280. Rewiring - Margo Steines
Edvard Munch, The Heart (1899)
In therapy I learned that while I had managed to clear my mind of the chaos that used to drive it, I never healed my body.
When my child was newborn, I had what I now understand to be severe postpartum anxiety. Her birth was not easy—few of them are—and I emerged from it feeling shaken, ill at ease in my body and confused by my mind. I found myself consumed with intrusive thoughts of danger and harm: Would someone stab me while I was walking with her and leave her helpless body lying in the road? Would a painting fall off the wall and hit her while she played on the floor? Would I fall asleep and roll over on her? Along with this chorus of possibilities, I felt a deep worthlessness. I was a new mom with a history of depression, living far away from family, during a pandemic, in a triple-digit climate, so it was easy to dismiss everything I was feeling as the natural and appropriate reaction to conditions. It was easy to dismiss myself.
Becoming a parent made me realize that while I had moved on from my younger life, which was marked by violence and addiction, I never actually healed the trauma of it. I just stepped over it like a leaking bag of trash on the sidewalk, as if it no longer had anything to do with me. But once I was holding the tiny person I had spent ten years hoping and wishing and atheist-praying for, the stakes were different. I couldn’t burn down or exit my life, because she needed me. She will always need me.
In therapy I learned that while I had managed to clear my mind of the chaos that used to drive it, I never healed my body. My nervous system was wrecked by the compounded effects of years of various forms of violence and chaos. I haven’t taken a drug in seventeen years, and I haven’t sustained any sort of violence in more than half a decade, but my autonomic nervous system has been stuck in a whining idle for a good twenty years, and that does something to a person.
I learned that with somatic therapy it is possible to retrace my steps, to use bodywork to rewire my mind. I learned to press the flats of my knuckles into a hard cool wall when I feel the dull buzz of panic rising in my chest. I learned to place my palm over my heart, to feel the floor against my feet, to experience myself safely existing. I learned to breathe the way my child does when she is regulating her nervous system, a skill that came wired into her: two fast inhales and a slow exhale, the physiological sigh. I learned more from her than I ever expected, like how to simply exist as a human being—a skill I am still working on.
- Margo Steines
