Coming into the Body (Part 1 of 2)

Trauma is an octopus.

L’dor vador. These Hebrew words, one of the most fundamental tenets of Judaism, translate to “Generation to generation”.

—You cannot rush the healing process—

“I wanted my mother to love me. Despite all the torture and brutality.”
― Wendy Hoffman, White Witch in a Black Robe: A True Story about Criminal Mind Control

GLUTTON

A shamanic therapist once said to me, “You want to eat the whole meal simultaneously. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner– until you throw up.”

My insatiable gulping down of life, the need to know it all, live it all, be it all, was my fear and anxiety from childhood trauma. My running to “get it” was the compulsive desire to “get love” before I die. If I “get it,” The child who did not receive love will be whole and healed.

My unworthiness said, ‘You have to “get it,”’ and my soul said, ‘You don’t have to “get” anything; you just need to live and learn.’

The myth about healing trauma is thinking that we can “cure” it. The need to be perfect and “get it” is part of the trauma cycle: fight, flight, freeze and fawn. As humans, “perfectionism” is hypervigilant behavior that drives us to “GET” loved because we believe we are not lovable.

The truth is you can never “get it all.” Life is a cyclic and continuous learning experience of the SELF. As Epictetus put it, “It is impossible for a person to begin to learn what he thinks he already knows.”

It is the conundrum of living. I will never know it all; I should know it all so no one will see the cracks and scabs that rub against my skin and bones, causing me fear, sadness, and loneliness.

Learning self-love is the most challenging, painful, and extensive aspect of trauma recovery. However, how can we love ourselves when we do not have models of unconditional love? Loving ourselves means loving it all—the good, bad, and ugly—the shadow parts.

The same therapist said, “You need to eat your mother to know yourself.”

I gagged when she said that. I thought I was well past my “mother work” because I was educated, creative, and independent; I believed I was nothing like my mother. My mother was an abuser and borderline personality, and my father, a male of his time who never protected me from my mother’s abuse, was sexist and told me I could not make it in the world without him.

I was over it!! And that was that.

What I didn’t WANT TO KNOW was how much of my mother’s rage, grief, and heartbreak I held unconsciously in my body with every slap, pinch, and kick she threw at me. My father’s words ran deep in my bones, “You can’t do it.” Unconscious behavior, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings acted out on everything and everyone.

HIPS AND HIDDEN TRAUMA

Many years ago, I worked with a client who felt hip pain. I guided her to travel inward, slowing down her breath so she could feel the discomfort. She experienced a heavy weight pulling her into the earth, burying her.

A deep sadness surfaced. “I don’t want to feel this sadness. It’s too much.” I urged her to receive her own experience gently.

As she moved into her hips, she felt rage and remembered her mother locking her in a closet when she was six when she tried to express her feelings. Because of that incident, she developed an unconscious pattern of shutting down and tightening her body when anyone got close physically or emotionally.

Layers of unexpressed fear and hurt emerged. “I hurt so much. Why would my mother do that?” she cried out.

Slowly, I guided her to move her hips side to side, slow, then fast, and encouraged her to “go out of control.”

At first, she was stiff and didn’t want to keep moving. “Stay with it. Accept your little girl’s feelings,” I said.

Finally, she touched into the pain and let out a short, loud scream. She felt exhausted, but she began to feel warmth opening up in her hips.

I asked her to keep practicing coming into the body.

THE METAPHYSICS OF CATHARSIS

Brain research and experiential, somatic, and creative approaches now inform us that trauma is in the body, not the head.

But what does that truly mean?

Your five senses and physical sensations are the door into your body. Emotions, intuitions, and instincts are energetically involved in trauma recovery.

Life is energy. Energy never dies; it changes through intent, effort, and focus. Your body, thoughts, beliefs, feelings, memories, and imagination are all energy. But they are all in your head. Bringing the felt emotional memory into the skin, bones, and organs takes an intentional pulling inward and downward.

Healing is not curing; feeling/intuition is healing—an ongoing process.

When individuals attempt to drop into their bodies, they will analyze a feeling from their head, tell a story, and repeat a memory of something that happened.

The energetics of trauma are non-verbal, irrational, and primal.

Your animal instincts sniff into your body. They guide you toward your authentic knowing and experience.

Many people are terrified to go there and believe it will re-traumatize them. It can. But if guided with acceptance, care, and pacing layer by layer, you will begin to release the pain and freeze with compassion.

