When I was born, we lived on Seventh Street. Since we didn’t live there too long, I don’t have a lot of memories from there, but I do remember our dog, Bootsy, having puppies in our backyard and my learning to ride a bike in our driveway. I remember trick-or-treating on Seventh Street; our neighbor had the best popcorn balls. On a less exciting note, I remember burning my hand on the muffler of another neighbor’s go-cart. (That’s what you get for trying to help push.) I remember cutting the inside of my leg open on our metal slide. A screw was sticking out. I could still find the scar until sometime in my thirties.
When I was four, we moved to what we called the drugstore house. My dad was a pharmacist, and his store was on Main Street in downtown Van Buren, the same place my dance studio would be twenty years later. The store itself was on the second story of a three-story building, and my parents had converted the rest of the space into our new home. As I recall, it was fabulous. My sister and I had rooms in the back on the second floor and a playroom on the third. We had laundry shoots that went down to the laundry room on the first, where the kitchen was. That’s where we used to finger paint.
I have a few other memories of the drugstore house, but shortly after we moved there, it burned down, the result of a bad accident involving a semi-trailer truck and a station wagon. Thankfully, we were all gone that night, but everyone in the vehicles died. Nine people altogether. I remember standing in the front lawn of my grandparents’ house blocks away and seeing the smoke, and that’s it; nothing else comes to mind. It was three months before my fifth birthday. We’d lived there six weeks.
Last night I read a blog article by Seth Oberst, a physical therapist in Atlanta who specializes in the mind-body connection and how trauma affects the body. The article’s worth your time. In short, it tells the story of one of Seth’s female patients who suffered from a number of problems–upset stomach, multiple sclerosis, back pain. In the course of her therapy, Seth asked, “When was the last time you felt fully relaxed?” Her answer? Almost forty years ago, when she was small child, playing with her stuffed animals.
As I understand it, when a person has experienced trauma, their body can get stuck in “there’s a threat” mode or “something bad is going to happen” mode. This means their muscles are often tight, ready for action, and their nervous systems are on red alert. Of course, this can cause a lot of problems when there isn’t actually a threat. Again as I understand it, the idea behind a lot of body-based therapies (yoga, somatic experiencing, even massage) is that they retrain the brain to recognize that the threat is over. The ideal outcome? The body relaxes and is better able to heal itself.
Getting back to the article, Seth says that part of his client’s therapy was for them to find positions in which she felt safe, like when she had pressure on the tops of her feet or shoulders. Eventually she learned to move without tensing her pelvis. Then get this shit–her back pain went away.
In reading Seth’s story, I confused the part when he asked his client when she last felt fully relaxed with the part when he helped her to feel safe. That is, the question I asked myself when I went to bed last night was, “When was the last time I felt safe?”
Hum, I thought. That’s a good question. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt safe. I don’t remember the last time I wasn’t afraid of something, worried about something on some level. Seriously, I racked my brain and couldn’t come up with a single example of feeling at peace here, definitely not in the last twenty-five years. But then I thought of my life before the fire. During that six weeks at the drugstore house, I had this white tent, one of those plastic poles, snap together deals. I think it was dome-shaped, and I kept it in our playroom, although I remember it also being downstairs. Regardless, I remember feeling safe there. And yet, something changed that night in my grandparents’ front yard, that night my white tent and almost everything else I owned went up in smoke. It was like I gasped and forgot to start breathing again.
Today I’ve been asking myself, Do I feel safe? Do I feel fully relaxed? Personally, I think they’re the same thing. And whereas my answer’s been, No, I haven’t felt safe and fully relaxed in thirty-four years, I’m working on getting back there. It’s tough when you’ve lost so much at an early age. There’s all this proof that the world is a terrible place. Still, I’m working on letting go of unnecessary tension. Tonight the sky was clear for the first time in weeks, so I spent fifteen minutes stargazing and spotting new-to-me constellations. And whereas it didn’t last forever, there were moments when the sky itself arched over me like that dome-shaped, white tent, moments when the brisk night air wrapped itself around me like a cocoon and I exhaled.
"Beating yourself up is a far cry from self-respect."
Quotes from CoCo (Marcus)
