DIS/EMBODIED CONNECTIONS: REFLECTIONS FROM THE FIELD

By: Sarika Talve-Goodman (she/her, MS, LMSW, PhD)

About every month over the past year, Kelly Caul, MSW, LCSW (she/her, trauma therapist and founding director of Empowered Spaces) and I co-facilitated a free community gathering called Community Rise. We held eleven 90 minute sessions via Zoom. We started in late March 2020, just as shelter-in-place began. 

We first started planning Community Rise before any hint of a global pandemic. We had imagined an informal gathering where therapists, activists, wellness professionals, and anyone committed to personal and collective healing would gather in the garden or yoga studio to build community, share resources, and explore embodied practices. The goal was to merge social justice commitments with trauma-informed modes of personal and collective care. The underlying idea was that collective liberation requires internal work. If we are practicing how to be more safely in our bodies and nervous systems—present to the fullness and complexity of our internal experiences—then we can better engage in the work of forming solidarities through multiple categories of difference and privilege, necessary for creating meaningful structural transformations.

Over time and through screens, the event became something even more intimate than we had imagined. The gatherings among strangers became an experiment in facilitating connection to individual embodied experiences in a disembodied virtual space. It was also an exercise in how to practice cultivating a felt sense of connection with each other while holding space for uneven experiences of ongoing collective trauma, loss, and grief. 

Every month we chose a different theme—grounding, anger, fear, grief, belonging—and offered practices that invited a deeper listening to what our bodies have to tell us. We began each session with a short centering practice, a sharing of community agreements for how to hold space for each other, and the assumptions that Kelly and I bring to the work (a practice learned from Michelle C. Johnson). Then we did a long check-in, where each person was invited to call themselves into the space by sharing a little about who they are, what they are bringing to the circle that day, and what they hope to receive from our time together. We ended with a longer embodied practice. Throughout the practice we invited curiosity and choice, and an intention to stay grounded in the principle that there are no experts and each person is their own wisest teacher. 

For the embodied practices, we drew from integrative and somatic modalities for healing trauma in the nervous system, such as clinical techniques from Somatic Experiencing and polyvagal theory (see, for example, Deb Dana’s Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection). Through these frameworks, being embodied means the practice of nervous system regulation and resiliency. In the stress of daily living, our autonomic nervous systems often shift into protective survival states—either the mobilized energy of sympathetic (“fight/flight”) or the immobilized energy of dorsal collapse (“freeze”). Trauma interrupts the ability to move flexibly between autonomic states, often keeping us stuck in either fight, flight (hyperarousal), or freeze (hypoarousal, numbed out, shutdown). As Deb Dana writes: 

When the ventral vagal state of safety is missing, life is an exhausting mix of intense mobilization and withdrawal. Navigating daily living is focused on limiting the possibility of being activated into a state of dysregulation. The path to regulation and social connection is hidden by habitual protective responses (104). 

Through the lens of polyvagal theory, the goal isn’t always feeling “good,” but to be more regulated, a process of building resiliency and flexibility in the nervous system. To be more “embodied,” then, is building one’s capacity to shift from protective survival states back to a felt sense of safety and connection. 

We merged these therapeutic understandings of trauma with techniques from social justice organizations like Generative Somatics, and Women of Color leaders of personal and collective somatic liberation work such as Prentis Hemphill, Michelle C. Johnson, and Adrienne Marie Brown. Across disciplines, the concept of trauma is entangled within modernity and racial capitalism, from its clinical origins in 19th century pscychoanalysis to contemporary epigenetics; up to its feminist, queer, antiracist, and anticolonial critiques and reimaginings. For our purposes, trauma can be defined as an embodied response to overwhelming events and emotions, as well as the ongoing impact of institutionalized and everyday insidious violences tied to racism, sexism, heteronormativity, capitalism, and so forth. In the context of Community Rise, then, to be “trauma-informed” is to engage with trauma as a multifaceted, unstable, and depathologized category that centers the body and reckons with personal and collective experiences of violence, suffering, and loss. 

From my own framework as a theorist and cultural studies scholar, and a clinician-in-training with Kelly, I approach trauma-focused community-based work from both therapeutic and critical lenses. Some questions I’ve asked along the way are: under what conditions of possibility is a felt sense of connection and safety possible? In what contexts and for whom is safety impossible, due to global systems of racialized inequality and oppression? Healing and liberation for whom, and through what means? How is any community space or construction of “home” dependent on exclusions and limits of access? How are spaces of “healing” or “wellness” structurally dependent on the largely forgotten or erased spaces of contemporary society that preclude a felt sense of safety—such as prisons,  psychiatric institutions, or detention centers? 

For me, the hopeful energy of this gathering comes from the process of Kelly and I exploring behind the scenes and then in community what it means to practice these techniques from our own different positions, as two white women in racially segregated city of St. Louis—and during a pandemic—through a social justice lens. In planning and in the group, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980) often flashes up in my mind. This short hybrid work of poetry, journal fragments, and lectures forms an account of Lorde’s experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. The tone of the writing is both tender and enraged, capturing how I often feel these days. The book critiques the role of cancer in a globalizing profit economy, and the importance of joy, love, and connection between post-mastectomy women from all backgrounds as a source of transformative political activism, a practice of imagining a world otherwise and how to feel and live it into being. 

Lorde also reflects on the difficulty of finding community as a Black lesbian poet with breast cancer. She describes her position as other in every group she is part of. She writes: “The outsider, both strength and weakness. Yet without community there is certainly no liberation, no future, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between me and my oppression (13).”  To be in community, then, following Lorde, is to choose hope and connection through vulnerability and struggle, refusing the silences and separations that oppression creates. As Lorde writes: “…it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken (23).” 

From this perspective, the goal of Community Rise is to create a felt-sense or glimmer of belonging and connection, however momentarily or imperfectly, and in doing so to refuse silence, separation, complicity, and powerlessness. In this way, we practice coming together in “not yet” forms of connection and community. In refusing to fetishize community for it’s own sake, we can work to pay as much attention to exclusions and impossibilities—to whoever is cast outside of this group and access to this space—as much as who is able to connect on a Saturday afternoon to practice reconnecting with their bodies via Zoom. In this way, maybe liberation through community is a practice of embracing and welcoming our “myriad selves,” as Lorde so beautifully puts it, exactly as we are. Part of this is bravely naming and recognizing pain, shame, trauma, separation, grief, oppression, and the violences in which we all are living in radically unevenly distributed ways, as well as the strengths, comforts, and glimmers of peace. If we insist upon care, honesty, intimacy, and joy—even with perfect strangers—what other more hopeful ways of thinking and being can become possible? 

Sources

Deb Dana, Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection: 50 Client-Centered Practices. Norton, NY and London: 2020. 

Grace Hong and Roderick Ferguson. Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. Duke University Press, Durham: 2011. 

Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth Century Fiction. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles: 1999. 

Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books, Berkeley: 1977. 

Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals, Spinsters Inc., NY: 1980. 

Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke University Press, Durham and London: 2015.

Meet Sarika

Sarika Stone Talve-Goodman (she/her, MS, LMSW, PhD) is a literary and cultural studies scholar and clinical social worker in training with Kelly Caul at Empowered Therapy. Her research interests include critical trauma studies, disability studies, Jewish cultural studies, transnational modernism studies, and critical theories of race, gender, and sexuality. Her therapeutic practice focuses on integrative, somatic forms of healing and psychotherapy.