Episode 65 - SOMATIC SEXUAL HEALING & TRAUMA RESOURCING IN THE BEDROOM with Sabine Grandke-Taft

Transcript

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Francesca Gentille:  Welcome to Sex: Tanta & Kama Sutra, bringing you the soul of sex.  I’m your host Francesca Gentille.  And with me today is Sabine Grandke-Taft.  Sabine is just such a beautiful woman of spirit and heart, who is a body worker in the broadest sense of the word and the world.  Which includes physical therapy, Feldenkrais practitioner, a massage therapist, a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, which is the one that I really love.  I want to say that one again, a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, for over 25 years.  She teaches a workshop on feminine radiance for women, and for couples teaches body communion.

Welcome Sabine.

Sabine Grandke-Taft:  Thank you Francesca it is a pleasure to be here. 

Francesca Gentille:  Well it is a pleasure to have you, because these conversations that we’ve been having leading up to today and sharing it with our audience, we’ve really been delving into the healing of the body in a lover relation, and the healing of the body in life.  The emotional body, the mental body, the physical body and how it is all integrated in the body. 

Tell us a little bit about you and your journey that brought you to this place of being a body worker in the broadest sense.

Sabine Grandke-Taft:  Thank you for the invitation.  I love talking about it because my own journey through my own healing allowed me to be such a therapist right now and feel the compassion through the self-compassion that I learned.

I grew up in Germany, and lots of Americans have had some German roots in many ways.  So there is quite a pressure there, and as a baby I wasn’t quite able to feel everything.  I had problems with balance and coordination. Luckily my mother sent me to ballet school, where I learned that I had a body and how to move it elegantly and with ease and with grace. 

And from that I began to do sports gymnastics and judo and horseback riding and all these things.  And then I realized there are physical therapists that are helping people who don’t know how to walk any more, to walk again.  And so I knew that that’s what I wanted to become.  I started that and through that I learned to work with handicapped babies. 

And then everything began from the very beginning.  I had to relearn everything I thought I knew, because when we do something to a baby that doesn’t feel good a baby cries.  And that’s certainly not the fault of the baby.  So I learned to listen to my own body, very gently more and more and listen with my hands to that beautiful being that I was holding in my arms.  For seven years as a PT for children I really came back to my own beginnings.  I learned to crawl on the floor again and I learned to do all the rolling motions.  I really recovered that part that I didn’t have enough of in my own childhood. 

Francesca Gentille:  I do want to stop you there for a moment because I want to take that in for all of us.  It is my sense that you are not alone in this.  There are so many of us that didn’t have touch with listening hands, hands that were listening for what really felt the best to us.  That so many of us didn’t have the opportunities to be on the floor and fully explore our world in safety.  That from the beginning parts of our own development in our body, in our sensed luxurious emotional body were limited.  Thank you for bringing that up.  This is something that we lose often and that there’s a journey that we can be on to reclaim it.

Sabine Grandke-Taft:  Yes, we recover if the space around us is safe and welcoming and you are with a person who can acknowledge the fact that they probably had an experience like that too.  So in relationships, for instance, and we talked about situations when we make love, when suddenly something comes up that doesn’t feel safe anymore it is usually something that surfaces from the past.  And we don’t even need to know what it is, but it is there and it is present in this moment.

So when we can begin to have a conversation with our partner, preferably before we end up in bed, to say “Hey when we get to that place lets just come back here now, connect with each other and find out what we each need in this moment.”  Because what babies need, and the most important, is safety.  And then curiosity comes in, and then we begin to play and then we begin to find out and then we want more of something that feels good. 

Francesca Gentille:  I am going to slow that down a little bit, because, as you said, we talked about it a little before.  So I want to reveal some of the things that we talked about before is that, I’ve mentioned this in other shows, that 40 percent of the population were raised in families that were severely emotionally, physically, spiritually or sexually abusive.  40 percent and/or sexually abusive and that is practically every other person.  And that 96 percent of us were raised in families that had missing functions, were dysfunction to some degree.  The family never god angry, or the family didn’t honor boundaries or privacy, or the family didn’t honor truth, and so we lose functions.

This is how we engage with one another as adults; we have missing functions and/or trauma in the body.  So it is not in a sense when are we going to go into, or if we are going to go into a trauma response with one another, it is almost when.  It is like we are these labyrinths that sooner or later something is going to go off.  And whether it is in the bedroom or outside of the bedroom we are going to find that we are having a reaction that is bigger, clinically in a way, then the moment would warrant.

For our listening audience, what are the hallmarks of a trauma response?  And I love that you said the memory doesn’t need to be there, we don’t need to remember what happened or when it happened to know that in the present something has been triggered that leads back to the past and in this moment there is an opportunity for healing.  So how do I know, I am with my partner, either inside the bedroom or outside the bedroom and how do I know, oh, this is a trauma reaction that they are going through?

