Dotty was referred to me by one of my teachers who, in addition to providing her with occasional sessions, rented a room to Dotty when she was working in town. At the time of her birth in 1961, the client was the youngest premature baby born in Europe to have survived. Her birth weight was just over one pound. She first came to me in 2005. Her mother walked out of the hospital without Dotty and never came back into her life. Dotty's father raised her and her older sister for seven years as a single parent in his native British Isles. He was a pretty good dad. Then he married (according to Dotty) the Wicked Witch of the West, a woman who was competely unsupportive of her step-children. Truly the proverbial evil step-mother, belittling, demeaning, locking Dotty out of the house at an early age and demanding that she not return for days, a perfect recapitulation of her earliest imprint: Being rejected by her birth mother and basically being left to die, had her father not fought for her and the medical profession not risen to the task of supporting her to live. Unfortunately, her father didn't protect Dotty from the on-going emotional assault at the hands of his new wife.
Dotty moved to the US from the UK when she was just out of high school. Through connections, she found work as a still photographer in the film and television industry. She went from job to job, enduring gaps in employment due to the nature of the business and, in part, due to bouts of depression and her inability to feel comfortable around or to bond with other people.
The biggest imprint on infant Dotty was living in a clear plastic box for four months after her birth. Called an isolette, the box is meant to bring warmth and comfort to premature babies, but the extreme isolation prevents them from receiving what we’re all biologically hard-wired to receive: Human contact and the comfort of mother’s touch, her movements and milk, her familiar heart-beat, breathing rhythms, digestive gurgles and her particular scents. Instead, premies in isolettes often experience stillness, bright lights, and complete exposure to whatever is in the surround. In the absence of soothing touch, they are subjected to pokes, prods, and tube insertions into orifices not designed to receive hard plastic or metal items. Only recently have hospitals instituted what they call "Kangaroo Care," where mothers are encouraged to hold their premature infant skin-to-skin on their bare chest. This offers much better outcomes than isolettes provide. Dotty's mom wasn't there and Kangaroo Care was thirty or more years off in the future.
Dotty, my teacher told me, had a high tolerance for deep work and his observation was that she integrated bodywork sessions well. What my teacher didn’t tell me was that it took her three to four weeks to integrate those sessions and that she seemed to go into significant troughs of lethargy and self-loathing after most office visits with him.
Having discovered this, to me, unacceptable outcome, Dotty and I found our "less-is-more" rhythm that included phone check-ins three to seven days after each session, just to see how the integration of new levels of discharge or revelation was going. Often when she called, she reported feeling lighter, easier in social situations, and even more motivated to pursue one of her hobbies, drumming. Sometimes we'd do a little work over the phone to support even greater self-regulation.
Troughs were part of the work too. When she traveled to Europe, or was on a shoot for extended periods of time, depression and social isolation would return, but gradually, they became less extreme.
The physical symptoms intrigued me as much as the psycho-social. Sometimes during our work, or when she was away for extended periods of time, bruises would appear on her lower legs - not from current bumps or injury. The bruises mimicked those I’d seen on premies whose feet, calves and shins were utilized as easier portals than tiny arms and hands for injecting hydration or medications and for blood draws. While medically necessary for sustaining life, painful intrusions into the flesh are not differentiated by the brainstem from life threatening events and the body rallies its three Graces: Fight, Flight, and Freeze. With no opportunity to discharge those survival energies, they get stuck in the nervous system, later to become our default setting. In the case of prematurely born babies kept in incubators or isolettes, freeze is a common default setting. Later in life, this looks a lot like depression.
In Dotty’s sessions, particularly when her legs showed any signs of wanting to move, we would court those micro-movements of muscles trying to organize a defensive response. Sometimes it looked as if the legs wanted to retract towards her core. Other times they seemed to want to push out. She'd lead with her heel in a mini and slowed-way-down “kick-ass” gesture. Titrating the movements was sometimes tricky. Her desire to go fast and push hard was understandable. She’d been carrying the burden of early traumas for over forty years, and she was in a hurry to get on with her life.
We began to court little movements of the legs while she sat in a chair. Gentle pushes into the floor, one foot at a time. My treatment room was set up with a low cot. Later, it was handy to put a large exercise ball between the wall and her feet while she lay on her back or side on the cot. Encouraging her to sense into the very first slimmest glimmer of a feeling of wanting to push and to let that build until she couldn’t not move proved a useful strategy. Then the challenge was to support her in finding those actual micro-movements so as not to go too fast and lose the juice of her nervous system's organizing. I wanted her to mount a full but slowed down (titrated) version of a movement she would have made to defend herself. If we went too fast, the upper brain engaged - remembering what she'd seen or experienced later in life, or what she thought she would have done, and she'd gloss over cellular accounts of how exactly she would have moved if she'd had the chance. Through supporting Dotty's nervous system to find those authentic defensive moves, the bruising events began to lessen. She found the agency to complete her body's responses to pain and intrusion and her cells could let go of the story. No longer was there so much need of a neon arrow (bruises manifesting) pointing to the fact that "something hurtful happened here."
Over the course of the seven years we met irregularly, we worked on her boundaries.
In the beginning, we’d start in opposite corners of the room with the door of my treatment room open so she could leave at any time… go all the way downstairs and even outside for a brief walk. She would leave her car key as collateral so I knew she would return. Being in a clear plastic box with no protection from visual stimulation and unannounced intrusions into her body was her first out-of-the-womb imprint. Her need for huge space around her was understandable. We discovered, over time, that some colors I wore could trigger her heightened need to retreat or to protect herself.
When our life feels threatened, our energetic field of awareness pops out hugely. For survival, we take in all sensory detail in the surround un-filtered, just in case that information may be helpful to our survival. Our awareness records, on a sub-conscious level, visual, auditory, olfactory and other sensory details. Even tastes are recorded. Coincidentally, on a day when I wore a red blouse, Dotty’s facial expressions led me to encourage her to explore the movements of disgust. Her nostrils flared, her upper lip pulled up. I saw her tongue push along the roof of her mouth and forward as if ridding her mouth of something distasteful. (No kidding. Being in a box for a third of her first year after birth was a totally distasteful experience!) Slowly, we explored sounds: Bleah, yuck, u-ug-g-h-h, i-i-i-c-k. Belches spontaneously erupted. We normalized and celebrated them. (My mother-in-law used to say: Better OUT than IN, I told Dotty.) We laughed. Sometimes the gag reflex was triggered. I kept an empty trash can handy just incase there was an urge to purge whatever it was that got in such a long time ago.
The red blouse day, before we got to the disgust and the discharge of it, she had to go outside for a few minutes. It was quicker to self-regulate alone. In her absence, I covered the offending blouse with a beige towel so as not to trigger too much stimulation too soon. I can only guess that some awareness of red, perhaps blood, perhaps part of a uniform of a person in those early months got over-coupled with some unpleasant experience.
Disgust can act like a cork that prevents us from feeling other emotions. Once worked through, we may have greater access to a wide range of previously unavailable emotions. Anger is often under disgust. Navigating anger's energies lends organizational oomph to working with and allowing defensive responses to complete. Finding agency in our body, reclaiming our full range of emotions and defensive responses can leave us feeling exhilarated, more joyful, less stuck, and definitely with a sense of greater agency and ease in relating with other people.
Eventually, Dotty fell in love, married and returned to Europe to live. Her triumphs touched me deeply, reminding me of the resilience of the human spirit.
