Do you want to fix your mind? Let your body speak.

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In her virtual sessions with clients, Kehinde struck a “delicate balance, because the body can be the scariest place to be present,” and she worried that on Zoom she might miss signs that “someone had far exceeded their threshold.” . He taught clients that upon awakening, they should scan their bodies for regions of sanctuary. He taught SE support self-holds, like the one Price described, with hands on the forehead and back of the neck, or hands overlapping on the upper chest. She advised lying under a heavy blanket. For herself, she did much the same thing, with the scans and the restraints, and having her roommate lie like a dead weight on top of her. Floyd’s murder, Kehinde says, left many blacks feeling devoid of agency and deeply in danger, “deregulated” and “hypervigilant.” With her somatic work, she says, she could instill a measure of internal control.

the span of The issues SE deals with are wide-ranging, from utter devastation to ordinary obsession. Alyssa Petersel is a social worker and founding owner of a website that connects clients with her long list of therapists, so she is well versed in a variety of practices. For her, she chose a professional with SE in her repertoire because, she says, her “anxiety, perfectionism, and workaholism” can lead to “activated panic states” and “cognitive loops” that cannot be reliably calmed by asking.” the mind to reorient.”

Last year, as her wedding approached, she was overwhelmed with the question of whether or not to take her husband’s last name. Night after night, unable to sleep, she made lists of pros and cons. “I spiraled down rabbit holes of ‘What does it mean?’ If I keep my name, I am a feminist; if I don’t, I’m letting down all women who… She continued: “My maiden name was rational, boss bitch, concrete. The other side was more woo-woo: Are they promising to be each other’s person and can’t change their name? What’s wrong with you?” With her therapist, she learned to focus on “super helpful data” in her body, as Petersel put it, to “trust the visceral.” It was enlightening.”

On the spectrum of suffering, Lauren (she asked me to use only her first name to protect her privacy) is far from Petersel. Lauren walked into Emily Price’s office in 2016, three years after she was raped and strangled unconscious to near death on a path leading to her doorstep in her hometown of Indianapolis. She woke up in the hospital with no memory of the assault. The whites of her eyes were bright red from all the burst blood vessels. A conversation with a sex crimes detective made her realize the magnitude of what had happened, but she still couldn’t access the memory of it. She never caught anyone. Lauren received counseling and tried to return to her previous life. And outwardly, she succeeded. Three months after the assault, she was promoted in her company. Less than a year later, she moved to New York City, where she had wanted to live for a long time. She traveled a lot for her work.

In New York, Lauren began working with a therapist. In her first session, she Lauren herself raised a number of issues that she wanted to address, not mentioning the rape and strangulation until the last few minutes and not seeing anything strange about it. “She was completely numb,” she told me. “It was shocking, for a person as self-aware as I think I am, how disconnected she was, how disassociated.”