A Perspective

The most arduous journey any of us takes is about two or three inches long. Under the best of circumstances, being born can be overwhelming. The immature nervous system is bombarded by sensations, sounds, and temperature changes that are mind boggling because so much happens in so short a time frame while we’re being kicked out of the only environment we’ve yet known as physical beings. Does this scenario perhaps underlie the story of Adam and Eve being expelled from paradise?

Those of us with more harrowing entrances into the world than “best of circumstances,” may still be carrying around the unexplored burden of our birth story in every cell of our body. First imprints pack a wallop. 

Do you ever get stuck in your life? Do you know anyone whose default setting is anger, withdrawal into depression, or perhaps frozen like a deer in headlights? Chances are, he or she, you and I are suffering from a bit of birth trauma reenactment. All of us are, to some extent, as we try to heal the initial wounds. 

Simply put, it is difficult to arrive in the world without overwhelm to our tender being, and that’s the basic definition of trauma - being caught in circumstances that overwhelm us and from which we don’t get a chance to discharge the survival energies of Fight, Flight and Freeze that get triggered by a perceived threat to our life. 

Threats during the birth process can be as routine as the big squeeze as one skull bone slides over another so we may pass through the outlet. There may be sudden pressure or stillness, harsh noises in the delivery room, forceps or suction bonnet, or chilly dry air and breathing with our brand-new set of lungs once the umbilicus is cut. It’s all so new. It’s all so foreign. Perhaps that scenario is why so many science fiction stories feature being lost in a new world.

We’re all trying to find our way back to the garden.

We’re all trying to shed the feelings of hopelessness and helplessness born of that two inch trip.

During nearly thirty-five years of seeing clients as a body therapist, it has been my privilege to help some of them to resolve birth trauma, and to witness the ordinary miracle of healing from those earliest impacts. We are a resilient species. Each human has been given three graces to help us survive: Fight, Flight and Freeze. We’re hard-wired to survive. We’re also hard-wired to heal. 

With a trained practitioner, we can slow down the stimuli that overwhelmed us on the day of our birth and the days following it by gently revisiting what the body is doing now, in the moment, and naming the sensations that accompany the memory of each stimulus. Slowing things down and tracking sensations allows us to discharge the bound survival energies through sweating, gentle shaking, tearing-up or yawning. Thus we free ourselves from the reenactment cycle born of trying to heal from the too muchness of coming into the world.

When I was teaching nursery school in Topanga in the late 1970s, “P” was one of our most challenging and interesting students. At four, P was bright, creative and physically very active. His first order of business every morning upon arrival to the classroom was to dump all the small manipulative toys - Legos, Tinker Toys, and Bristle Blocks out of their respective baskets onto the floor and to ice-skate through them methodically to mix them up thoroughly. He seemed to be showing us how chaotic things were for him. The other peculiar habit P had was to find a place to get his head stuck. Sometimes, he would move a chair close to the wall and insert his head into the gap. Other times, he would force it into one of the plastic juice pitchers. Once we had to call the fire department when he discovered “just the right size” hole in the ledge above the back seat of a car that had been made “safe” for kids to use as a climbing/imaginative play structure. P climbed into the trunk which had no door, stripped off the fabric covering over that ledge under the windshield, and put his head up into one of the holes in the metal. There, he stuck. No amount of coaxing, coaching, supporting him to retrace his steps or attempts to physically remove him worked. He was calm; untroubled by all the adults who really wanted him to get free. He seemed content to stay with his head stuck in the hole. When the gentle firefighters arrived and worked their magic to get him out, they just smiled and assured us it happens a lot with kids. 

When P’s mum came to pick him up that day, we asked if anything unusual happened during P’s birth. “Ah, no,” said his mum, “apart from him getting stuck in the birth canal for eighteen hours. I just kept talking to him, until they put me under anesthesia and pulled him out by Caesarian Section. He does like to put his head into boxes and the like, doesn’t he?”

I think my eyes bugged out of my head in disbelief as I wondered why she had not thought to disclose this pertinent information to us.

