Connecting to your body when it can feel like "a strange or unkind place" with dysphoria, chronic pain, and trauma
A cameo from my partner, Quinn
Thanks to everyone who shared topics they’d like to see written about in this newsletter! (PS, you can always request something in the comments.)
Today’s Joy Notes is on one of those topics: “connecting to and getting into your body when your body can feel like a strange or unkind place.” This person in particular wrote that dysphoria makes connecting to their body a struggle.
So I thought I’d talk to my partner about this and share their thoughts for a few reasons: they’re a non-binary person who can speak to dysphoria from lived experience, and they also have a deep understanding of trauma and the body both personally and through their job at WOAR, Philly’s rape crisis center.
Not that I’m biased, but Quinn is brilliant (and so cute). Below, they give a mixture of frameworks they’ve learned from Buddhism and therapy to help with connecting to the body when there’s dysphoria, chronic pain, and/or trauma. And a quick disclaimer: they’re not a trained therapist or mental health professional.
Quinn’s thoughts on connecting to the body through dysphoria, chronic pain, and trauma
There were a variety of ways I felt dysphoric, but the most prevalent way was about my chest. It took me 4 years to decide to get top surgery, so I spent a lot of time feeling into the dysphoria and trying to learn how to live with it.
I think you can go two routes:
-Listening to the dysphoria and deciding to medically transition (which isn’t accessible for everyone who may want to).
-Working on self-acceptance and re-branding what feminine and masculine bodies are.
On the self-acceptance route, there’s a lot of un-internalizing and self-work around what bodies are feminine and masculine. In my case, it was reframing that men can have chests like mine and that’s a perfectly valid way to be masculine. We can work to reframe how we traditionally gender bodies and chests to include our own experience.
However, it’s hard to fully un-internalize these norms when we live in such a prolifically toxic society. When I went on solo camping trips in the woods, removed from society, I wouldn’t really experience dysphoria and didn’t feel a need to bind. When I came back from those trips, it would come back because even as I degender my perceptions of the world, I can’t stop the world from gendering me and putting those perceptions on me as I navigate such a binary world. We can un-internalize in our bubble, but outside of it it does take so much mental stamina to hold your reality against the world’s different reality they’re trying to force you to fit within.
The acceptance route is also about accepting what it’s like to live with your experience of the thing.
Maybe you un-internalize some gender norms and your dysphoria lessens — for me, that was not the case. I don’t know if I just didn’t un-internalize successfully enough or that just wouldn’t work for me, but I think it did help in some ways.
Another way to cope and work with dysphoria for me has been trying to be curious, open, and non-judgmental about my own experience with dysphoria.
For example, instead of saying: I feel unsafe in my body because of dysphoria and labeling that as bad, we can try to be curious about what dysphoria feels like. Maybe it feels like heaviness in my chest, shame, embarrassment, etc.
How can I get curious about that as a regular part of my day-to-day and allow that to exist without suppressing or denying my other life experiences, like joy and the things I desire? How can I hold a full life and dysphoria at the same time?
My favorite way to hold a multitude of experiences at the same time is to do what therapists call titrating.
We can’t have things be hard all of the time. We’ll burn out and lose capacity to process or be with the hard thing; we need to self-soothe and take breaks.
When we’re living with things we don’t want (like dysphoria, chronic pain, or trauma) and things we do (like joy, love, and pleasure) at the same time, titrating can really help. We move move from awareness of what’s hard to awareness of what’s neutral or easeful and back again.
Maybe I’m at my brother’s wedding getting deadnamed and misgendered, but I’m thrilled for my brother and his wife’s love. I can feel the experience of being misgendered while also experiencing and noticing the joy and love for my brother.
Buddhism has really helped me realize there can be multiple realities about a situation and it doesn’t mean they cancel each other out. Society and social media are so black and white and unnuanced, but we can titrate between “this sucks and is painful” and “this is really great and what I’m here for and who I came for” while putting up with serious BS.
Both can be true without denying the other’s validity.
For this example, our couple’s therapist taught us something that really helped and can apply to experiences in the body. When we’re doing hard things with family, we can make a goal beforehand for why we’re there, what we’re hoping to get from the experience, what feels achievable. Especially when you can anticipate heightened dysphoria or chronic pain, plan in where you’re going to get your joy and anticipate that.
