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For many who have endured trauma, the body serves as a receptacle for that which cannot be formulated or spoken. Different types of traumatic experience – relational, physical, sexual, and societal – can be stored in and repeated through bodily states, with the body serving as the primary or only means of self-expression. By listening to what our patients tell us about their somatic experience, observing their physical postures and states, and tuning in to our own bodily sensations, we can learn something about their dissociated psychic pain.
Bach (2016) described certain patients whose early experiences with intrusive caregivers have left them feeling as though their bodies belong to somebody else. Their early environments were loud, overstimulating, often sexualized; they may have been physically or sexually abused, and they felt emotionally overwhelmed, even inhabited, by those who failed to help regulate and protect them: “The body they are in belongs not to them but to an ambivalent protective figure that is or can suddenly become toxic” (Bach, 2016). In my work with patients with eating disorders, I have found that many have such histories, and that self-destructive acts against the body can reflect both identification with the aggressor and, perversely, attempts to reclaim a body that was taken. Through the misuse of food and other substances, and through self-injurious or self-abnegating behavior, these patients may be trying to differentiate between psychic and physical pain, and also between self and other.
In the US and around the world, women’s ownership of their bodies is under attack. The overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court represents, to many, a large-scale invasion, an unwanted appropriation by an “ambivalent protective figure” that has, indeed, shown itself to be toxic. For some, this external threat aligns with early intrusive introjects. In my patients’ reactions, I have witnessed the coming together of psychic and bodily pain, through r