Sabine Grandke-Taft:  Very often it is enough that we notice something doesn’t feel right anymore.  We don’t feel safe, something comes up, or we feel anger.  Anger is often, lets say, the secondary response to protect the primary feeling of insecurity.  And anger is very juicy and it is very helpful when we notice I’m tensing up physically, my breath is changing, my body gets tight or my back gets tight, my neck gets tight, or I stop breathing in the flow.  So when we notice any of those shifts, and very often we are so used to feeling our emotions first, so when we notice any of that, just say, “Let me stop here right now and lets just check what is really going on.” 

And very often we tend to put it onto the person we are with.  It can be anybody.

Francesca Gentille:  It is your fault.

Sabine Grandke-Taft:  It is your fault; it is your fault, yeah. 

Francesca Gentile:  If I wasn’t with you I wouldn’t feel this angry or this weird.

Sabine Grandke-Taft:  Yeah, and that is a survival instinct, so to say.  It is a very normal thing to do.  It is not natural, but it is normal.  This is what we normally do.  I did the Hoffman Process a few years ago and something that they offered there was everybody is guilty but no one is to blame.  It is very true.

Francesca Gentile:  I like that.

Sabine Grandke-Taft:  Because we cannot blame our parents for what they’ve done, they’ve had parents too.  Who knows what happened there?  And when we begin to dig into those histories we know, like my parents for instance, went through the Second World War when they were children.  And so, yeah, I can see where they are coming from and how much they suffered in their childhoods.  And then I can see how I am guilty for doing things to my poor husband that are coming out of a moment where I’m not present. 

And you brought that up, the word ‘present moment’, which is really the greatest source of healing and resource, to use that word from somatic experiencing; resource in this moment is this moment.  The sense of our body in this moment to say “Wait something is changing here in my feeling with that person.”  And to say, “Wow, this have nothing to do with what is going on, this may be something that’s come up from the past.”

Francesca Gentile:  Exactly.  I want to come back, in a moment we are going to go to fabulous sponsors.  I just wanted to point out to our listening audience that these responses that are bigger than the moment might seem to warrant, either in me or in my partner, it could be fear, it could be anger, it could be sadness.  I love that you pointed out, just even the beginning of tension.  Peter Levine calls it the fight flight, freeze, or disassociation responses where we can sometimes check out or get very numb or just want to leave, or the fight, the anger. 

If when any of those happen, if either of us can notice, as you pointed out, we can into a sense of the present moment and stop.  Just take a moment to say “Give me a second to stop here and let me just breathe into this, or I want to invite you to breath into this.”  And in a sense get here, what is happening.  I want to talk about this more when we come back from a break and a word from our fabulous sponsors.  And encourage our listening audience to support our sponsors because that keeps wonderful programs like this on the air.  And we will be, or the computer, and we’ll be right back.

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Announcer:  Listen to Sex, Love and Intimacy, a podcast providing weekly audio workshops for your pleasure and connection, on personallifemedia.com.

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Francesca Gentile:  Welcome back to Sex: Tanta & Kama Sutra, bringing you the soul of sex.  I’m speaking with Sabina, body worker in the broadest sense, with so many skill sets, including Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. 

And we were just going over how we notice trauma.  And then what I wanted to ask you Sabina, is how we start to heal personally with trauma so it is not always there and how we can support one another as partners. 

For myself, my listening audience knows my mom died a year ago and I find that a whole new level of trauma is coming up to be released.  In a way now that I feel safe enough to feel it.  I didn’t feel safe when she was alive and my poor partner is getting a much more reactive human being then he first met.  This is personally important to me and I so want to hear, as an individual who recognizes that these trauma responses, the fight, flight, freeze, the anger, the extreme, sadness, anxieties, what can I do personally, what can we do personally, and then how can we invite our partners in with us?

Sabine Grandke-Taft:  The most important pieces, I said it before, would to talk with the partner and say, “These things may happen, and in that moment this has nothing to do with you.”  So they don’t feel blamed and that sets off their trauma response, their history.  And in that moment to say “I may need you to just be there and hold space for me so I can have a time out where I can feel my own self again, where I can feel my body.”

Or we may ask our partner to “Could you just stop and could you just hold me?”  Or, “Could you cover me?” when you lie somewhere and take a blanket, and “Breathe with me, or just look into my eyes” For some people that may be too much, they really want to be left alone and need that space to reconnect.  And the reconnecting is the most important piece.  I said before, to be in the present moment.