Another little guy J was just under three years and a non-talker. We did know the story of his premature birth and how long he’d spent in an incubator. Can you remember a time when you didn’t want to get out of bed but were forced out - either by an insistent alarm clock or a parent worried about you being late to school? Can you imagine a little one inside mom enjoying full-on womb-service, and who isn’t ready to come out yet, but due to circumstances beyond his control is booted out before he’s fully “cooked?” Can you imagine living in a clear plastic box for two months where much of the touch you receive is painful or intrusive - like a poke for a blood test or a suction to your nose or a tube stuck down your throat for food?

One of J’s favorite games was peek-a-boo. I was watching him one day as he watched activities in the room while hidden behind the back of an upholstered wing-back chair. He had turned it around so that he could stand on the seat and all we could see of him was the top of his head peeping over the top of the chair back. Soon he stood on his tippy-toes and sought eye contact with me as I sat a few feet away. We played peek-a-boo for several minutes until he began to giggle, then guffaw and finally he came around the side of the chair and flung himself into my lap. He was beaming. It was as if a light had come on or a flower had bloomed. The difference in this self-initiated game of peek-a-boo was that he was the one peeping out, at his own pace, not an adult creating the timing. Within a few days, J began to speak. Like sunshine after a storm.

These are but two examples of kids re-negotiating their birth scenarios in an attempt to discharge bound survival energies. In the first story, P took much longer to heal the urge to get his head stuck so he could heal once and for all. It might have been faster had we known what he was trying to tell us and we'd been able to name and acknowledge his story. In the case of J, the discharge and moving through the feelings of discomfort was much quicker. 

Both these little ones were helped by our intuitive interventions even though it would be fifteen years before I began to study birth trauma resolution techniques with Dr. Ray Castellino of Santa Barbara.

There is hope for all, from newborns to nonagenarians, who wish to resolve early trauma and stop the cycle of feeling stuck with undischarged survival energies ruling our behavior. 

May all beings be happy. May all babies and their parents be surrounded by caring people. 

Pee in your pants kind of laughter when you can’t catch your breath, and your belly muscles hurt and tears are streaming is too rare an event for adults.

Robert Provine, a scientist who has stalked wild laughing for years reports in the Magazine “Mental Floss,” that children laugh upwards of three hundred times a day, whereas adults laugh between seventeen and twenty times a day. How utterly sad!

The advantages of laughter include the release of soothing endorphins, the reduction of stress hormones, improved muscle tone and the lowering of blood pressure. In his book Anatomy of an Illness, Norman Cousins reports he cured himself of a debilitatingly painful disease called ankylosing spondylitis by watching Marx Brothers’ films and episodes of Candid Camera.

Lucky me to have fallen in love with a man whose greatest gifts are his sense of humor and his sense of human. Every day we laugh. Even in the midst of loss or tragedy or political upheaval, there is dark humor.

At my mother-in law’s funeral service in New York in 1989, the Rent-a-Rabbi, who had never met her spoke of the many relatives who were unable to attend her service that cold February afternoon. At the end of the list, he said, “… and of course, there’s Cousin Ralph.” Well, there was no Cousin Ralph in the family. Later, we thought that maybe he meant Cousin Jack and perhaps got the schwa sound confused in his mind and said, “Ralph.”

During his pre-service interview with my husband, his brother and sister, the rabbi heard some pretty outlandish claims about the deceased. Among them, that Friedabel, their mom, was a brilliant jazz-harmonica  player (not true). Then, my husband piped up suggesting that it wasn’t too late to follow through with Mom's request (not true either) to have her freeze-dried and sent in mailable sections - like weekly installments - to her estranged husband. We laughed till the tears came.

