I don’t know who it was in the traumatology field that first suggested that survivors of sexual trauma unilaterally cannot feel their bodies, however, this statement has come up multiple times and in multiple spaces in the work I do related to somatic trauma healing for survivors of sexual trauma. Simultaneously, and often from the same people, there is a push towards trauma-informed yoga for survivors with the emphasis being that this specific way of practicing yoga is the way for survivors who struggle to feel their bodies to develop interoception - or the capacity to sense inner body experiences. This has frustrated me for multiple reasons: it represents a shallow or diluted understanding of interoception, it fails to recognize survivors’ diverse experiences of embodiment, and it’s being espoused by folks with massive teaching platforms who I am not convinced have equally expansive experience teaching, listening to, and centering the vast array of survivors’ voices and yet who influence, from the top down, many aspiring somatic practitioners whether yoga teachers, bodyworkers, therapists, and survivors alike.
So here is a bottom up perspective from someone who is a survivor with a range of varying relationships with my body, who has worked with survivors everywhere along the spectrum of feeling numb most of their waking hours to feeling far too much from the inside, and often alternating between those two spaces, and from the lens of studying with somatic trauma healers who, recognizing each of us has our own somatic experience, not only center the body’s voice yet specifically center the unique voice of the body in front of them.
Interoception, the ability to notice and sense our internal experience, is both created and developed in a context. That context begins in utero and continues to be shaped and reinforced throughout the child’s primary developmental years which are considered 0 - 3 or 0 - 5. That said, the ACE Study tracked children’s adverse experiences between the ages of 0 - 18 and found significant correlations between the impacts of trauma within that wider age span and adult physical and psychological health allowing us to make meaningful assumptions that while there is a period of more acute structural building, the shaping of the brain/body relationship does not complete at age 3 or 5, yet rather, is a continuous process. I digress. If the context within which a child learns to sense their body is one that is laden with threat and lacks consistent physical and emotional safety - their internal signaling systems will become tuned towards tracking for danger. The interoceptive cues they do receive from their body are likely to be filtered through a “danger lens”. (Kathy Kain) For example, if a child developed a relationship with their gut - whether hunger, fullness, illness, indigestion, or instincts - in the context of an abusive, neglectful, or absent caregiver, the cues associated with the gut and the experiences they have in that region of the body (whether or not they are consciously paying attention to it) may trend towards discomfort, pain, fear, etc. Among many of the impacts this could cause, the person may come to affiliate sensation in the gut with evidence of a “problem” and then in searching their external (or internal) environment for the problem, may feel those sensations of danger and discomfort increase. They might experience a number of physical or psychological challenges like chronic stomach aches, cramps, digestive issues, anxiety, lethargy, etc.
Too much of what I see written and spoken about regarding the benefits of yoga for trauma survivors has to do with this blanket notion that survivors cannot feel their bodies, and therefore need to engage in a yoga practice that helps them awaken those internal feeling channels. Yet, survivors are not a monolith. Some of us are extremely sensitive to our inner body and others feel numb inside or in specific parts of ourselves. Some of us oscillate from acute sensitivity to absence of sensation. It is simply not true that survivors of sexual trauma cannot feel themselves and the fact that this notion is out there reflects the need to have more survivors writing and teaching about the impacts of sexual trauma and pathways toward healing.
There is ample research available now that demonstrates that people with high levels of anxiety, which is common though not universal among sexual trauma survivors, in fact, feel everything inside of their bodies. They might even say they feel “too much“ and that this abundance of feeling contributes to states of anxiety. The relationship between trauma and interoception is not simple despite everyone wishing for a one-size-fits-all modality or solution to the complexities survivors navigate. Rather, it is always person specific.
There are some survivors who, in order to cope with the embodied memories, images, feelings, and thoughts related to all that they have endured, may unconsciously dull the feedback from their body to their brain. They simply stop paying attention to it, because paying attention to it would be too debilitating. This is a survival strategy and it works. Other survivors may have the opposite experience. As a result of the vigilance required of them, whether as children, young people, and/or survivors who belong to historically and presently marginalized and targeted communities who had to be assessing for risks in their environment in an ongoing way - they have to turn on all of their “paying attention systems” and as a result, those systems are constantly tracking for and providing feedback in their body about levels of threat and danger. Noticing those signals is prioritized as a survival mechanism and sometimes that leads to a person cultivating a “danger lens” through which their interoceptive experiences are filtered. Safety has been so persistently intangible whether in certain contexts, spaces, relationship dynamics, or on a societal level, that many survivors would have a hard time noticing safety in their body even when it showed up.
