avoid ever feeling this again was, quite simply, to stay single forever.

Anything that kicked up the reality of uncertainty sent a cascade of horror through my soul.

This exquisite dread-sense was familiar.

This sense of doom was triggered by anything that bothered me about the relationship, about him, about me with him, about anything really that threatened to rupture whatever connection was being established.

It was the same feeling that filled my body all throughout my childhood when I had to leave my mom to go somewhere else.

GETTY IMAGES | Kira

I understood, both in childhood and as an adult, that my dread is tied to the threat of leaving, of disconnection, which is why I had been single for so many years when I began this new relationship.

The dread that emerges whenever I become connected to a new partner is so draining, I had needed a break.

But by the time the pandemic began, I was done being single, and wanted to try again.

And so I went for it.

But the paralyzing state of apprehension and unease I had while getting to know this new person was so exquisitely awful, I wasn’t certain I was capable of moving forward. Every time I wanted to end it, friends would push me to keep going, worrying that it was my fear that was preventing me from entering into a relationship.

Before I continue, though, just so you understand why I was stomping on the brakes of a new relationship, I need to explain the feeling of “paralyzing dread” because those two words don’t do it justice.

Imagine the state of anticipatory dread you feel in the lead-up to delivering a company-wide presentation, or giving a toast at a wedding, or leading your first workshop, or awaiting results of a biopsy, boarding a plane for a 14-hour flight when you are terrified to fly …

Bring to mind all the times you’ve had to fulfill an obligation, but the mere idea of the obligation—whether it was something you’d agreed to do or were strong-armed into—suddenly feels insurmountable and all you want is for that feeling of agitation to be resolved, for that date to have passed.

But the time that spans between before and after feels tortuously long, as if time has slowed down just to watch you suffer.

Now, imagine that fear or dread inhabiting your body. Feel it in your stomach, chest, the back of your throat. Feel your apprehension in battle with the absolute need to have that apprehension alleviated.

If you’re having trouble, try this: Recall a moment when you were in a body of water and realized you couldn’t hold your breath much longer so you headed back up to the surface, only to discover that you’ve miscalculated the distance, and you’re terrified you might not make it.

GETTY IMAGES | piranka

That’s the feeling.

Now double it.

On top of that, this feeling doesn’t subside.

It lives in your body all the time, like a box of gray static electricity, zapping its heaviness into you. It wakes you up while you’re asleep to remind you to get back to it, as though sleeping and not feeling the dread means you’re slacking off.

This is the dread I’m talking about.

The anticipation of suffering is a fully embodied experience, and one so disturbing, you’re afraid to make it worse by moving. The irony is that dread is often more unbearable than the actual painful event you’re anticipating.

When I felt this during the beginning of my relationship, I believed with my entire body that the only way to alleviate the dread was to escape from the person I was with.

The dread was telling me that I would so much rather be alone and liberated from that feeling than be with someone and filled with dread.

Yet because the feeling is so wildly unbearable, and because I don’t want to be alone forever, the goal to feel better demanded I find a way to address it while I was in a relationship. And that’s when I had this flash of insight: I have been in therapy for half my life. It has literally saved my life—so why hasn’t it touched the dread?

I realized it’s because the dread lives inside my body—it’s in my physiology—and talk therapy doesn’t venture there.

What I understood, very suddenly, was that my FEELINGS THEMSELVES needed therapy.

I had to find someone to bypass my mind and go into my body and work directly on the dread. But first, I had to find out if that was even a thing.

Turns out, it is.

It’s called Somatic Experiencing Therapy, and it was developed as a “naturalistic and neurobiological approach to healing trauma in the late 1970s by Peter Levine, a psychologist who specializes in trauma. Like its name (“soma” in Latin means “of the body”), it’s a body-first approach. It helps individuals create new experiences in their bodies, ones that contradict those of tension and overwhelming helplessness.

This means that healing isn’t about reclaiming memories or changing our thoughts and beliefs about how we feel; rather, it’s about exploring the sensations that lie underneath our feelings and beliefs, as well as our habitual behavior patterns.

Dr. Levine, who received his doctorate in medical biophysics and worked for NASA as a stress consultant.

While studying animals in the wild, Levine discovered that they very rarely showed signs of trauma even though they were constantly under siege by predators. His studies gave rise to what he called “Somatic Experiencing.”