When, during the service the Rabbi said, “…Cousin Ralph,” perhaps he was joining in the fun or maybe seeking comic revenge. My personal belief is that he was clueless and in over his head. Whatever his motive, when we, the family heard  “Cousin Ralph,” a slow-building rolling giggle began in the first two rows of the pews where the family sat. By the time my husband stood up to share the eulogy, he was hoping the rest of the congregants would think that the shoulder shaking they saw in the family pews before them was from sobbing, not laughing. As he eased into the aisle and made his way up to the dais, he gave us the most convincing imitation of a stern seventh-grade English teacher’s glare he could muster while trying to wrestle his own smile into submission.

What follow was his, as usual, honest and heartfelt recollections of his mom, Friedabel Smith, and her life on a roller-coaster. For all gathered, there were laughs and tears.

Cousin Ralph followed us into the reception and has given us streaming eyes, sore belly laughter ever since. As I age, and gravity continues its persistent tug on me, maybe I’ll even pee my pants again next time someone mentions Cousin Ralph. 

Procurement (Warning: This May Be a Difficult Read for Some)

“Procurement.” 

The word hangs over the table between us. I gasp. The sharp inhale causes the word to slide down my core. It stings. I hold my breath. 

There’s a feeling of visceral realigning as my gut makes sense of a final puzzle piece plopping into place. The picture pops - clear of the fog that’s been there for over fifty years.

The back of my head clenches. My brain feels the squeeze as if I’ve just registered the ingestion of way too much caffeine, but my belly unclenches. So weird. So physical - this process of the body making sense of new information. 

“‘Pro-cur-ed,”  I roll the word around my mouth, “That is what my high school buddy and I were, in 1967! Procured for six members of the UCLA basketball team. That’s what happened to us!” I exhale. "And, Oh, my God, Kelly, my boyfriend's friend got paid for our gang-rape!" 

“Wow. Sorry that happened,” she says, “Yeah. It’s a regular practice. Learned about it when I was in the WNBA.”

How could an event fifty years ago come to table with us here in Oakland? What miracle was wrought for this new friend, who understands what happened to me as a teenager in Los Angeles, to be here now? She knows all about arrangements made for young women to be bought from a procurer and brought to male members of sports teams for pre-sport sport - mice for cool cats to play with. It’s a regular practice. 

Shame morphs. Rage rises. Red hot. I burn and yearn to fight them off, NOW, those five bastards who pinned me down on the wall-to-wall mattresses in some apartment living room in Westwood Village where they killed off a part of me. 

Fifty years ago, I was inert. Frozen. Prepped with hash and pimp sticks and copious amounts of vodka. My friend fared much better taking only one of them to another room. For neither of us was escape an option. Kelly had driven us to the "party" and he wasn't there now. But she had no previous history of early childhood sexual abuse. She fought back as best she could. Fifty years ago, I was not aware of my own history of boundary violations at the hands of our father who ain’t in heaven, Howard was his name. In his drunkenness, he used me, my older brother, who began drinking at age nine, and my older male cousin as well - the one who’s schizophrenic in back woods Oregon. 

Dad had perverse appetites. What can have happened to him to allow him to think that using children for his sexual gratification was a good idea? He spent time in jail for molesting my step sister. I didn’t know this when it happened. I didn’t know why he was jailed when I was ten. I only learned years later that it wasn’t for “disturbing the peace and resisting arrest,” which is the only part of the story that our adults told us kids. He was arrested for molest. Step-sister Heidi’s mom called the cops on him. Sentenced to a year in jail, he got out after six months for "good behavior." My Auntie Nora knew the story. She told me when I was forty-five, three years after my memories began to surface.

It’s taken me a long time, a lot of energy and a lot of money for therapy, bodywork and survivor support groups, twelve-step programs, self-defense courses and lots of hair-pulling from thinking I was crazy, in order to heal - or make sense of - my adolescent acting out, drinking, drug use, promiscuity and feeling like I was made of black Jello at my core. Throughout my school years, I feared people getting too close to me and finding out about the slime that lived within me. Yet, I had no conscious memory of what happened to me from a time before I had teeth to when my father left - just before I turned ten. My memories didn't surface until I was forty-two.

How lucky I am to have had wonderful support from my husband and daughters, therapists and healers. Lucky and thankful.

