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 has crossed their threshold.” She taught clients that, upon awakening, they should scan their bodies for areas of sanctuary. He taught supportive SE self-restraint as described by hands on the forehead and back of the neck, or hands layered over the upper chest. He suggests lying under a weighted blanket. As for himself, he did the same with scans and holds, leaving his roommate lying on top of him like a dead weight. Floyd’s killing has left many black people feeling disenfranchised and deeply endangered, “uncontrollable” and “hyper-vigilant,” Kehinde said. With his somatic work, he says, he can affect a measure of internal control.
The span of The problems being treated by SE are wide ranging, from complete destruction to general obsessiveness. Alyssa Petersell is a social worker and founding owner of a website that matches clients with a long list of therapists, so she’s well-versed in a variety of practices. For herself, she chose a practitioner with SE in her repertoire, because, she says, her “anxiety, perfectionism and workaholism” can lead to an “active state of panic” and a “cognitive loop” that can be “reliably calmed by asking Can’t” to rearrange the mind.
Last year, as her wedding approached, she was overwhelmed with the question of whether to take her husband’s last name. Night after night, unable to sleep, he makes lists of pros and cons. “I spiraled down the rabbit hole of ‘what does that mean?’ If I keep my name, I’m a feminist; If I don’t, I’m putting down women who —” she went on, “My first name was Logical, Boss Bitch, Concrete. The other side was more upbeat: You vow to be each other’s person, and you change your name. Can’t? What’s your problem?” With her therapist, she learned to focus on “super helpful data” from her body, as Petersell said, “to trust the visceral. It was clarifying.”
On the pain spectrum, Lauren (she asked that I use only her first name to protect her privacy) is a far cry from Petersell. Lauren stepped into Emily Price’s office in 2016, three years after being raped and strangled unconscious and nearly dying on the way to her door in her hometown of Indianapolis. He woke up in the hospital with no memory of the attack. The whites of his eyes were bright red from all the popped blood vessels. A conversation with a sex-crime detective brought home the enormity of what had happened, yet she still couldn’t access the memory. No one was ever caught. Lauren did some counseling and tried to get back to her old life. And outwardly, he was successful. Three months after the attack, he was promoted at his company. Less than a year later, he moved to New York City, where he had long wanted to live. He traveled extensively for his work.
In New York, Lauren began working with a therapist. In their first session, Lauren raised many issues that she wanted to address, not mentioning the rape and strangulation until the last few minutes and seeing nothing strange about it. “I was completely numb,” she told me. “It was shocking, for someone as self-conscious as I believe, how isolated I was, how detached I was.”
