Reese's Story

Reese’s Story rambles across decades and continents. Particulars are changed here to protect the innocent babe born so early that s/he was the youngest babe to survive in her/his country of birth that year. Doctors were amazed. Birth mother was too distraught at the thought of a one pound baby to care for, so she left the content of her womb in the hospital and went to live on a different continent. Reese never saw her again.

Reese's father cared for his child as best he could and, when safe to do so, returned to his country of origin to be nearer relatives who might help him out a bit. He couldn't help but fall in love with the babe, nor with a caring housekeeper woman who'd come to help. So he married her and invited her two daughters to live with them as well. 

Unfortunately for Reese, the step mother turned out to be a wicked witch of Grimm proportions - jealous of every scrap of attention Reese's father spent on the fragile wee babe. As Reese grew, the evil surrogate mother told Reese how useless and lame s/he was and how s/he’d never amount to anything - ever.

Reese took to heart this pronouncement and it struck the core with a dissonance s/he'd carry with her/him seemingly for the rest of her/his days. S/he identified as a no-goodnick, a waste of skin. Deep shame was the overriding affect.

When s/he came to me, s/he was already in her/his forties. S/he had attempted several careers but seemed best suited to photography which s/he did artfully with considerable skill and some amount of pleasure for the film and television studios in Hollywood. 

The issues s/he wanted to address were lack of social grace, inability to sustain lasting relationships, and deep depressions that s/he fell into fairly regularly. 

Referred to me by one of my teachers, Reese showed up in my office during an episode of severe symptoms on her/his lower legs. Huge purple bruises appeared in splotches between knee and ankle. Not like ordinary bruises, these purplish black marks came and went quickly. 

I was reminded of something I'd seen during a cranial training in 1999. The class was working in pairs. A woman lay on the table near me while I was working on someone else. During a break, I watched in fascination as the woman's temples began to turn purple. Her practitioner, a compassionate and gentle man was applying feather light touch to her shoulders - no where NEAR the head. The purple became bright then darkened all the way to this same charcoal gray color I was seeing on Reese's legs. 

In the case of the woman at the training, all bruising evaporated after 12 hours. The content of her work was based on her forceps delivery and something got resolved during that practice session. In the case of my new client Reese, the bruises came and went fleetingly. There for just a few hours, gone, then back again. Reese tracked them at home.

We set an intention to watch the flow of color to see if it was related to any mind-set, emotion, or activity. Negative on all three counts.

Was the body trying to signal the anniversary of the post birth trauma s/he’d experienced? Was the body trying to heal this ancient wound of pokes and prods  s/he’d received during the time living in an incubator in that European hospital nearly fifty years ago?

Can you imagine living in a clear plastic box for three months, wherein the only touch you receive is painful pricks, jabs and rough handling? The lower leg is about the best target for IV needle insertion in a lethargic, hanging- on-for-dear-life, extremely premature baby. 

As late as 1999, the international pediatric community of doctors didn’t formally recognize that newborns felt pain before one year of age. More current research acknowledges that untreated fetal and newborn stress reactions may be responsible for adolescent aggression, and self-destructive behavior including suicide.

That Reese had only some physical symptomatology, bouts of depression, and trouble sustaining relationships was quite remarkable. S/he was ALIVE! 

Notes I took in 2008 during a phone debrief a couple of weeks after one particularly rich session, illustrate the depth to which this client could go and reemerge with some resilience. By rich session, I mean there was a break-through of repugnant tastes from another time/space that made it into the therapeutic container to be dealt with via bodily responses. I had a bucket ready just incase the ultimate natural response - vomiting - manifested. R did not vomit, but sweated, and shivered and shook and cleared throat and thrust tongue in a sustained disgust response. I normalized that and kept close, my hand making contact as s/he asked for contact - usually on the sole of a foot. Client was curled up on the floor:

In a conversation today with R. about our last session, which was 2 weeks ago, the client laughed and said, in a very up-beat voice, "It’s been miserable! I’m depressed, feel melancholy and am not functioning well at all. Am I on schedule?" S/he wanted to know.

"Yes, and no…," I said. "You are a statistical improbability… being the youngest gestational premie born the year of your birth. The cost was enormous in terms of de-regulating your nervous system. There is a resiliency you’re experiencing now that allows you to handle deeper levels of turmoil without fragmenting into total dysfunction. This is a good thing. But feeling depressed is not where I'd like to land you and I’m not convinced that it is at all necessary. I'm sorry you've had a rough go these past days. Let’s spend next session completely OUT of the trauma vortex and story and stick to building resources, shall we?" I said. 

"Sounds good to me." R said.

Acknowledging when I've taken someone too far, too fast has been helpful to almost all of my clients. For them to hear that landing them in a difficult patch was not the intention and that we both can watch out for 'too much too fast' in the future humanizes practitioner and client and invites collaboration and engagement. This is a team effort. I'm not here to fix anyone, but rather to bear witness to whatever the human with me in my treatment room is ready to deal with and, hopefully, get a new perspective on. 

Healing happens even if the traumas endured came so early in life. Telling the story seems empowering as only a coherent narrative can be empowering. Once the nervous system has down-regulated (discharged some of the fight, flight, freeze), the story of what happened takes the healing from the brainstem upward through the emotional brain and all the way to the cognitive brain where story lives and can be understood.   

To understand how shame and disgust are linked I recommend watching a brilliant comedienne named Hannah Gadsby. Her show, which she calls "Nannette" is on Netflix and treats difficult subjects with humor but most of all with humanity. She also is ready to graduate from jokes to story telling  which, according to her are very different responses to what happens to humans. Jokes create tension and provide release through laughter, as R was doing when we debriefed that difficult session - laughing at how rotten s/he felt. Story telling has three parts: Beginning, middle and ending. Getting all the way to the other side of the river of healing is our goal - not to be forever floating on the trauma rapids. We want to get to shore. To land. To feel some sense of completion and relief.

Ultimately, Reese married, returned to Europe and lives well enough - if not "happily ever after."  It pleases me still to hear from R from time to time. Resilience incarnate.