Latest / The Trauma Therapist / Episode 744: Touch. The Most Fundamental of Human Experiences with Cornelia Elbrecht

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Episode 744: Touch. The Most Fundamental of Human Experiences with Cornelia Elbrecht · The Trauma Therapist

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  Or welcome back to the Trauma Therapist Podcast. My name is Gaming Person.
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  My mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible cells, to be human,
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  to be real, not just a clinician. I'm a big believer in
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  who we are is more important than what we know, and this requires cultivating
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  authenticity, genuineness and vulnerability, and that requires intention. Can learn more about
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  my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma Therapist project dot com. That's
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  the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get started. So here we go.
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  So five or three, two and one, our folks, welcome back
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  to the podcast. I am very excited to have as my guest. Back
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  as my guest, Cornelia all Breact Cornelia welcome, Thank you very much for
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  inviting me. Yeah, welcome right here. So Cornelia studied at the School
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  for Initiatic Therapy in the Black Forest, Germany, and holds degrees in Fine
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  Arts and Arts education, along with extensive postgrad training and young Gastalt Therapy,
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  bio energetics and at the Sematic Experiencing Training Institute. She's best known for her
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  cutting edge work with guided drawing and clayfield therapy. She holds regular workshops around
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  the world and a clawin retreat and Apala Bay, Australia and internationally respected arts
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  therapy education facility. Today we're gonna be talking about touch in relation to trauma.
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  But before we get there, Cornelia, welcome, super excited to have
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  you back here. I remember talking to you, remembered your effervescent smile and
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  your presence, and I was like, I seriously want to have this person
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  back. But before we get into everything here, please share with the listeners
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  for those who didn't here episode the first episode five ninety four the podcast,
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  where you're from originally and where you are currently. I'm originally from Germany,
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  so that's where I did my core training and then midlife I immigrated to Australia
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  and this is where I'm living now. I probably asked you this before,
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  but why did you move to Australia ammigrated story. Yeah, anybody immigrate without
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  a big push, if not to say in trauma. So I I believe
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  I've always been looking to leave Germany. I went three times with a one
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  way ticket to the US and yeah, came back ultimately saying no, it's
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  not working for me. And when I came to Australia. It was like,
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  yes, that's really country. Yes, what about it? Um,
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  it's it was, it was just something that resonated in the um. How
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  can I say it's it's it's a feminine archetype that what someone once said,
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  where's the US is a more masculine archetype. It's more hero based, and
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  whereas Australia is very much circular as in supporting each other and helping each other,
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  Australians don't like it if you are too much of a tall poppy for
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  example. I don't know. It's it had something very European Australia that as
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  well as this amazing nature, which but the US has the amazing nature as
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  well, but I can't it's it wasn't a rational decision. And then yeah,
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  to meet a man, um, yeah, it certainly helped to it's
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  less irrational to Yeah, I married an Australian man and that. Yeah,
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  but the move was was definitely driven by lots of events in Germany that just
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  really made me just I had to leave. Yeah, well appreciate you appreciate
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  sharing that. Um. All right, so let's dive in here. Um.
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  You know, before we started on here, I asked you you know
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  what you wanted to talk about, and you said touch. Yeah, Um,
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  let's dive into it. Why what and why? So I believe touch
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  is the most under researched of all the senses we have. We have sight,
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  yes, smell, the taste, and touch is so early because it
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  starts in uter that is our first experience. And I think we just take
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  it so much for granted so that we don't think much about touch trauma.
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  And at the same time, when I started to work, initially with finger
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  paints and then with the clay, I noticed how many people were there who
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  just couldn't touch it, like oh, they'd go with one finger yeah,
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  or the like this is my red finger, this is my blue finger,
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  this is my yellow finger, rather than even though you give them a big
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  tub of paint, yeah or yeah, there's ten kilos of clay in front
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  of them and they will not touch it. And then I became aware of
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  my own touch trauma as a baby, as in that I was raised with
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  a paradigm that if you touch and hold and cuddle your baby too much,
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  your spoil it and they'll go wrong. So it was very structured. I
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  was fed, breastfed, every four hours, and then was put in a
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  crib in a room with a closed door so no one could hear me cry.
