My Mind/Body Workout
I quit my workout half-way through to do another kind of work.
Over the last year and a half, I’ve been working with my therapist to heal from past trauma. It’s been a difficult and windy road. The first time we touched on it in a session, I was overwhelmed and ended up gaining 25 pounds from overeating. The second time, I fell into depression for several months. The third time, I collapsed during an at-home yoga routine. Fear and the need to hide overwhelmed me. I curled up under my covers and cried for an hour.
Since then we’ve worked more slowly and intentionally on related subjects and on building my emotional processing capacity.
The other day, it came back. Another at-home workout triggered it. The intense fear and the need to hide were still there, but I didn’t collapse. All the work I’ve done has made me stronger. Able to be open to the feelings without succumbing to them. I was able to allow myself to accept and experience those emotions and allow them to flow through me.
I was shaken by the whole thing and I did something that I’ve never done before. I reached out to a friend who has experience dealing with trauma. Being able to express how I felt without judgment and their response of compassion and care helped me return to a feeling of safety.
The thing that bothered me was that I need to exercise. How am I supposed to exercise when I could trigger a trauma response at any time? As far as I know, trauma isn’t something you want to trigger on a regular basis.
In my next therapy session, I brought this up. My therapist told me that he usually doesn’t talk about theory and frameworks, but he knows I’m a psychology nerd, so he explained how trauma theory has been changing over the last 20 years or so.
He said that initially, psychologists did everything they could to protect people from traumatic experiences. Around 10 years ago, though, they started to ask if they were not feeding into the fear of trauma. Making an already intense experience even more foreboding. So, now, while psychologists want to prepare people to handle these situations, they’re doing their best not to add to the fear.
After telling him what I experienced and how I handled it, he was confident that I was equipped to handle it. His advice was to do what exercise I could. If it triggered something, stop and transition to working through that emotional experience.
“Kind of like a mind/body workout?” I asked, half-joking. “Actually,” he said, “yes.”
Tonight was my first attempt. I was scared to start, but I’ve built up courage and confidence in my therapist’s advice and in my own strength, so I got started.
About 12 minutes into my 20 minute workout, my breath was heavy and my heart was pounding as they tend to do with exercise. Then I felt that familiar, primal fear creeping up. I knew if I went on, it would get worse, so I stopped and laid down. Fear and sadness washed over me, and I cried for a bit. The musical part of my brain jumped in and translated it into a melody. I might make a song out of it someday.
For the next 15 minutes I let myself feel what was there while paying attention to how intense it was. If the intensity got above a 7 out of 10, I was prepared with grounding techniques.
After a while, the emotions, my breathing, and my heart rate calmed down. An hour later, as I write this, I’m still feeling some residual emotions, but it’s nothing I can’t handle. I got through it, and I know I can do it again.
My fear of this experience has diminished. I like to think of it as emotional calibration. I was petrified of this experience before, but every time I experience it, that extreme response gets a little more reasonable.
If you have experienced something similar, please make an effort to find a therapist trained in trauma. It’s important to have that support and expert guidance as we work through these difficult experiences.