Can bodyworkers whose trauma healing techniques involve touch benefit from Chi for Two training?
Hands-on healing is ancient. The value of touch for trauma healing is clear.
Touch can also trigger trauma response. The energetic dance that causes touch to trigger trauma response can be better understood now than ever before due to new science.
Now that science better understands energy, we have a more concrete understanding of how touch can heal trauma.
Quantum physics helps us understand that our world is made of waves: light waves, sound waves, the radio waves our devices use to communicate.
According to quantum physics, everything is both a wave and a particle.
· When we study specific interactions, we can see particles: molecules, atoms, protons, electrons and neutrons.
· However, when we step back from looking at specific interactions, we can see patterns that help us recognize the waves.
Our bodies are full of waves—currents of blood pumping, inhales and exhales, waves of emotion—energy. To better understand how the energy of one body affects the energy of another body and how touch can trigger trauma response, we can look at particles.
Through the lens of quantum physics, it makes sense that the energetic particles of bodies (molecules, atoms, protons, electrons and neutrons) would affect the energetic particles of the air around the body. We can begin to understand how some people might see colors around other people’s bodies. Particles are waves; colors are various kinds of light waves.
In the same way that we can now picture the particles of our body affecting the particles of the air around our bodies, we can picture the particles of the air around our bodies affecting the particles of air around another person’s body.
When we touch—skin to skin—the particles of our body affect the particles of the other person’s body. However, our skin safe-guards the merging of particles so while the particles of one person’s body affect the particles of another person’s body, each person’s skin keeps the two bodies separate. We can connect without merging. We can disconnect easily.
Push
Dance/movement therapists study the dance of relationship. Dee Wagner, counselor, dance/movement therapist, somatic educator and originator of Chi for Two, has studied the dance of Push. During infancy, the dance of Push is how we learn to sense our bodies as separate beings from other people’s bodies. As we say in Chi for Two, when I Push into what’s Not-Me, I find Me. Push helps us develop “energy skin.”
This is where the Chi for Two partner practices come in: Chi for Two partner practices help people better sense the energetic dance of relationship. Push is a Chi for Two partner practice that bodyworkers can do with clients.
There are many techniques in which clients push a body part into a bodyworker’s hands. These techniques help bodily functioning. Chi for Two helps bodyworkers recognize how Push helps clients sense themselves as separate beings. This sense of separateness is key in touch being healing.
Chi for Two draws from scientist Stephen Porges’ polyvagal view of nervous system anatomy, Peter Levine’s understanding of trauma patterning within the body, Sue Carter’s understanding of the neuro-peptide oxytocin, understanding of infant development from Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Judith Kestenberg and colleagues, Object Relations and Attachment theorists, understanding of ancient people’s healing use of storytelling from trauma recovery specialist Clarissa Pinkola Estes, and understanding of racialized trauma from Resmaa Menakem.
Chi for Two partner practices awaken and integrate the dance of consent for touch.
Chi for Two developer Mary Lou Davidson spent years studying trauma with Wagner. Over this time, Davidson developed a training for bodyworkers called Who’s on the Table?
Looking at the therapeutic relationship as a dance, bodyworkers can better appreciate how clients transfer unfinished infant/parent dances onto the client/bodyworker dance. They can better sense what psychologists call countertransference—when therapists project their own unresolved conflicts onto clients.
Wagner’s first article in a peer-reviewed journal was Polyvagal Theory and Peek-a-boo: How the Therapeutic Pas de Deux Heals Attachment Trauma. This article was published in 2015 in Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy.
In this article, Wagner helps therapists recognize the dance of the therapeutic relationship. The therapeutic relationship involves losing and gaining connection. As therapists lose connection with clients and invite Push to reestablish connection, this dance builds the sense of safety that is key to healthy nervous system patterning—the dance of consent.
Bodyworkers can appreciate how client/bodyworker interactions replicate infant/parent interactions. There is connection, loss of connection and reconnection. Lying on a massage table stirs implicit memories from infancy because clients are often in varying degrees of nakedness, hoping a bodyworker can help them shift how they feel in their bodies. Robin Karr-Morse helps us understand infant trauma in her book Scared Sick: The Role of Childhood Trauma in Adult Disease. As Wagner helps us understand, infant/parent interactions during diapering and dressing play a key role in passing nervous system patterning from one generation to the next.
Bodyworkers learn the energetic difference between interactions of Dancing-with versus Doing-to in the training Who’s on the Table?
Bodyworkers benefit from an understanding of the current scientific recognition of nervous system anatomy and how trauma affects the body potentially getting passed down over generations during infant/parent interactions. So, yes, bodyworkers whose trauma healing techniques involve touch can benefit from Chi for Two training.
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