Your healing story is a body story
CW: rape, intimate partner violence
It’s no surprise that two of the most cited books about trauma and healing, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk and My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem, have references to the body in their title. (Both of these books have received legitimate criticisms, but I name these to reference their titles, not the content.) Healing and trauma isn’t about mindset, it is embodied. Racial violence isn’t just a way of thinking, it is about subjugating and controlling bodies.
In Who Is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who it Leaves Behind, Fariha Róisín discusses how Virginia Woolf wrote how important it is for illness to be part of literature. “Literature, Woolf believed, concerned itself too much with the mind while pretending that the body was negligible and non-existent”. Responding to critiques of navel-gazing in memoir writing, Melissa Febos writes in Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative,
“Transforming my secrets into art has transformed me. I believe that stories like these have the power to transform the world. That is the point of literature, or at least that's what I tell my students. We are writing the history that we could not find in any other book. We are telling the stories that no one else can tell, and we are giving this proof of our survival to each other. What I mean is, tell me about your navel. Tell me about your rape. Tell me about your mad love affair, how you forgot and then remembered yourself. Tell me about your hands, the things they have done and held and hit and let go. Tell me about your drunk father and your friend who died.”
When I talk about your healing story, it is most certainly a body story. A body story moves beyond stating the pain or love or disappointment you felt because it shows where those feelings and sensations showed up, mutated, transformed, dissipated, and arrested you. After all, humans are physical manifestations of life force. So our bodies are here to guide us. We might think our bodies hate us. We might dissociate from our bodies, ignoring all the signals and information it gives us. But all the “bad” things we believe our body is doing TO us is actually FOR us. And this is always part of a larger story.
The tricky thing is that so much of what the body does isn’t always in accordance with our vision, what our eye can see. Even if we visualize that a physical location or human we are with is “safe”, our body can decide otherwise based on past experience. Our conscious mind is so helpful, but it often bypasses what our subconscious and unconscious parts have to tell us. These parts give us messages by halting our hunger, increasing our heart rate, tightening our hips, not allowing us to speak, inducing a pit in our stomach, feeling detached from our body, and more. Then our mind responds through thoughts, beliefs, and language. The unconscious holds SO MUCH, and I truly believe that increasing our awareness of it starts with relating to the body. This is an actual relationship.
But relating to the body can feel like crap for a bit (or longer). You don’t have to do this all at once, it can be slow and steady, in a way that honors how much you can handle. In doing so, you can excavate the many ways your body has LOVED you and protected you when you didn’t have the means to do so when you had few choices. Remember, your healing story is love story. And if your healing story is a body story, then your body story is also a love story.
Image ID: A photo of Nisha Mody from the head down to the top of her chest, with a sheer white saree with brown squiggles on it, draped over her head. She is smiling and her skin is bare.
I was unwillingly reminded of my body own story in June 2022. I was in Hysperia, CA with my boyfriend looking at CalEarth homes when I was enamored watching a cute little kid navigate one of the homes. At the same time, my boyfriend wanted to show me something cool he saw just a few feet away. He tugged at my forearm to show me what he saw, and I froze. It wasn’t anything violent, but my body began to remember. It alerted me to the time, more than 10 years before, when my ex-husband yanked my arm up the three flights of stairs to our third-floor condo. I resisted while he tried to pull my house keys out of my hand. Those keys were all I had to grant me any sense of safety, access, or agency. This was followed by him pushing me on our bed and repeatedly hitting me in the face. My body shut down and I had no strength to fight back.
It was one of the many times he went from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde in his drunkenness. Earlier that night, we had a beautiful time hosting my brother and some friends on our rooftop deck, overlooking the Chicago skyline, grilling, drinking, laughing. Then our friends left and my brother went to bed, apparently giving my ex full permission to transform from a jovial, sweet husband to a punishing, violent force. It was the only time he was physically violent toward me, but it was all my body needed to imprint that memory, that fear, that trauma response into my bones, my flesh, and my heart.
Ten years later, I thought that memory was in the past. And it was. But trauma never goes away. Our relationship WITH trauma, which is inherently a relationship with our body, is what allows us the capacity to heal, to have self-compassion, and to remember that our bodies want nothing more than to be wise and protect us in any way possible. While my boyfriend excitedly pointed at what he wanted to show me, I was frozen in fear, wondering why my head felt cold and numb and my belly felt immobile. In the middle of him talking, I stopped him and told him what was happening to me. Then I burst into tears. After my sobs softened, I jokingly said, “Wow, the body really does keep the score.” My precious body remembered something that happened in a different place with a different person during a different time with such strong sensitivity that it wanted to alert me to anything remotely close to the danger I experienced a decade before. Wow, what a beauty my body is. What a loving creature. What a protective badass.
Reliving that body memory felt like shit, and the more I think about it, I’m glad. That day I learned that I had a HELL NO for any act that took me away from my joy without consent. While I was technically safe, my subconscious and my nervous system recreated sensations to say HELL NO.
WHAT A LOVING LOVE THAT IS.
Yes the body keeps the score, but it isn’t about winning or losing as much as it is about capacity and discernment. And capacity can shift and expand when you bring curious, loving, non-judgmental awareness to the body. Some people are so traumatized and so dissociated from their body that this seems impossible. No amount of words I write about how your body loves you so fucking much can convince you of it. But that, my love, is your capacity. So be with it. Nurture what is there because even numbness is a feeling that is present FOR you.
Love is a verb. The body is an ecosystem. Healing is a returning. Your healing story is a body story is a love story. So ask yourself….
What stories has your body received?
What stories has it told?
What stories were taken away?
Journal about it, tell me in the comments, or talk to a safe human about what comes up for you.
ICYMI, here’s what I’m offering in Nishaland!
My 6-week Boundaries Course is open for enrollment! Learn more and apply here. I will have two cohorts, one for everyone and one open for BIPOC only. We start the week of March 12.
I have some spots for one-on-one coaching open. My former client Niro says “Nisha exhibits all the excellent qualities that make a great coach. I have also witnessed her taking feedback with grace and compassion. She is everything you could hope for in a coach who is also self aware and continuously educating herself.” If you’re interested, apply here. We will have a no-pressure convo and take it from there!