This is why I will often spend months or longer with a survivor (and in my own ongoing practice) learning how to notice when there is safety: what are the signals in the body, what happens to the muscles, the facial expression, thoughts, one’s way of orienting and taking up space in the body and in the world around them when they feel safe. As one of my teachers and a primary influence on my work, Kathy Kain, says, “How do you know when you’re safe?” Building a safety map that in time can grow alongside the danger map, may lay its imprint over that former map, or simply expand the complexity of the map, is crucial to healing, and it is also person specific how we get there. Part of building the safety map is also learning how to take safety in, to receive it, to rest into it when it shows up, and this too is work that unfolds in a titrated way.
Kathy Kain remains one of the few teachers I have heard articulate this so clearly - this thing that we as survivors have always known about what it’s like to live in a body that knows the intimate body, psyche, and soul breach of sexual trauma. Our lived experiences hold the nuance that you won’t always find at workshops and conferences, and especially from influencers and experts that themselves have not grappled with the nuances of how sexual trauma (often combined with other forms of systemic oppression) inform embodiment.
Some survivors alternate between high states of disassociation where they don’t feel their bodies for days, weeks, months at a time, and alternately, navigate periods of time in which they are in great distress because of the constant signaling in their body and what it might be telling them about the outside world, and/or the state of their inside world, and this can be both overwhelming and isolating especially when you are receiving messages about quick fixes to “hack” your nervous system or that a trademarked “trauma-sensitive yoga” practice will be the solution to the ways in which trauma has impacted you.
As a yoga teacher, and specifically as a sexual trauma survivor who practiced yoga as an intentional part of my (ongoing) recovery, I know that yoga can be a place for survivors to start developing their capacity to discern among different interoceptive cues. To develop a more reliable internal map. To receive more reliable feedback from their body. Pulsing or sharp pangs in the belly may not mean that something bad is about to happen, it may mean, in this current moment, that we need something to eat. Our racing heart may not indicate that we need to run for cover as fast as we can, it may mean we are having a wonderful experience. The physiology is the same - it’s the context that influences how we interpret those cues.
Healing will support us in being able to parse out the present context from historical context - in time. While we are practicing yoga and building an intimate relationship with our body, our emotions, and our beliefs, we have the opportunity to cultivate a new internal map that includes both the imprints of trauma as well as those of our resilience. With practice, our interoceptive cues may begin to highlight experiences of neutrality, safety, or perhaps, pleasure. Still, this takes time and yoga is one among many pathways to developing this new self-awareness. It’s important for yoga teachers who are excited about trauma-informed yoga to understand and communicate that amplifying interception is not initially the goal when the internal map is laden with trauma markers. For many of our students, our primary intention may be to support the student in building the architecture for a new “somatic vocabulary” by noticing where things feel more quiet, more comfortable, more easeful, less painful, or perhaps neutral, and developing the capacity to take those sensations and cues in.
In my experience, yoga offers an environment to practice learning a new “somatic vocabulary” as we engage and explore our internal map, however, for many survivors, it will also require working with other practices to support that mapping process. Accessing complementary modalities that are explicitly focused on helping our body understand how the current signaling systems have long been associated with danger and how to bring those systems up to date, beginning to explore for signals of safety, comfort, belonging, or connection, and moving towards a place in our body where we have access to the wide range of internal cues will, I believe, serve to deepen our enjoyment of the experience of yoga as a healing practice.
I reflect on the most recent therapeutic yoga conference I attended where multiple people with PhDs spoke these untruths about how survivors inhabit their bodies, and I lament the dissonance between experts and survivors that we must continue to address. I think about the imbalanced power dynamics that get reinforced when someone of authority, in a position of esteem, has the audacity to tell survivors what their experience is of being in their body, the audacity and in fact the harm of speaking for someone else’s experience in such a binary manner. I think about how my body has been my compass and my most powerful communicator in helping me to decipher the next step on my healing map, the next pose in the yoga sequence I am practicing, the most basic and yet essential needs of when it is thirsty, hungry, sleepy, and joyful, peaceful, scared, nervous, or grieving.
I always get that feedback from my body before I have language for it. Even when my body is quiet, especially when it is quiet, its communication remains crystal clear.
I am not distressed about these influencer voices telling us why survivors should do yoga, or what is hard for survivors about yoga, simply because there are more and more of us who are speaking our truth. I invite all survivors to remember, claim, and embody the wisdom they hold about sexual trauma - the experience, the complexities, the challenges, the healing - wisdom that they had to fight to survive long enough to uncover and translate into words. Survivors who are healing in the wake of sexual trauma (while also living in a culture where the threat of sexual violence remains ever-present) will always be the best teachers on sexual trauma and healing and it is time for us to take up our rightful space among the experts.
I invite you to email me at mollybharris@gmail.com or to comment on this article to share your insights on interoception, embodiment, somatics, dissociation, yoga, and the nonlinear process of healing so that the range of our voices can be magnified.