GETTY IMAGES | Aditya Singh

The first two survival instincts are the fight-or-flight response, but deep trauma is born of “the third survival response to perceived life threat which is freeze and collapse,” which he writes about in his 1997 book, Waking the Tiger. This third response “is time-limited, in other words, it needs to run its course and allow the massive energy that was prepared for fight or flight to discharge through spontaneous, gentle inner shaking and trembling. If the immobility phase does not complete, that charge stays trapped, and, from the body’s perspective, is still under threat and often continues to perceive the world from that perspective.”

Traumatic symptoms are not caused by the triggering event itself.

Long-lasting trauma is caused, Dr. Levine explains in his book, when the energy failed to get discharged. Instead of being released, it’s stuck inside our nervous system making a mess of our lives, behaviors, and states-of-mind. Somatic Experiencing’s goal is to help the body process that stuck energy.

The nervous system was designed to respond to threats that we can see, by fighting or fleeing.

When we encounter an invisible threat, we are catapulted into the third survival mechanism, which is to freeze and close down.

We want to get away from a threat but we can’t flee because we can’t see what it is we need to escape.

Trauma happens because we are unprepared.

This is why people living with trauma are constantly preparing for the next threat. They are still stuck inside the original threat and become preoccupied and live on edge.

Dr. Levine created Somatic Experiencing® to release that stuck energy, and to turn off the alarm that’s creating dysregulation and overwhelm inside a person’s system.

I was sold, and off I went looking for a Somatic Experiencing Therapist.

And then I found her.

Her name is Rita Hayes, she’s a Somatic Experiencing therapist, and she is gentle and warm, and I liked her instantly.

Dr. Hayes, who is an LCSW, explained to me that we all have “parts” of ourselves at different ages. Versions of our younger selves still exist in us—some are stuck there, some are versions of our younger selves who have been frozen inside of us, like moments where something overwhelmed us that never got fully processed.

There’s a little 3-year-old me, a 7-year-old me, a teen me, and on we go.

Each of these versions has their own response style.

The dread I feel when I experience uncertainty in relationships is very, very young. It’s overwhelmed, helpless, and feels wildly alone and out of control.

How did Dr. Hayes know this?

Dr. Hayes asked me to describe the terrible feeling I felt in my nervous system as a small child.

I shut my eyes and felt a heat, a vibration at the center of my body followed by a sense of haunting dread that I was about to be dragged by my ankles against my will to some muddy, dark lava pit where I’d be disappeared.

Dr. Hayes asked me to describe and then imagine, the opposite of that feeling: What would have helped alleviate that child’s dread and terror?

GETTY IMAGES | Maskot

For reasons I still don’t understand, I saw my friend Megan (as an adult) come into my childhood bedroom, put her arm around me and explain what was going to happen next. (When I told Megan this, she thought it was the best thing ever.) She made sure that I had a sense of certainty before moving on.

Dr. Hayes told me: “Don’t let the little part become you. When you feel the dread, it's the little part in you trying to tell you you're in danger. In those moments, you can tell yourself that that's your kid self, and you are not in danger, and there is a way to fix whatever feels dangerous.”

When I experienced things my boyfriend (now my ex) did or didn’t do that triggered my earliest fears, I felt like I was in danger, and the dread consumed me. I became part of the dread experience, like it was an immersive environment. This is what she meant by “don’t become it.”

The young part of us doesn’t know the difference between the past and the present.

It’s all the same time. Anything that sets off the alarm is something big, even if what sets it off is objectively something small (and in my case, it was always something objectively small).

Dr. Hayes explained that my dread was developmental, something I’ve had since I was a baby. Other people’s stuck responses might be circumstantial—they were in a car accident, or a victim of sexual assault. And the part of me that was having the dread response was very young.

“Parts,” Hayes told me, are "un-metabolized traumatic energy."

Imagine a baby with unstable and unreliable parents. The parental instability would cause a type of terror in the baby’s nervous system. The terror is fueled by not knowing what’s going to happen next because there’s no routine, no structure. The baby would develop a fear of all that feels uncertain and unknown. In the future, when the baby is an adult and something triggers them, they will feel the same dread they felt as a baby.

When asked how old that feeling-state is, they are bound to recognize that it’s a very young state—that’s their young “part.”

A part is an ego state that gets stuck and just hangs out for years or a lifetime until someone comes to move it through the proper channels.

GETTY IMAGES | Westend61

An SE therapist moves it through by working with the stuck parts and helps you metabolize it into your system, into your adult view, so that when the feeling of dread comes up, it’s not overpowering. It doesn’t blow you away like it did when you were young.

When you become swallowed by an emotion that feels uncontainable, you become the emotion.

And you feel the same age as when the stuck emotion was created.