To find THAT emotional voice takes a deep commitment to tolerate the pain. To melt unconscious defended patterns that, as children, kept you safe and frozen in survival. Holding pain and discomfort is a metaphysical, energetic, emotional healing of trauma.

Releasing, navigating, and transforming trauma is an intense cathartic experience.

“Catharsis provides a model of healing that deals with those things which most disturb us and we least wish to face. The model that catharsis offers and which the millennial vision communicates is that there is a practical way to accomplish the ancient spiritual goal of creating light out of the very substance of darkness. This process may be crucial to our physical and spiritual survival, for as the apocalypse myth keeps reminding us, the darkness will not just disappear. Instead, it must be transformed.” —A Work of Lamentation by Joshua Leavitt, Parabola, Spring 1988

Cathartic work is passion work, the portal into your body.

OCTOPUS TENTACLES AND THE PSYCHE

Dr. Schulman, my first therapist at age seventeen, said to me, “You have a symbiotic relationship with your parents.”

I had no clue what that meant at the time.

Through my inner travels and studies, I realized I was living off of their feelings, unresolved traumas, and unconscious beliefs, which they had hammered into me without awareness.

He continued, “You don’t know what your feelings are separate from your mother and father.”

These are the core symptoms of trauma–co-dependency and addiction. You feel “others” feelings, not your own. You have no SELF.

Trauma is an octopus—a long, twisted, winding road leading back to the beginning of time. Your body is the topography of your soul and its primal wisdom and voice.

GRANDMA’S LEGACY

Trauma is the universal story of your ancestors. There isn’t a culture, society, country, race, or nationality that didn’t walk through the fires of trauma. The fight for freedom, independence, and individuality— truth and intimacy. Family—unconditional love.

My grandmother, Sarah, brought a trail of blood that she dragged across the Atlantic Ocean from Russia/Poland—carrying generations of women’s silence.

My four-foot-four, husky, blonde, vodka-drinking, chain-smoking grandmother came to America and escaped the Russian pogroms. Nazi ovens murdered the rest of her eleven siblings, and she came alone, bringing with her the unfelt grief and rage that helped her survive loss after loss. She passed on her heartbreaking story to her children.

By the time she was twenty-five, her husband Charles died of pneumonia at thirty years old. Sarah was left with three children to feed and keep alive.

Like all good Jewish children, her children retired Sarah to the Burly House on Miami Beach.

I visited Sarah often, especially after I moved to Florida. One day, I asked her, “Grandma, how did you come to America?”

Sitting in her small blue and white kitchen, watching Sarah slap dough into thin wraps, shaping them into blintzes, she was too focused to answer.

One by one, she placed each blintz in a big frying pan, boiling hot with butter and oil, until crisp. The greasy smell of fried dough and hot, mushy potatoes has had my mouth watering since I was two.

I asked again, “Grandma, how did you come to America? Who were your mother, father, and siblings?”

“Oye”. My grandmother grunted. “I was smuggled in a pickle barrel.” She waved her hand, loose flesh wiggling from her underarm. “Stop asking such questions.”

“What?! A pickle barrel? Why don’t you talk about any of it?”

“Shush. No more talk.”

Her generational stories were buried in my grandmother and then my mother. Who was this woman? This Yiddish, sharp-tongued grandma?

The grievous wound of the mother is ancient. If I didn’t know her, how could I know myself?

GENERATIONAL REPAIR

Generational trauma is our personal trauma—the ongoing story of the repair of human life.

This is the meaning of the repair of the world— Tikkun Olam is the fragmentation of humankind scattered across the universe, and for us to repair the scattering of light into the darkness of the universe. Repairing the world and the human condition is eternal.

The way of the body is a path of diving, digging, curiosity, creativity, emotional expression, and self-inquiry

I had to learn to hold deep heartbreak to understand what Dr. Schulman attempted to teach me. I dug into profound, gut-wrenching family patterning work until I changed my experience with unhealthy relationship choices, unworthiness, shame, and blame.

Change and growth take time, commitment, intention, mindfulness, presence, self-responsibility, and the practice of coming into the body. It is a rebirthing of yourself.

Cathartic healing guides you toward writing and art, embodying the core emotional eye of your inner, deeper story.

Part 2 of this story will be posted on March 27, 2025

Image provided by the author.

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