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  So I have memories from even as an infant, from looking at myself
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  from the ceiling. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I was so dissociated.
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  Just to be clear, we're not talking about touch as a healing modality.
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  You're talking about touch trauma exactly. Yeah, same, What does that mean?
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  Touch trauma? Touch trauma is that for example, when you touch,
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  yes, say, for example of my clients that are observed, you know
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  they touch paint or with not with a paintbrush, with the hands or the
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  clay, that they shy away like they fear because there's a learned behavior that
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  if I touch, there will be pain. If I touch there will I
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  will get hurt. That could, for example, apply to any domestic violence.
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  It could be a sexual abuse. It could be medical issues when you've
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  gone through a lot of surgeries where you know, like your skin boundary was
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  invaded, and and these are touch experiences, Like you can't look into a
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  crib with the baby and say to the baby, I love you, you
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  are safe the baby. That will be nothing to the baby like safety and
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  love is communicated through holding, yeah, and caressing the baby and how you
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  hold the baby. So we learn attachment and communication through touch. And when
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  we haven't experienced that to downregulate, for example, or we've been too hurt
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  to touch it, it creates a withdrawal on the inside that basically parts of
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  the communication feedback loop is cut off. So what I do is called sensory
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  motor out their piece. So you have the two pathways of sensing and motor
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  impulses. And people with touch trauma, for example, can be people who
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  are very busy. They're always action action action, action, but they don't
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  stop to feel anything. They never get anything back. I'm making sense here,
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  may you are, And as you're talking, I'm thinking, um,
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  I can feel it, I mean seriously it, you know. Conversely,
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  you know, I'm just thinking how healing touch is just when someone touches you
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  and and and also how um uh what's the word here, uh, sketchy
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  or or you know. Within the therapeutic community, within therapy, touch is
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  right has has certain connotations. It's it's it's tricky waters to wade in.
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  Absolutely, yeah, Like you can't hug and caress your clients. Yeah,
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  that's yeah, so you to have the play. For example, as a
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  mediator and somatic experiencing, we used cushions's reason that you have a cushion here
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  and you can invite your client to lean into it, so you're not having
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  the hugging experience, but you'd still have the connection experience. But I also
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  think we've just gone through three years of touch phobia with COVID and the I
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  think the World Health Organization released statistics that mental health and anxiety have increased by
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  twenty five percent worldwide because of COVID because we didn't have that option to down
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  regulate and co regulate through touch. So people who you know, this is
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  interesting because I don't know if I've had this discussion before on this podcast.
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  I mean, of course we've talked about somatic trauma and and touchment trauma,
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  but to kind of break it down into the aspect of touch, how does
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  it Granted its people are different, but give us an example or a cool
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  examples of how does this show up to you when you see something or what
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  do you see? And then you start thinking, Okay, For example,
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  I worked with the client yesterday and it was in guided drawing, and she
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  went straight away into moving, moving, moving, moving, moving, and
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  at the same time she was telling me how blocked she felt, and so
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  I asked her to slow down her rhythm because it was obvious that she had
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  a lot of motor impulses, but she was not feeling anything, and even
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  with slowing down, I could feel it was not resonating with her. And
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  then her hand actually stopped at one point, and she looked very confused,
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  and I kept asking her just to stay with this and to sense what was
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  happening inside her, and then she started to cry, and it was she
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  almost needed this more point of fully stopping in order to actually and then her
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  hands, who had been like this before, like she was touching the paper
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  here, but turned her hands literally braced away like this, and then her
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  hand went like this, and you could feel her shoulders going down. She
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  connected with the base of the hand. And for example, if you will
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  push your desk with your fingertips, like, what will happen is your shoulders
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  will go up agency the moment you push with the base of your hand.
