Initial Conditions, Part Two
A colleague was kind enough to leave a very thoughtful comment about A Primer for Somatic Therapy (published August 26), to which end I thought I would share a brief section of Initial Conditions.
WHY THIS PRIMER?
A primer is both the first coat of paint that goes down on a surface to insure that subsequent layers are true to their color, and a tiny book offered at the beginning of studying a subject to prepare you for what is coming.
This is a primer for people preparing to receive somatic therapy. It is likely you’ve received this book from your practitioner, as a way of helping you prepare for your first session. It was first written for clients of the Hearth Wellness Autonomics clinic.
My name is Gabriel, and I’m the author of this booklet. I have spent the past thirty years studying neuroscience for deep personal and professional reasons, with the past fifteen focused particularly on autonomic physiology. I am the Founder of a translation research firm in autonomic physiology called Hearth Science, and the Developer of Autonomics, a re-mapping of the living Autonomic Nervous System.
When I first studied Somatic Experiencing®, the naturalistic approach to the resolution of trauma developed by Peter Levine, PhD, something I found both fascinating and perplexing was the degree to which people in our training cohort would have fantastic transformational sessions with one another, and then very mediocre sessions with clients.
When we worked with one another, profound and sometimes dramatic changes and transformations would ensue. Our nervous systems responded to one another in interesting and complex ways, and we regularly experienced mystery at the ways that they were re-organizing. Yet often in sessions with clients not much would happen. The experience would seem muddy: just kind of blah. Now granted, we were simply students, so some degree of this discrepancy can be attributed to the fact that as we began, we just weren’t that good at the modality. But there was something else going on that I could sense as well.
This noticing was about 15 years ago, starting in 2010 when I began to study the modality. Around the time I began to learn Somatic Experiencing I was introduced to the Polyvagal Theory, Steven W. Porges, PhD’s 1994 update to autonomic physiology. Polyvagal Theory was taught as the theoretical mechanism for helping us understand why Somatic Experiencing was effective. It was like learning a new language of the deep nervous system, and I rapidly became obsessed with studying it intricately.
Once I completed the training program, this discrepancy between the results we saw with people training in the modality, and the general public began to really bother me, and I started to think in systematic ways about why this was happening. I was clearly not the only person in the Somatic Experiencing community who was thinking about this in a methodical way. Anthony ‘Twig’ Wheeler was teaching courses around this notion of creating the conditions for success in our sessions with clients, helping people consider all of the things that happened before someone sat down for the first time to engage in somatic therapy.
The Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute probably should never have let me study with them, because I didn’t have a scope of practice appropriate to their teaching framework. I was not a therapist or a bodyworker, and in fact, I didn’t even typically work with individual clients at the time. I thought of myself as a mindfulness teacher who was working to be trauma-informed, and most of the work I did at that stage of my career was with groups anyway. So I didn’t hang a shingle as an SE practitioner. Instead I took a very deep dive into Polyvagal Theory. And I sort of forgot about this question of initial conditions for fifteen years, until I began to run a transformational wellness clinic that was working autonomically with folks, and I realized that before they sat down with me, I needed to orient their attention so that we could make best use of our time together.
If you grew up in the United States, in all likelihood, you have been interacting with allopathic medicine (most people call it western medicine, or just medicine) your entire life.
In all probability, you had a pediatrician. And you probably don’t remember the first time you found yourself in a doctor’s office because it was likely when you were a baby.
If your pediatrician was tuned to your needs as a small child, they probably recognized that the equipment that they were using was unfamiliar to you. And they may have been courteous enough to explain what it was that they were doing.
Maybe they showed you the stethoscope before they put it on your chest (hopefully they warmed it before setting it against your skin), and perhaps even let you listen to a heartbeat through it. They might have showed you how the otoscope they were going to use to look in your ears worked, or let you hold a tongue depressor.
We don’t really think of this as being an acculturation into a medical system, but it surely is. They’re showing you the tools, normalizing them, giving you a sense of how they’re going to use them, so that you can feel a sense of familiarity with all of these things that are going to be done to your body. Having someone put a funny cone-shaped light into your ear is invasive. Having someone put a wooden wedge into your mouth is invasive. You get acculturated to all of this so that you don’t punch the doctor in the face when she starts sticking weird instruments into the holes in your head.