How do you, how do I, how do you Francesca, bring yourself into this moment again?  Very important, Peter Levine was researching on the somatic experience for the past 30 years, found that the autonomic nervous system, the erectile brain on the bottom of the skull, the base of the brain, that part is what alarms us, that part. That part is what says, “Hey you are not secure anymore”, you will do fight, flight, freeze, one of those.  And that part of the nervous system is very connected to eye muscles and neck muscles. 

So in those moments when we stop talking and start looking around the room, using the neck muscles, using the eye muscles, the erectile brain begins to realize, “Oh, I’m here now and this place that I’m in is safe.  I’m standing in a room, or I’m lying in bed with my partner, but I’m here now.”  So that is a very clear, very real experience for that moment.

And then, of course, when we get into stress situations we tense up, the startle reflex that you mentioned before is coming up.  The breath stops and we are holding air in, that get emotions going and gets emotions going higher and faster.  So when we begin to exhale with a little bit more emphasis, beginning to exhale down the body, imagine that the exhale flows out your legs, out your arms and down.  That allows the nervous system also to come back here, to relax into this moment and be present.  And then we might be able to look at our partners and say, “Wow, something is just happening, I have no clue what it is and it really does matter, but thank you for being there with me.”

So they feel acknowledged and we know we have created a safe place.  And we have created a place where we can take responsibility for what is going on.

Francesca Gentile:  Wonderful.  I just want to point out a couple of things that you mentioned, I want to highlight them.  One of them is that sense of, we don’t always know or can’t do it quite in the moment, but if it does happen later we can map out with our partner, “This is the way that I, when a trauma response might happen, this is how I want to be held, this is how I don’t want to be held”

My beloved and I different three step… we do a three step because it needs to be simple when one of us is in trauma.  So for me, I like him to hold out his hand, not reach for me, but just hold his hand and then he breaths and then he might gently say “Breathe.”  And then I take a breath and little by little I reach out my hand to him. 

When he is in a trauma response he does not like to be touched.  He wants me to speak more and to say more that it is going to be OK, and if I did anything that was upsetting to say “I noticed that I did this and you got upset and I’ll be aware of this more in the future.”  And then I might say “Breath.”  So he needs something else before he feels safe enough to be touch.

 I’m just pointing this out because it is great to map it out with your partner once you know that it is happening, afterwards, how do we handle this for the next time, that will be different?  I often say to my students, if possible, after establishing a sense of safety don’t intervene in someone’s process.  Don’t hand them the Kleenex, don’t reach out to hug them.  Once they’re in a release, if they’re crying, if they’re talking like “and then this happened and this happened”, if something is coming up for them to let them go through it.  Would you agree to hold that container without intervening, for someone to release?  Or do you have suggestions on when someone is crying, or when someone is shaking? 

Sabine Grandke-Taft:  In the SE model that Peter Levine brought up we are avoiding those very deep places of process and catharsis, sort of say.  Because in those places people can get re-traumatized.  And it is, and I know this from my own process, it is this turning in this same drama again and again and again with no real relief.  So, as an SE practitioner I would say, “Let them cry for a moment, but then say, “I’m here for you, can you look at me?”  And they may be able to do that and maybe not. 

But we can also say, “I’m here for you, when you are ready to open your eyes, open your eyes.”  Or we can ask them questions like, “Would you like me to touch you?  Or, “Would you like me to hold you?”  We begin an interaction to keep the person in this space, here and now.

Like I said before, when you go back into this really deep dark place there is often no release.  And it may take a long time, and we might get re-traumatized in it.  And believe me I’ve been in psychotherapy for years, in cathartic therapy.  I’ve killed millions of pillows and mattresses and I’ve been in that place.  But now we are about 15 years later, there is more to this place of saying “Hey, can you be here, can you see me, can you look through your tears and can you see I’m here for you?  You are here now in this moment.”

And then, of course, here comes the SE model that is not into exploring our emotions in that moment, but to coming back to the body.  The body in this moment is directly connected to the erectile brain, and the body in this moment has sensations.  The feeling sense is what we are looking for, not feeling emotion, but feeling sensations.

And those sensations could be a sense of tightness in the chest, or rocks in your stomach, or you have a really heavy feeling on your shoulders, or a pain in the neck.  Or another feeling could be a sense of constriction anywhere else on the body.

Francesca Gentile:  This is fasinating.  I want to talk more about this but we need to go break again.  But I want to talk more about, we’ve supported ourselves, or our beloved to come into the sensation, and then what’s next with the healing process after a break and a word from our sponsors.  And we’ll be right back.

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Francesca Gentile:  Welcome back to Sex: Tanta and Kama Sutra, bring you the soul of sex.  With Sabina, discussing how we heal our bodies in relationship and we are talking about sensation.  So we are supporting ourselves or our partner to feel that heaviness, the tightness.  Right now I’ve got a little pain in my right shoulder.  Now what do we do, now that we’ve presenced the body and the sensation?

