Change your body, change your brain

I rarely find myself at a loss for what to read next, particularly with non-fiction. I read one book I find interesting and inevitably, there will be another book referenced which I add to my list, and so on and so on. This is how I found myself reading Body Learning: An Introduction to the Alexander Technique by Michael J. Gelb. It was mentioned in another book and it sounded as though it would beneficial to read it. I had read a bit about the Feldenkrais method in one of my other brain books, but had not done much research into the Alexander method other than to know that many actors and musicians make use of it. 

I am finding it interesting reading. It has also assured me that my work with R. in how she holds her body is not in vain. This bit particularly struck me last night as I was reading.

"Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Jones's work [another researcher whose work corroborated Alexander's] is his research into the 'startle pattern', a stereotyped response elicited by a sudden noise. The characteristic response starts with a disturbance of the head-neck-torso relationship, followed by a raising of the shoulders and a tensing of the chest and knees. All of this results in a loss of tone in the antigravity system. Jones reports that 'whenever the stimulus was strong enough to elicit a response, it appeared in the neck nuscles and in many cases it appeared nowhere else.

Professor Dart [once again, another researcher] has described the startle pattern as a prototypical response to fear. Jones, who calls it paradigm for malposture, has show that it varies very little from person to person and that it serves as a model for other, slower, response patterns. He points out that fear, anxiety, fatigue, and pain all show postural deviations from the norm similar to those seen in the startle pattern. When one falls into a period of depression, pain, or fear, the balance of the head, neck and torso is acutely disturbed. When the difficult period clears, one is often left with a habit of carrying the head in an unbalanced way. My [the author] own observations have convinced me that the majority of people spend much of their time in a modified form of the startle pattern... " (pp. 50-51)

This is the most accurate description of the way R. holds her body that I have ever come across. She is still fending off a perpetual state of anxiety and fear nearly all the time and it is very much like she is constantly in a startle response. I had just never put all the pieces together. I knew from other reading that our body language and facial expressions can inform our brain of what we are feeling as much if not more so as our brain informing our body. For this reason R. and I have been working a lot (some days it feels nearly constant) on relaxing her body, lowering her shoulders, thinking about what she is expressing with her face. Even before I read this we would go through a litany of doing a self check-in... Are your safe? Is anyone hurting you? Is anything bad happening? ... then mirroring her body stance with mine then showing her how to relax her body by relaxing mine. It is slow going, because not only is it all habitual, but from what I just shared with you, it is an automatic response from years of fear. You don't change that kind of thinking in a month or a year. This is the work of years. 

Sometimes I feel a little bit as though I am experimenting on my children. That sounds bad, but I don't mean it to. It just means that a child who has been so hurt and is receiving help at such a late age coupled with having missed so much is a mystery that not one professional I've had contact with has any more idea what to do than I do. So you try things. Sometimes they are clearly the wrong thing, so you stop. Sometimes you don't really see change over the short term, so you keep going. This is encouragement to me that I am on the right track, so we will continue on.