Take a moment and think about how allopathic medicine helps you. As in, what do they do or prescribe to help you get better? This is the treatment armamentarium of a modality: how they intervene after diagnosing you. The treatment armamentarium of allopathic medicine is essentially surgery and pharmaceuticals. This is to say that if something is wrong with you, in all likelihood, these are the ways that allopathic medicine will treat it. It is through one of these two methods. For certain conditions, these methodologies are incredibly powerful. When I was 10 years old, I suffered an appendicitis. And I am very grateful that a surgery existed that could remove my ruptured appendix. Had it not been removed, there’s a pretty high probability I would have died. Similarly, when I stepped on a rusty nail a few years ago, I’m very glad that the emergency room was able to administer a strong course of antibiotics. Again, in the absence of this intervention, it is pretty likely that I would have gotten a blood infection, and I could have died very painfully.
There are other conditions that allopathic medicine is less well suited to treat. The most broad category of these disorders include anything that is stress-related.
Allopathic medicine has never in its history correctly diagnosed or treated a stress-related disorder. The reason for this is very straightforward. All stress-related disorders are a result of dysregulation of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS), and the ANS is the neural architecture of the mind-body connection. Since the structural foundation of allopathic medicine emerged from a split between the mind and the body, it is impossible for them to correctly conceptualize autonomic issues.
Yet 4 out of 5 visits to primary care are stress-related. What this means is that allopathic medicine is structurally unable to treat most of the primary reasons that modern people are coming to see a doctor.
Tools emerge from a worldview. Sometimes this is obvious, and other times it is implicit, but it is always true, even if the worldview is not obvious.
Nearly two decades ago I got fascinated by Japanese carpentry. In particular, I fell in love with Japanese saws. The first time I saw one, I didn’t know what it was. It looked like a flimsy blade attached to a broom handle. Unlike the European-derived carpentry saws I had grown up looking at, a Japanese saw cuts on the pull stroke. European saws, by contrast, cut on the push stroke.
The reason that Japanese saws cut on the pull stroke, is because the origin of Japanese carpentry is in an animist tradition. This means that Japanese carpenters believe that wood has a spirit. And because they view the wood as being alive, they wanted to have a relationship with it. What we want to have a relationship with, we draw towards us.
And so, from this worldview of the animacy of wood develops a tool, in this case a saw, that cuts by bringing wood closer to us. Japanese carpenters tend to wear soft shoes, and they brace the wood with their bodies and bring it towards them. Japanese carpentry has also evolved the most elegant joinery in the world for binding wood to itself. Again these tools, and this system, are the byproduct of a worldview.
A European saw performs the same function as a Japanese saw, in the sense that it cuts wood. But a European saw is informed by a totally different worldview. Europeans did not look at wood as something with a spirit, but rather as an inert commodity. Something that was void of interiority itself, but could be shaped in useful ways.
A being we want to have a relationship with. A thing we feel indifference towards. Out of this indifference emerges a set of tools, in this case the European saw, but there is no reason to pull a thing toward you. European saws cut on the push stroke. In order to stabilize the wood then, we need all manner of clamps and other devices to hold it in place.
What I am attempting to illustrate for you here is the relationship between a worldview, tools, and outcomes. You can build a house with both European and Japanese carpentry, but what it means is different. It may have similar utility, but our relationship to it, the way it feels to occupy it, this will likely be very different.
Allopathic medicine sees your body as a very complex machine. It treats ‘physical issues’ of the body by referring them to more and more refined organ-level specialists. It has a divide-and-conquer view of the body that arises from an imperial and hierarchical worldview. It views mental health as an epiphenomenon of brain chemistry. Mental health issues are sent to psychiatrists who are taught to alter pharmacology.
This is the medical view of your body that you have been socialized into since you were small. When you are acculturated to reach for Excederin instead of scanning your body to discern why you have a headache, you are participating in this worldview and its directives. When you don’t inquire into the nature of the pain, but simply seek to get rid of it you are collaborating with this worldview and its directives.
You got the European carpentry version of medicine. But the complicating problem with this? You are alive. And every stress-related issue that you will encounter involves your body, your mind, and your meaning-making. If you want to transform these issues at their roots, which is to say the actual places in your bodymind where the rubber meets the road, you are going to have to approach in a different way.
And that is likely how you ended up on the threshold of a somatic practitioner’s doorstep. What we’ll do over the next twenty-five pages is introduce you to their worldview, and then set you up with some of the basic tools that you can come in the door with that will help them do their job.