What my SE therapist told me over and over again was: “Don’t become her, just notice her. Observe her.” Meaning, every time I feel dread, don’t become overpowered by it. Just try and pull back from it and see it as my fear response as a young, stuck, scared baby. I don’t need to respond that way anymore. I can just observe what the dread is trying to tell me.

My dread, she informed me, was not actually panic—it was trauma.

And because trauma’s roots are buried in our physiology, we must work with our bodies (and our minds) in order to heal.

A post-traumatic stress symptom is a response to fear that is trapped in mid-leap. It’s suspended, unprocessed and incomplete. Like EMDR, Somatic Experiencing is a method for processing what hasn’t been fully completed.

Imagine being taught how to hand-write letters, but before you’re able to master it, you’re given a computer.

Now, going forward, whenever you’re asked to write something by hand, you’ll be unable to do so legibly because you never learned how to form the letters using a pencil.

That’s stuckness—an incomplete cycle.

She had me talk about something in childhood that felt traumatic to me (the symptoms of my undiagnosed panic disorder was what traumatized me the most) and walked me through a scene in which I was in a panicked state.

She asked me what I wished had happened and then she had me tell that story. In recounting it to her, I was given a resource and time to prepare for the trauma.

This is part of the process of metabolizing stuck trauma. It creates a sense of completion. And it allows you to prepare for what's coming.

A lot of her work is geared toward helping to keep the nervous system from being overwhelmed. She showed me some techniques for self-regulating my nervous system, with the goal of smoothing the jittery and jagged waves to a point where they’re more calm and fluid, so that I do not feel like I’m being held prisoner by my symptoms.

She aims to tap into the trauma, without leaving people there.

Dr. Hayes guides her clients to touch into the pain in a titrated way and then bring in the resources to help, so that they don’t go into an overwhelmed state again.

When we have anxiety and the nervous system is dysregulated, anxiety moves upward, and regulation moves downward. So any exercise that you do should try to bring you into your lower body, from your waist down. This will begin to bring you into regulation.

Anxiety brings you out of your body and keeps you circulating outside and around yourself.

So you always want to go back into the body to find out what’s happening inside.

The beauty of therapies like Somatic Experiencing is that, unlike talk therapy, they don’t require you to tell the whole story of what happened. It can track things through the body and work with a little tiny piece of information.

Original art for How to Live by Edwina White

TECHNIQUES

The first technique Dr. Hayes taught me was to separate my feelings of overwhelm. When you’re overwhelmed, your nervous system and brain clump the stressors altogether, and they want to be separated.

1. The Ceiling: (I just made this name up): She had me look at the ceiling and mentally place each stressor into a different corner. Getting them outside of my body and placing them in separate corners really did free up tension in my body. One corner might be all the work you have before you. Another corner might be all the chores and errands that are piling up. Another corner is all the admin piling up...You get the idea.

2. Grounding: Put your feet on the floor. Bring your awareness to your feet, and press down. Feel the solidness of the floor and the solidness of the earth underneath the floor. Slowly bring awareness to your feet. Slowly bring awareness to your butt, and feel the seat under you. Feel the floor again. Then let yourself feel the back of the chair. This exercise brings you into regulation, by bringing all the energy down below your waist.

3. Breathing: Breathe in for a count of four, and then breathe out through your mouth with some effort and sound, like you're blowing out candles. Do a series of five of these and then breathe normally. When you’re ready, do another series of five. Rhythmic breathing regulates your entire nervous system.

4. The Hug: This technique comes from Peter Levine. Put one hand on your forehead and the other hand on your chest and just feel what goes on between the hands. Pay attention to the energy and the temperature. Stay until you feel a shift. Then, take the forehead hand and put it on the belly. Wait until there is a shift and or a flow. Emotions expand and contract, so try and notice your sensations and how they change.

If you find yourself yawning, that's a sign your nervous system is regulating.

Somatic Experiencing helped me immensely.

I was able, in moments of extreme dread, to observe the stuck part of myself and to extrapolate from that young stuck part what was the true fear. I learned to communicate my dread as openly as possible, and clue in my partner.

The dread itself never fully resolved, but I learned how to better manage it, and that’s the crucial piece.

The more I practice identifying what the dread is trying to tell me instead of mistaking it for meaning I’m going to imminently die, the better off I’ll be, and the safer I’ll feel in relationships.

In addition to dramatically helping me, it also gave me a new appreciation for my dog’s ability to shake off her upsets.

Lucky dog.

And you? Do you feel like your emotions need therapy? Have you ever tried Somatic Experiencing? If so, did it help you?

Let me know in the comments!

Until next week I am…

Amanda