My life is changing and my identity is transforming. It’s exciting and terrifying going where I have never imagined I could go. The money finally came and I no longer have to scrounge to get through each month on Social Security.
I don’t have to use the foodshelf every month. I don’t need to get the free leftover bread from the soup kitchen. I don’t have to take stuff from free boxes. I can take my cats to the vet for routine care. I can buy a small laptop and a smartphone. I can afford pens & ink & sketchpads & watercolor paper & drafting tools. I can go out to lunch with a friend.
But, what it even better is that I can finally afford the alternative healthcare treatments that our touch-phobic culture has denied me. It ought to have been blindingly clear to all the doctors that a woman who was beaten and raped throughout the first 16 years of her life might have a critical need for loving touch. But, no. I am a broken machine, a collection of separate interchangeable parts. The problem was that my genetic code was wrong, the instructions for building the machine that is my body were defective, or the electrical impulses or the neurochemical messages were haywire and all that was required was a simple technological intervention to fix my inherent brokenness.
I tried very hard to get alternate care and I met with obstacles at every turn. The primary issue, as always, was cash. Medicaid would not cover anything except the technological, invasive treatment that is psychiatric chemicals. It astounds me just how stupid educated men really are. I almost feel compassion for the state of moral and biophysical alienation of the doctors and the bureaucrats that created western medicine .
So, I’ve had a revelation, in the form of a type of treatment called “structural integration”, which is a kind of intensive massage. It is very focussed, a little scary, a little painful. Sometimes healing can hurt, as you open up the pain that you’ve been unknowingly holding onto. But, this method is empowering: I was not simply lying back as someone did something to my inert form. This is vital for someone with pervasive experience having her body controlled by someone twice her size. The practitioner teaches me how to move my arms and legs to control the rate of release of the myofascial sheath tissue that surrounds the muscle groups
Here is an explanatory paragraph from the site Structural Repatterning where you can read about this kind of therapy. (I’ll also include this link on my Trauma and Recovery resources page for future reference.):
The design of KMI is to unwind the strain patterns residing in your body’s locomotors system, restoring it to its natural balance, alignment, length, and ease. Common strain patterns come about from inefficient movement habits, and our body’s response to poorly designed cars, desks, telephones, and airplanes, etc. Individual strain patterns come from imitation when we are young, from the invasions of injury or surgery or birth, and from our body’s response to traumatic episodes. Beginning as a simple gesture of response, movements can become a neuromuscular habit. The habitual movement forms one’s posture, and the posture requires changes in the structure – the body’s connective tissue ‘fabric’. In other words, a gesture becomes a habit becomes a posture and eventually lodges in our structure. These changes are rarely for the better – anything that pulls us out of alignment means that gravity works on pulling us into more misalignment or increased tension to counteract the force. Compensation begets compensation, and more symptoms. KMI is designed to unwind this process and reduce structural stress. The method depends on a unique property of the body’s connective tissue network.
This is one more element I can add to my overall program for releasing and resolving the trapped and frozen post-trauma pain, in addition to diet and exercise. I just want to say that, of course we are all unique, and our adaptations to trauma are highly individual, but with patient persistence anyone can discover what will support one’s transformation. It’s not the sole province of technomedicos.
