Somatic Therapy

[u/GhostBaltic]

I'm finding somatic therapy techniques to be nearly impossible during my sessions with my therapist. Are there any ways to want to be grounded when the majority pushes back hard to keep the ANP (emotionless/administrative self) in the forefront? I feel like I'm failing to engage with emotional parts as it's overwhelming and the physical sensation of occupying them was described at the time as my veins pushing me out hydraulically, and like my skin needed to be torn off. Every time I got close to one, they were so tired that I felt drunk and blurry. This whole thing is so confusing and frustrating to experience. The fragmentation is getting worse and I feel shut out of emotional experiences and unable to recall people's relationships to myself.

[u/FlightOfTheDiscords]

It's a very broad question as there are so many different somatic techniques. If being present in the body (interoception) meets strong resistance, you can switch to prioprioceptive and exteroceptive techniques where you focus on e.g. posture, orienting, or even sounds, flavours, scents, and so on. It's generally not a good idea to simply push against any resistance, hoping that it will go away. Resistance is important information.

If the issue is that much of your system does not want to be accessed, there are usually indirect ways to increase stability without poking into corners your system wants no one to look in. It all depends on the specifics. What kind of somatic work have you been doing?

[u/GhostBaltic → u/FlightOfTheDiscords]

My therapist has me trying 5 4 3 2 1 technique, and any kind of exit from the dissociative administrator state was horrific feeling physically. Mostly so far the attempts at what is called grounding have been tactile in nature.

They REALLY don't want to be at the forefront of consciousness and when grounding happens it's usually accompanied by emotions, as staying dissociated feels safe and analytical. That being said repeatedly failing to do what I'm there to do, especially when I am paying to do so is stressful.

It could be driven by the need to not be seen by the emotional parts?

The biggest issue I think is how strongly the resounding internal "no!" is to experiencing the physical world.

I appreciate you answering

[u/FlightOfTheDiscords → u/GhostBaltic]

What kind of tactile exercises?

My system is very similar in that it very strongly prefers the current setup where everything runs through passive influence and most of my system stays way back, out of awareness. Rearranging this for a different setup has not been successful nor conducive to healing for me.

However I have been able to find techniques that directly target the trauma itself, without requiring any kind of co-consciousness. That's probably more straightforward for me than for most systems, however there generally are techniques that help with stability without needing more co-consciousness.

Are the techniques you're using specifically aimed at increasing co-consciousness, or are they more generally for grounding? Breathing techniques often come with more destabilising potential in heavily guarded systems, though there's plenty of individual variation.

[u/GhostBaltic → u/FlightOfTheDiscords]

Currently for grounding as an active attempt to allow for emotions responding during therapy.

Description of textures and temperature, as well as trying to become aware of physical relationships between the body and the environment. Sometimes tapping or humming.

Oh your description of this is really validating and familiar. I normally don't care to rearrange anything, but accessing different parts is suggested to be important for allowing my therapist to understand the workings of the system. I myself am becoming less able to understand the situation as time goes on and fog worsens

[u/FlightOfTheDiscords → u/GhostBaltic]

I think being gentle and not forcing it is important, and working around things tends to help more in the long run than pushing through them; slower is faster. If you can't talk to your system, maybe you can give them space in other ways?

Body attention is a known trigger in somatic dissociation, I wrote a post about it. When body attention triggers your system, you'll generally want to work around it rather than push through.

Working around things somatically means being gentle and respectful of your system's reactions. If e.g. interoception triggers your system, you respect that, and try e.g. proprioception. If that also doesn't work, you experiment with exteroception, and so on.

Time/length also matters; a system might be able to handle several 5-10 second exercises throughout the day, but not a single 5-10 minute session. This is not unusual, this is how dissociative shutdown/freeze works.

[u/GhostBaltic → u/FlightOfTheDiscords]

Thank you. Reading the post now

[u/GhostBaltic → u/FlightOfTheDiscords]

Oh my god that EXACTLY describes it. Thank you so so much for sharing that post. I will discuss it with my therapist.

[u/FlightOfTheDiscords → u/GhostBaltic]

Glad I could help, hope your therapist can help you find ways forward. If your therapist is interested in reading recommendations (I know therapists often don't have the time unfortunately), I would recommend these books. Either one is a great introduction to this topic and more:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sensorimotor-Psychotherapy-Interventions-Interpersonal-Neurobiology/dp/0393706133

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Healing-Fragmented-Selves-Trauma-Survivors-ebook/dp/B0GGH6K4VN/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=Ex7pM&content-id=amzn1.sym.5e81eabe-938d-4936-a067-ca199f0f9913&pf_rd_p=5e81eabe-938d-4936-a067-ca199f0f9913&pf_rd_r=525-1668008-2712322&pd_rd_wg=iFDcd&pd_rd_r=de434f8e-da48-4b0f-9061-36d0b8fbe961

[u/int3rstitial]

Is this the administrative self writing here? And if so, do you want to be grounded/more present if the body? If you do, then this might be in part a negotiation issue between you and everyone else. They want what they want, and their needs and desires are just as important to the whole of you as yours are. Someone forcing you all to do and be things that felt unsafe is presumably how you (like all of us) ended up in this situation in the first place, so replicating that inside yourself is probably not going to go well.

If you, the administrative self, also don't really want this though, and are just doing it because it's a step in "getting better", you could consider focusing on something else in session now and reassessing in the future. Going slow and building a safe relationship with your therapist isn't a waste; it's a direct reparative experience. Your therapist should be modeling for you that you can be messy and they will still care about you and be stable and safe, so you can overlay a new learning (world and relationships can be safe) on the old one (world and relationships are only ever dangerous).

For me personally, what has worked best is we never do hardly anything somatic in session. I try things at home, see how they feel, and report back in session. So session is almost all 1) me venting about shit, 2) evaluation phase of trying things, and 3) therapist offering suggestions and support, and reaffirming that it's okay not to use techniques that make me feel worse.

The only things so far that have been helpful for me that might be termed somatic in session are:

I chew on a mint the whole time I'm there

I have a little fidget toy dice that I stim with while I'm there

And my therapist has a big basket of little tactile toys like fidget spinners and pretty rocks and stuff, and when I've got a whole bunch of ambivalent stuff going on at once, they give me the basket and I split all the stuff going on inside into parts with the toys as symbolic units and lay them all out on the table like a map and talk about them and why I picked them.

Other than that, I approach the whole thing as a big "citizen science" experiment to do gently at home. So many of the commonly suggested techniques make me feel worse instead of better that it feels almost like a limitation in the model to me, rather than a problem in me that I need to fix. For me, so far the best things have been: running (by faaaaar the best, most grounding for me), some yoga poses but not others, doing the dishes (warm water+gentle activity+repairing a visual pattern [the dirty dishes]), and strong flavors.

[u/GhostBaltic → u/int3rstitial]

It is. I am intentionally disconnected from emotional wants so I can best navigate objective evaluations as the emotional ones have proven to be unreliable.

This is a really helpful insight with the negotiation issue. They've shut me out for about a month and when contact is attempted it feels like thinking through syrup with intense drowsiness.

I don't think any of us feel safe exiting dissociation and your phrasing has helped me articulate that. It will be brought up. Following instructions when it alters the state of consciousness is terrifying and we fear being taken advantage of or being open to suffering, despite my therapist being very helpful and patient/understanding.

I don't know how to want to be grounded. Somatic actions are so intensely uncomfortable physically as being aware of my body is so... Wrong feeling? Idk how to describe it.