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  Yeah, your pelvish engages. So from body work, I know, and
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  it's an acupuncture, an acu pressure that. Yeah, this part of the
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  hand here um relate to the Pelvish. Yeah, this is the heart yea
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  space, and the fingers are you know, the cortex and all the fine
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  tuning and fine motor skills. And when you, for example, do something
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  really fiddly, like you add the ears of a cat. Yeah, with
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  your fingertips, you actually begin to see the cat and see the environment.
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  Yeah, that it brings in all this imagery. Whereas engaging the base of
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  the hand and the thumbs engages the body. So when I work with clients,
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  I watched their hands and what they're doing. Wow. So so naturally
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  or not naturally, but maybe someone who doesn't want to or push like that
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  is unconsciously r wow. Yeah. So it's a form of a dissociation.
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  Yeah, which we just do in order to keep safe. It's learned behavior
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  because if I when I went there it was too painful, I did get
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  hurt or yeah, whatever happened. Or let's just pause here for a second
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  to thank our sponsors. All right, we are back. So, so
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  you talked about before someone who was just like touching the clay or the paint
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  just like this. What does that say to you? What are the options
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  there? Yes, she's very engaged in your head. It's very cognitive and
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  avoiding her body and at the same time and avoiding embodiment. Yes, so
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  psychologically you'd say it associated. And at the same time she had a lot
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  of physiological complaints about feeling blocked and pain and tension in her body. And
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  as she went down with her hand and took time, and she literally ended
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  up sitting twenty minutes just playing with the base of her hand connecting with the
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  paper and the paint her all the tension in her body resolved, including tears,
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  and the tension in her legs and the tension in her gut all settled.
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  Now, this could originate from what type of trauma? Right, Okay,
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  I don't inquire. And you know, for example, I worked with
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  a lot of children and you see it all the time, you know,
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  like the ADHD pattern on the autism spectrum. You know they all can't they
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  have no agency in their hands. Yeah, and the kids will not tell
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  you why, you know, what's happened to them when they were two years
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  old or when they were babies. But you can work with them in order
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  to create like a safe environment for them in the art space where they can
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  to touch and settle and experience themselves in their body and yeah, I call
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  it post nurture, you know, their developmental deficit. So there's a there's
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  a a an inability or a fear and maybe it's I don't know why,
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  but I just can't push with my palms. Yeah, yeah, that's for
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  example, the ADHD pattern is that um this in somatic experiencing. They say
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  these children had a traumatic event between two and four when the motor cortex really
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  develops when we learn, for example, to to to run and to have
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  play fights with dads and to acquire the self esteem through doing things. That's
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  yeah, And it's just simply about honing your muscles, your ligaments, to
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  organizing your scaletal build in order to have an effect onto something. And these
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  kids, for example in their own primary school, that have huge amount of
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  energy and all these disregulated emotions, but they can't organize their bodies to do
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  anything to have an outlet for it. And the majority of the therapists simply
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  with push exercises that word pressure, yeah, and lifting lifting like you see
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  these little and lifting you know, like the whole box with ten kalers of
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  plays standing there and just beaming and that ability comes online and then sometimes within
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  six months they learn to read and write and there you know, all their
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  behavioral difficulties definitely reduce. So I think you could do the same through martial
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  arts or just exercises that hone the body in order to teach them to coordinate.
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  But initially they are like like they're they're collapsed. They han't like that,
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  like they are rage in their body, and then they can't bring anything
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  out. It's extraordinary to watch what happens when you teach them or they learn
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  how to engage their hands and simply push and pull and lift right right now.
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  You know, oftentimes when we talk about people talk about trauma, there's
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  the impact on the tauma on the body, but he we're talking specifically about
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  the hands and the arms and pushing. Is this necessarily correlated or absolutely absolutely?
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  But to like a specific type of trauma or traumas or is it just
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  it doesn't matter, it's just it could be any type of trauma. Yes,
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  yeah, I just look at it. That trauma impact either on Yeah,
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  the motor cortex. For example, I knowed from children in households with
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  domestic violence, especially girls, decide it's the safest is to fly under the
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  radar, so not to be noticed, not to be too loud, to
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  be quiet, and reduced so they don't move. Yeah, they are in
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  sensory overload, perceiving a pin drop two rooms down the track. Yeah.
