The Will to Persevere

The world breaks everyone and

afterward many are strong in the broken places.

Ernest Hemingway

Wanting to understand what it is about the work I do that resonates with my clients, I asked a few if they would be willing to write a couple of sentences about their experience of working with me. One client couldn’t condense her experience into a short paragraph, so wrote what came to her and asked if I could condense it into a shorter form.  As I read what she wrote, I knew that I needed to honor all of what she had written. 

My first meeting with Barb was very powerful as my tears started flowing within minutes of showing up on her property.  I walked through a portal into Barb’s space as she showed me around the farm.  The tears continued and I couldn’t explain why or what was happening.  I said to Barb “I’m not a crier”.  Our stroll took us over to a very beautiful tall evergreen that reached up to the sky.  As I stood under that “mother tree” my body began to shiver and the tears continued to flow.  Barb asked me some very powerful questions and in that moment our journey began under that tree.  I knew I suffered emotionally and experienced depression and anxiety probably most of my life.  My adult life continued down a path of repeating harmful relationship patterns.  I was stuck.  I didn’t even have the language to talk about how I felt.  I assumed this was just how everyone felt.  I saw many counselors over the years, did lots of talk therapy and learned lots of new problem solving skills to help me cope with life.  All of those modalities have a place in our healing journey, but one thing that remained crystal clear for me was that the pain never shifted out of my body.  As I grew older and my heart continued to be burdened, I told Barb that my hope was that I could live a bit before I died.  I spent the next many months doing a different kind of therapy with Barb.  It was somatic therapy and it was body based instead of brain based.  Trauma is stored in our body according to Peter Levine and others.  I read as much as I could absorb on somatic healing.  Barb, because of her own personal journey, found somatic therapy and that took her down a passionate path of study that can only be described as miraculous for those of us who are living with trauma and frustrated that we don’t seem to be able to heal no matter how many counselors we see, how many books we read or how many papers we write.  It is hard to explain this work, but Barb helps you identify where the pain is living or hurting in your body.  Through this process I was able to immediately tap into the pain and tears were a huge part of this experience and seemed to provide the outlet for releasing the pain and painful emotions.  It is challenging to capture this experience with words, but the experience for me was powerful and dare I say life changing.  I was finally free of a lifetime of anger and bitterness toward a parent who couldn’t parent and didn’t have the capacity to nurture or care, leaving a wounded human being struggling for all of her life.  I’m free of that anger now but it took me all of my life to arrive at this freedom.  That was my experience and I imagine anyone who is curious about doing this type of healing work might have a slightly different experience.  It’s not a one size fits all.  But I do believe that having Barb walk through this work with will change your life in some positive way.  I know it did mine and I am deeply and forever grateful that I can now live with some experience of joy before I leave this earth.  Somatic therapy worked for me.

It was not only what she wrote about me that I was touched by, but more what I saw in her fierce determination to find healing for herself, even in her mid-70’s. Peter Levine writes about this fierce determination to heal in his book Trauma and Memory, calling it ‘the will to persevere’.  As he says,

My forty-five years of clinical work confirms a fundamental and universal instinct geared toward overcoming obstacles and restoring one’s inner balance and equilibrium:  an instinct to persevere and to heal in the aftermath of overwhelming events and loss. . .. Any therapist worth his or her fees not only recognizes this primal capacity to meet adverse challenges, but also understands that their primary role is not to ‘counsel,’ ‘cure,’ or ‘fix’ their clients, but rather to support this innate drive for perseverance and triumph.[1]

He then asks the question “But how do we facilitate the fulfillment of this instinct?” but doesn’t give the answer!!!  Instead, he goes on a long-winded discussion of epilepsy and then brain anatomy.  Finally, many pages later, he writes that “in renegotiating trauma via Somatic Experiencing, we utilize ‘pendulation,’ the shifting of body sensations or emotions between those of expansion and those of contraction.”[2]  Perhaps this sounds simple, but this is where the art of being a healer comes in.  How to create the ‘expansion’ that is necessary to provide the space and ease in the body to be able to tap into the trauma and the contraction it creates?  That is a whole essay in itself, and not what I wish to discuss here.  However, it is what I seem to have an innate sense of, as described by another client in her comment about our work together:

I would call Barb a somatic, sense-making sorceress!  Her work is very skilled as she combines a number of different approaches in a way that is always body-based but welcomes the psyche and spirituality in a holistic and integrative way.  She listens to human bodies and human beings and guides the client to discover how to make sense of what has happened to them and what needs to happen for resolution and repair. 

What my clients have in common is this ‘innate drive for perseverance and triumph’ that Levine describes.  Not everyone who has experienced trauma has that drive, however.  Sometimes the body-mind has shut down so much that there is no energy available to begin the healing process, no matter how much the person says that they want things to be different.  I have had people like this come for a session and never return.  I am not surprised by this as I find in the session that I am unable to arouse sufficient energy in them to feel.  They are completely numb. There is no ‘innate drive for perseverance’.  This is the result of a body that was so completely traumatized that it shut down in preparation for death. I have taken The Eye of the Needle training to work with near-death experiences, but a person must have some drive, some determination, to begin the work of healing.  Not everyone does.  Some exist in a numb state - breathing, eating, sleeping, but not really living.

But for those who yearn for healing, I welcome you into my space.  Perhaps it is under the ‘mother’ spruce tree, or through the ‘portal’, or with one of my horses.  I resonate with your fierce determination or will to persevere.  That determination is what drove me to find my own healing and learn how to bring that healing to others.  And, as my client in her 70’s demonstrates, it is never too late to begin this journey.

[1] Levine, Peter. Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past. North Atlantic Books, 2015, p. 65.

[2] Ibid, p.71.