Sabine Grandke-Taft:  Yes.  As I’ve noticed in my clients, it is often very difficult to leave the emotions.  They are very dramatic and very seductive to feel the emotions and they may be overpowering.  So, when you can help your partner or yourself to go below that, into you physical body, and look for sensations. 

One of the sensations we are looking for in the SE model is something that feels like tingling, vibration or even flapping of the tissues.  Or when the spine begins to quiver and to move and things start to feel as if they are flowing through your body.  Those are the sensations we are really looking for, because that means that an old part of the trauma that was held in the body begins to get freed up and move out.

And the movement of these fine vibrations, or big shivering, big movements even, they move down and out the legs and down and out the arms. That is something, when that happens, when the whole body begins to vibrate, or just one foot, or one hand or one part of the body feels like that, then we know we are releasing, the word used to be discharge, we are discharging the old charge that is keeping us hostage, so to say, to the old story, to the old trauma. 

Francesca Gentile:  So instead of being frightened if our partner starts to shake, they’ve said “I’m scared” and then said “My back feels tight, my chest feels heavy” and then they start to shake, that we are not doing anything wrong, we haven’t hurt them, we don’t have to call the doctor. 

Sabine Grandke-Taft:  No, this is healing.

Francesca Gentile:  And do we just breathe at that point? 

Sabine Grandke-Taft:  Exactly.

Francesca Gentile:  If I see my partner doing this thing, do we just breathe and be present?  Or if I am doing that to let myself continue with it?

Sabine Grandke-Taft:  Yes.

Francesca Gentile:  And then it will be done.  So how long might that take?  Would it be a couple of minutes, 30 seconds, five minutes?

Sabine Grandke-Taft:  Yeah.  It could be that, it could be whatever, because this is highly personal.  Each one of us has their own way of moving through.  And it may happen again and again and again, as much as there is stored and pent up energy in us that can be released this way.  And it is often not a big dramatic experience because the body knows how to release this and we do not have to go into, like I said before, a big dramatic catharsis. 

By providing that safe and the outer container for the person who is going through this right now, through this healing process, by providing that safe container they can go through it and they don’t get re-traumatized.  That is a fantastic very exciting way of looking at healing and trauma resourcing. 

Francesca Gentile:  It is that we can be the support.  And it reminded me of the Kundalini, where, when the Kundalini, or the stored energy at the base of the spine releases the body often quivers.  I even wonder if we are sometimes drawn to the orgasmic response, or drawn to the Kundalini response because of this healing nature of releasing pent up energy.

And lets say, heaven forbid, I, or my beloved, is going through this response, we’ve hit a nerve, so to speak, we’ve gone through the emotions, now we’ve gone to sensations, now they are releasing, and I realize, “Uh-oh, I’m supposed to have an interview right now.  Uh-oh we’re supposed to be doing something”, and it doesn’t feel like there is time to complete the process.  Is there a way to gracefully put a pause button on it?

Sabine Grandke-Taft:  I would say it always is, you can always come back by opening your eyes, looking around the room, noticing who is there, starting a conversation, exhaling more than you inhale.  You could even count to four with the inhale and count to six or eight with the exhale.  And stand up, so standing on your own feet, and then coming onto the tip toes and plop back down onto your heels, will send a shiver through all the bones in your body and that will create a real deep sense of grounding here now in this moment.

I have a client who I just gave this practice to when he stands in the check out line at Pete’s Coffee, or at Whole Foods, or where ever he goes shopping, because he doesn’t feel comfortable.  And I told him to just come up to the toes and plop back down.  That kind of here now response, through the shaking and vibrating through the bones gives the nervous system a very clear sense of safety and security and grounding.  So, yes, that is possible. 

Francesca Gentile:  Wow, this is so great, Sabine.  I want to have you on again because this is such beautiful information for ourselves and our partners.  As we said in the beginning, it is really not if there is going to be a trauma response or trauma moment for so many of us, it is really when.  And it is discovering how do we take it as an opportunity to shift, heal and deepen into greater love, intimacy and pleasure in our lives.

Thank you so much for bringing us this journey of embodied healing.

Sabine Grandke-Taft:  Thank you Francesca, my pleasure, absolutely.

Francesca Gentile:  And how would people find you?

Sabine Grandke-Taft:  www.radiantembodiment.com.  You can also Google my name, Sabine Grandke-Taft and I’m sure you’ll find me out there.

Francesca Gentile:  And also, if you want to see Sabine’s picture, get to her website, read the transcripts, forward this to your friends, also contact me; you can do that at www.personallifemedia.com, www.personallifemedia.com.  And thank you for listening to Sex: Tanta and Kama Sutra, bringing you the soul of sex.

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