Can I get 'hands on' my deepest layers of trauma?
W
wade neumann
Notes. Thoughts. Big Green Ideas.
Categories
- Health
- Therapy
- ConTactCare
- mush
Wade recently undertook further training in ConTact Care, and if I was forced to give you the shortest possible explanation of the method, I'd probably say that it works with the body's protective responses rather than trying to overcome them. Instead of pushing through tension, it listens to it. Instead of trying to force a release, it supports what is already there until the nervous system feels safe enough to let go on its own.
During the course, Dale Speedy said something to me that didn't seem particularly important at the time. Looking back, it may have been the most important thing he said all weekend.
He looked at me and said, "You know about the sense-abilities of people. You know that a look across a crowded room can be as powerful as a poke in the ribs."
To be completely honest, I was mostly surprised that he was talking directly to me. All day we'd been asked to feel things through our hands that I wasn't entirely convinced my old farmer fingers were qualified to feel. There were plenty of moments where I questioned whether I was imagining things, misunderstanding things, or simply too clumsy to appreciate what was being presented.
I probably should have had more faith. Dale is a farmer too.
It wasn't until later that night that his comment started to bother me in the best possible way. I found myself thinking about all the moments in life where our awareness suddenly sharpens and the world seems to come into focus with unusual clarity. The first example that came to mind was cold. Most of us know the feeling. A certain stillness arrives with a cold morning, and suddenly the skin wakes up. The hairs stand on end. Every sensation seems amplified.
The second example was danger. Not anxiety. Not worry. Genuine danger. People often describe those moments as strangely calm. Time appears to slow down. Awareness narrows. Every detail seems important. Again, the hairs stand up on the back of the neck and the body enters a state of heightened attention.
Then I found myself thinking about Dale's example. The look across a crowded room.
Anyone who has ever caught the eye of someone who would later become important in their life probably knows what I'm talking about. There can be something almost electric about it. A brief moment where the noise disappears, attention condenses and the body seems to recognise something before the conscious mind catches up.
Three completely different situations. Cold. Danger. Attraction.
Yet all three seem capable of producing remarkably similar responses.
What interested me wasn't the cause. It was the possibility that the body might be doing something fundamentally similar in each circumstance. Not becoming frightened. Not becoming romantic. Not becoming cold. Becoming attentive.
That thought kept pulling me back toward the work we'd been doing with our hands throughout the course. ConTact Care places a surprising amount of emphasis on developing the practitioner's ability to feel rather than their ability to impose. The more I sat with that idea, the more I wondered whether sensitivity itself is a trainable skill. Not in some mystical sense, but in the simple sense that a person can learn to notice more than they noticed yesterday.
Dale introduced us to embryological ideas suggesting that many of our primary sensory structures share remarkably close developmental origins early in life. Whether viewed anatomically, neurologically or simply through lived experience, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the idea that our senses operate as isolated systems. The body appears far more integrated than that.
Perhaps that is why I find myself fascinated by moments of pyloerection, what most of us simply call goosebumps. Scientists continue to debate exactly why it occurs and why it remains so prominent in human experience despite our lack of fur. Yet the body continues to deploy it reliably in situations that seem to matter. Cold. Danger. Awe. Music. Love. Profound recognition. It is difficult not to suspect that the body knows something useful about the experience, even if we struggle to fully explain it.
All of this leaves me with a question rather than a conclusion. If there are states in which the body naturally heightens its sensitivity to the world around it, might there be value in learning how to access those states intentionally before working with another human being? Could our hands become better listeners if we first learned how to become more attentive ourselves?
I don't know the answer.
What I do know is that ConTact Care has challenged a belief that I carried for a very long time. Most therapies I encountered throughout life seemed to share a common assumption that healing required force. Find the sore spot. Stretch it. Manipulate it. Break it down. Push through it. Endure it.
ConTact Care appears to begin from a very different place. It asks what might happen if the body were offered comfort first. Then more comfort. Then more again.
That idea struck me as almost absurd when I first encountered it. Yet the results have been difficult to ignore. Patterns that I assumed were permanent have started to soften. Areas that I thought represented inevitable ageing now seem more like long-standing negotiations that were never fully resolved.
The greatest surprise hasn't been what I've learned to feel in another person's body. The greatest surprise has been discovering how much discomfort I had quietly accepted as normal in my own.
For that reason alone, the training was worthwhile. It reminded me that we are not necessarily condemned to carry every old compensation pattern forever. Sometimes the body already knows exactly what it needs to do. Sometimes it simply needs enough safety, enough attention and enough comfort to remember.
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