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  When you have them in the clinic, they'll ask about every noise that's happened
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  in the building, but their movements are inhibited. Yeah. And then you
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  have the others who are go, go go. Yeah, lots and lots
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  of movement, but they have dissociated the feedback loop. Wow. Like,
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  if you think of their domestic violence setting, for example, the boys might
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  identify with the father and to feel means to be like the mother and to
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  get hurt. So so they just dissociate that part and they go, go
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  go. But like you give them warm water and yeah, initially they won't
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  feel the wolves because they're just shut down that part where anything comes back from
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  contact and it's a survival mechanism, right yeah, absolutely, Yeah, most
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  creative solution you could come up at the time. Yeah, right, Wow.
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  That that image of not wanting to push or feeling like but not knowing
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  why, Right, I just I don't want to push like this or I
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  can't push like that you're saying, how because that pushing and I can even
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  feel it just doing this, how it engages that the core the pelvis.
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  Yeah. Wow, And and I guess what I found out, yeah,
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  over decade, really is that when your pelvis is still your pelvis. Yeah,
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  you might have experienced sexual abuse, yeah, but your pelvis is still
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  your pelvis. So if you find exercises that simply engage your pelvis, you
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  can, in somatic experiencing, it's called uncouple the trauma from the body.
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  Is so because the implicit behavior is I just avoid going to anywhere near that
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  in my body. So to actually teach them, Okay, you can push
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  and engage your pelvis and it's still your pelvis, so you're not all that
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  trauma. That can be pathway to gradually becoming more embodied. Wow, that's
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  fascinating. I find it totally fascinating. Yeah, it's really fascinating. And
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  I'm just thinking to myself that, you know, again, a lot of
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  this is unconscious people who have experienced trauma. You don't, right, I
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  mean obviously a lot of people don't even know that they've experienced trauma. But
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  to even drill down to this level where you're thinking about how some people could
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  be inhibited to to not just to embrace, but just to push. And
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  because you've done that since you were one year old or two year old,
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  don't know any different, right, So this is what you identify as my
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  me? Yeah, like this is my identity, this is who I am.
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  Well, so for those therapists who are listening to this, share a
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  little bit about your process of maybe assessing in these terms when you when someone
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  someone walks into your office, what do you maybe looking for if we're talking
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  specifically about this touch trauma. So, I mean I was fortunate that my
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  training who was never about the symptoms, yeah, about diagnosis that. Like
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  I've had a lot of trouble with going for supervision in Australia and saying,
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  you know, I've got this in this client and then yeah, my supervisor
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  would say, well that's it's like that's a personality disorder. And I'd say,
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  yeah, I know that, but how do I work with this person?
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  And he'd just say, well, it's a personality disorder. Yeah,
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  Like it was almost like you know, we put that stamp on that person.
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  Yeah, I just watch yeah, like how is someone coming into the
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  room? Yeah, like how do they organize their body? Like how much
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  if you take in the polyvagal theory, like how capable is this client of
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  social engagement? Can yeah she make eye contact? Um? Yeah, say
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  hello? Or is it just all looking away, looking down? And and
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  then are they yeah like yeah internally yea dead yeah? Or are they paper
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  activated? Yeah? I'm dering too much, you know, like they climbed
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  I described from yesterday. She was doing too much. Yeah, she was
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  go, go, go go, but yeah she couldn't feel anything. Yeah,
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  others are yeah, like they can't move, you know, like they
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  sit like this. You know, see so many kids who sit like this
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  in front of paint and paper and like contracted in that body and not daring
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  to touch. And then it's about like how can I create safety? Oh
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  yeah, what exercisest will? Um? Yeah? Make yeah this individual feel
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  safe enough so they can dare to explore the options that are there. And
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  sometimes that takes time. But I observe hands and body posture more than what
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  they're talking about. H that image of you just in your kids, just
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  sitting there, not able to touch the paint or whatever. What is going
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  on in your mind when when you see something like that, Oh certainly said
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  God, what has happened to you? Yeah that you know made you learn
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  this? Yeah, considered this as um a normal in engaging in contact.