There is a statistical link between early boundary breaches and subsequent rape, molest and harassment. It’s as if we’re trying to assemble the raw materials to recreate that initial wound and heal it at last. We keep trying, thinking this time we’ll get to the core and heal what needs to be healed. Usually, we only end up being hurt again. I'm here to testify: Once healed, we won't stand for being victims again.

Here’s the thing about very early trauma: It feels like a life sentence. Before age two or so, we haven’t developed the mastoid processes of the temporal skull bones behind our ears. We have no sense of temporality; of time being bound to moments. To infants, it feels as if what’s happening in this moment will happen forever. This causes huge overwhelm for the immature nervous system. Catecholamines and other stress hormones flood our bodies, creating extreme fight/flight/freeze responses.  When unresolved, the accumulation of stress hormones leads to hyper-vigilance, nervousness, premature aging and inability to focus. Often times we only have one of the Three Graces, with which we are all born - Fight, Flight, or Freeze, as our default setting. How many people do you know who are always itchin’ for a fight? Or always on the move? (stuck in flight) Those of us who cannot respond to situations,  go numb or become totally withdrawn or depressed are stuck with Freeze as our default setting. 

Fortunately, we’re hard wired to survive. We’re also hard-wired to heal.

My hope is that this moment in history when the Post-Weinstien flood of women (and men) disclosing what has happened to them at the hands of perpetrators, will be a teaching moment for young women (and young men) everywhere to TRUST THEIR GUT. If something doesn’t feel right about any situation in which they find themselves, they have a right and duty to avail themselves of all three in-born defensive responses: Fight, Flight AND Freeze (if necessary). Freedom to use the best option is key. If you’ve a history of trauma, whether male or female, please, see a practitioner who specializes in helping folks heal and reclaim their resilience.

You’re worth it. Healing what happened to us is the only game in town worth playing. The time of passing down inter-generational trauma must end. 

Bringing to light what has been in the shadow of our human psyche for millennia may help all of us to heal enough so that we may be able to turn to the healing of our home: Planet Earth!

Fear of OICS

I worry about OICS.

Odors I Cannot Smell.

Old people’s smell, oily hair smell, stinky feet, underarm odors, and the smell of sex or telltale odors from an insufficient wipe make me shudder. What if I’m not aware of such scents in my aura? What does that say about me as a modern American woman? Yuck? If I were from another culture that is less commercially-perfumed, might I value the information given off by my own and other's natural body scents?

I live in the United States of America in the twenty-first century. Sigh... I conform to the norm.

My high-school buddy Wendy used to ask me for reassurance, when we carpooled in my mom's VW Bug, that she didn't smell like bed... you know... that stale smell?

Laundering the pillow slips and sheets on a weekly basis reassures me I fit in the bell curve of acceptable. Letting my nose be the final judge on all I wear - especially collars, scarves and hats - is a habit. I find it workable to wash my hair twice a week. It seems that older people (yes, I am older) manufacture less sebum, grow fewer hairs, (except for those on our chins!), and have less active sweat glands, so over washing the hair just makes it fly-away-dry. I remember my Grammy’s frequent trips to the beauty parlor yielding a poofy white halo that gleamed under her hundred watt reading lamp in the living room and made it look as if someone had rubbed her head all over with an inflated balloon. 

While I have been accused of having a hyper sensitive nose that can discern the subtlest of odors, fragrances and smells, I know that as we age, all of our senses are subject to wearing out; they become less acute.  I worry that I won’t be able to discern whether or not I smell unpleasant - in much the same way that a barista at Peet’s may no longer be able to smell the coffee on her clothes. Similarly, we acclimate to familiar sounds. We tune them out, when the novelty has worn off, saving our gray matter for more important, perhaps threatening sounds.

I remember some of my elders being comfortable wearing clothes that had a slightly grimy feel and smell about them - as if they’d been worn while standing too near a deep fat fryer where the vapor of rancid oil coated and imbedded in the fibers of everything they wore.