I’m newer at dealing with chronic pain, but it takes very similar skills of getting curious about our experiences with pain and how to hold them simultaneously with the rest of our life experiences.
There’s an added component here of how that affects and changes our capacity. A lot of living with chronic pain is about trying to figure out what’s essential in our lives and what’s not needed, paring things down strategically to suit our needs. Boundary setting practices and being in tune with capacity supports that (something I’m working on).
A lot of the ways I learn about my capacity limits are in retrospect after I’ve overextended myself. In the future, I hope to make better decisions. So be gentle with yourself as you’re learning and figuring it all out.
Yoga and meditation can be really helpful tools for getting into the body. For me, meditation is not a very heady mind thing. It’s more of feeling sensations in my chest while breathing and building a distress tolerance to hold them and not tapping out from being present with them. Yoga can also really help process and move through emotions, and notice what feelings are coming up when.
Another huge thing for all of this is community: surrounding ourselves with people who are able to receive changes in plans due to limited capacity from chronic pain, people who see and affirm you so when the rest of the world misgenders you you’re better able to tolerate it because you can go back to your community that gets you. If you don’t have queer and trans community and aren’t sure where to look, you can start online.
When it comes to trauma making the body feel unsafe, I think people’s most common coping tool is dissociation.
Dissociation is such a helpful coping skill in keeping us safe and alive and definitely has its place. In no way am I saying dissociation is inherently bad. But I do think it makes it harder to be present in our bodies. It makes sense we wouldn’t want to be in our bodies when there’s trauma and pain there.
I like to share this tool with people who have experienced trauma:
Basically, we can see the pendulum swinging from total numbness on the right to emotional flooding and overwhelm on the left. Sometimes, when people swing out of dissociation they overcorrect into feeling all the feels at once — when can be overwhelming and shut them back down into dissociation.
The name of the game as far as moving through dissociation is building distress tolerance for hard emotions so when you’re present in you’re body, you have tools to increase your bandwidth to hold all that’s inside your body.
Those tools are infinite and different for each person.
They can look like grounding tools, processing tools, community care, remembering to eat and sleep on a regular basis, and coping skills. Learning to be gentle with yourself and not so binary like I’m numb, I have to jump in 100% can be huge. You can crack the door of your body, peak around the edge, and shut it. Maybe next time you open the door a little wider, maybe next time you walk through it.
Forcing the process and fully jumping into your body too hard and fast can be unsafe with flashbacks, triggers, etc. It can be retraumatizing. So honor your own pace while pushing yourself to grow if you’re a person who needs that push.
If you do end up experiencing a flashback or a trigger, try to develop an understanding of your healing journey as nonlinear. Know that sometimes our bodies give us trauma information because that’s the time for us to reprocess and grow from the experience.
Triggers are painful and they suck but they’re not always inherently bad. They can be a source of trauma healing, growth, and processing.
Sometimes, when you’re healing from trauma it can feel like you’re going backwards. Maybe you were able to cope with something and now you’re not. Maybe you used to do a coping skill that wasn’t serving you and now you’re back to doing it. Whatever it is, it’s all part of the healing journey you’re on. Sometimes we have to revisit the same lessons with different flavors to fully understand them, even if they’re painful lessons we don’t want to learn.
Something that’s given me solace in navigating this is an analogy someone shared of healing being like a screw with the threads on it. If you follow the threads on a screw, they’re always moving up. They’re diagonal and go at a slant, so sometimes on the way you’re looking down. It could feel like going down, but you’re still moving towards the top with each thread. You’re always making progress.
Hopefully that can help us be more patient with ourselves as we relearn some of the same lessons. You’re not regressing, you’re just taking a different view of the same thing. It’s part of the trauma journey.
One last thing I want to share: these classes are rare to find (I’ve only found them occasionally) but there have been a few studies showing that a choose-your-own-adventure style of yoga can be healing for people with trauma because it centers your agency and moving at your own pace. It can be an extremely powerful way to crack the door open without swinging it wide. If you’re nervous about a fully embodied practice, that could be a way to increase your agency and engage at your own pace.