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  Yeah, like this one was this three year old girl. Yeah. Yeah,
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  and and and then it was yeah like mirroring. Yeah, like with
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  a fingertip. Yeah, just one finger could touch the clay and she watched
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  me doing it. Yeah, and then nothing happened. And very often it
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  is there's that nothing happened, Yeah that, Yeah, I can touch this
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  and doesn't explode, It doesn't yell, it doesn't flash out, nothing happens.
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  And then she would go and of one finger, and then I go
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  one finger, and then should go one finger, and gradually you build Yeah
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  that trust, Yeah that it could be possible here in this setting to touch
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  without getting hurt. I just want to remind everyone that I'm stealing with speaking
• 29:22
  with Cornelia Albrecht. Um. Wow, fascinating to me now, granted if
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  I had the preface of my question with everyone is different than that. Everything
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  is different. But highlighting this particular instance you're talking about, when might it
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  be necessary to weave in this kid's story or what happened with them? Would
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  that be ever would that ever come into play um with adults, But certainly
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  yeah that but I find and I was trained like that back in Germany originally,
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  and then somatic experiencing almost gave me the language to explain it, because
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  back in the seventies and eighties no one had that trauma language that Peter Levine
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  developed. That you don't start at the beginning with what happened, because you
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  just go deeper and deeper into the trauma that you like if you talk to
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  an adult and yeah, they have this happened, and then this happened,
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  and then this happened, and then this happened, and it gets worse and
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  worse. So you start first in building resources so there is a good place
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  you can go to, and then you tight trade going to the bad place,
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  and if it gets too much, then you go back to the good
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  place and settle the nervous system. And then you go a bit back to
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  the bad place, and then again to the good place to settle the nervous
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  system. And Peter Levine has emphasized really that the solution for trauma is never
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  in the story, because if there was trauma, we dissociated, your parts
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  were dissociated. So our memory is factured anyhow. Yeah. He calls it
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  the Medusa or the terror of remembering. You know that we do so much
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  stamp in trying to remember what happened to us. Yea, rather than putting
• 31:45
  the focus on the repair. Sometimes I think you're like, I've broken my
• 31:52
  arm when I go to the doctor, and then the doctor will say,
• 31:55
  how about just to make sure we understand how you broke your arm? You
• 31:59
  break it again? Right, let me feel that arm there, right right?
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  Rather what you want is a plastic cash yeah, and a bandage yeah,
• 32:08
  and yeah, support that it can hear. Yeah. Yeah. Wow,
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  man, I love talking to you. What's the best way for people
• 32:17
  to get in touch with you? Learn more about what you're doing? Probably?
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  I have now developed a course on Clayfield therapy with traumatized children, which
• 32:30
  is an online course. So so that is something. It's all on my
• 32:36
  website Central Motor up Therapy dot com. Wow, there's lots of information there.
• 32:44
  Okay, Now, clay Field therapy, what does that mean? Clay
• 32:47
  Field therapy? So it is clay in a box. So it's not a
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  lump of clay. It is a like a box about this size, but
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  this deep filled with clay. Wow. So children, young children will get
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  about five kilos of clay, adults up to twelve killers of clay. And
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  it's flat, so it's not so much the impulse of what do I make
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  here? If you put a lot of clay in front of someone, But
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  how do I relate to this? So you offer a relationship with yourself.
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  Yeah, and as you touch the clay, what comes back is yourself.
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  Yeah. How you learn touch and then you can step step repair it so
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  it becomes more fulfilling for example too touch Wow. I'll have that linked up
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  at the show's page here at the Trauma Dips podcast dot com. Cornelia,
• 33:53
  I love talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time to
• 33:58
  join me again. Thank you. Okay, take care