When my mother was of a certain age, her paramour, also of a certain age, wore a cravat which should have been retired or at least sent for repeated treatments at the cleaners until it could no longer stand upright  all by itself when set down on his bureau. It was stinky with his less oft-washed eau d'neck.

Do we become allergic to bathing as we age? Or do we finally re-prioritize our finite minutes on the planet. I believe our culture is obsessed with hyper deodorizing behaviors.

When in my twenties, in the late 1960s, I supervised the fifteen-year-old son of my friend Maxine for two months while she went traveling with a friend to Bali, Bhutan, India, Indonesia, Katmandu, and Nepal. While in Bhutan, they met a young ethnomusicologist named Gabby. Gabby had traded a young herdsman, from the high plains, her transistor radio for his goat herder’s skull-cap. It had been his grandfather’s and father’s. He’d worn it every day for about ten years. Made of fine, black, tightly woven reeds, it had a tuft of feathers like a fountain shooting straight out the very top. It had four large bird beaks and some red, white and yellow glass beads sewn around the perimeter of the base. Before giving it to Gabby, he scraped the inside of the hat with his fingernails to get the essence from it, he said, so it would always be with him. Gabby entrusted Maxine and her friend Jan to ship it back to the United States for her to pick-up later when she returned stateside, after her music research was completed. 

Of all the stories Maxine shared with her son and me about her travels, as we helped her  unwrap sea-mail packages that arrived weekly for months after she returned - each bundle having its own marvelous musty smell from the holds of cargo ships - this one story and the aromas emanating off the cap of cook fires, green meadows, mountain winds, randy goats, their milk and the wooly coats of suckling kids stuck deeper within my heart than any other. I could see through Gabby's eyes, and Maxine's those Himalayan goats in their high pastures and the golden-skinned man who traded his cap, but kept its soul-essence under his black fingernails.

There is something primal about smell. The olfactory nerves hang down from cribriform plate, into the nasal passages bringing the scents of the world directly into the brain where they are instantly processed, made sense of, and responded to. Of the five senses, smell is, perhaps, capable of drawing out in us humans the most emotional and visceral responses.  Do you ever get a whiff of something that evokes an entire gestalt of prior experiences?

After she died, I could be comforted by the remaining scent of my Grammy on a few of her favorite napping pillows. In addition to her poofy halo of fine white hair, I remember my grandmother Florence for the almond scent of Jergen’s hand lotion and Pond’s Cold-Cream. 

In my later twenties, I attended my first home birth. Friend Rona labored outside much of the hot June afternoon, sipping only small bits of water. Toward the thirtieth hour of her labor, husband Jack grew quite concerned at the sickly-sweet smell of ketones on his wife's breath. That's the scent of the body digesting its own tissues to sustain itself. He transported his laboring wife - even as she protested - to the nearest hospital where their son was born by Caesarean section. It turned out that his fourteen centimeter head would not fit through her ten centimeter outlet. While disappointing to the mom, the dad's appropriate evaluation of sensory information and swiftly acting upon it prevented more wasted labor. She was too exhausted to continue, but couldn't recognize it. Olfactories to the rescue!

I set to work changing sheets, cleaning the fridge and making the house ready for the family to return to order and freshness. I shall always remember that ketone smell.... reminiscent of death itself.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Part of me is maniacally meticulous. I care that the house and its occupants smell fresh. Other parts of my psyche are averse to spending time cleaning in corners, dusting the highest shelves and light fixtures, and moving all the furniture to vacuum underneath.

More to the point, I do not want to go into the world with my body smelling like an old person who no longer cares. On the other hand, what is my olfactory footprint? I aspire to roses, but will settle for memorable in any sort of pleasant way. What is my natural wreak? That of my beloved seems to be the fresh ozone smell of having been out-of-doors. So clean. I also aspire to that.

Please, Goddess, free me from all OICS! Keep my schnoz sensitive till I'm outa here feet first. And grant me the decency to respect the varieties of human odiferous emanations and let me value the information held within them. May I always cherish the olfactory uniqueness of humans and other creatures on this mud-ball-spinning.