Trauma is self-defined

5 questions for author, somatic enthusiast, and teacher Molly Caro May

I’m realizing I have so many incredible friends that I want you all to know about, people with particular wisdom for this weird time we’re all weathering, so I’m going to be publishing some Q&As for awhile and see how it serves you. Let me know if you like it?

Molly and I met when we were on a badly-managed, soul-transforming study abroad experience in a township in Cape Town, South Africa. As soon as our formal course work was done, she headed for the most remote part of the country she could find, while I moved into a house downtown, teaching poetry workshops in the township high school, and going out at night with a crew of local mc’s and spoken word artists. In other words, we seemed very different.

But we’ve always been connected by an unbreakable chord of mutual admiration and fascination. She now lives in Montana, in a house that her beautiful husband built himself. Her two daughters are intimate with all matter of epic landscape and amazing wildlife.

I live smack-dab in the middle of urban Oakland. My two daughters are intimate with public transportation and all kinds of city characters. We both write books (hers are so, so gorgeous). We are both obsessed with stories. I knew she’d have a lot of wise things to say about this destabilizing moment, so here it goes…

Courtney: You started training in somatics before all this went down, which now seems really prescient. What is somatics and how are you using it to keep yourself and your family grounded in this moment? 

Molly: Yes, more now that ever we are being called into our bodies, right? I’m in the middle of a 3-year Somatic Experiencing (SE) training. It’s a study of trauma resolution in the nervous system and body. Trauma is self-defined. We all have trauma. SE is a way to work with our animal body and our fight/flight/freeze responses. It’s tending to the story told by the body, not the story told by the human using words. Most of us are walking around having repetitive responses that are now maladaptive because they haven’t been completed. You got hit by a car accident on a crosswalk and now you panic at every crosswalk. You were bullied on the playground and now, as an adult, you have what seems like a lot of unrelated push and aggression in you toward peers. You have chronic illness and nothing is helping.

By working with and tracking sensations (hot, cold, buzzing, cramped, pressure, constriction, tingling, etc), we can resolve those defense responses and get a person to feel more like themselves. There’s so much more to say. It’s a way to increase your own capacity for sensation, your window of tolerance. This is resilience. It doesn’t mean you become a non-reactive "mellow" person. It just means that you can exist more often in a state of calm readiness, you can hang with the uncomfortable feelings without getting stuck in fight/flight/freeze. It’s not a cathartic model. It’s slow so that the body can metabolize and integrate and so the body learns to move in the natural penduation and rhythm of life on its own. Instead of just doing the breathing exercises, your body also learns to breathe and shake itself in the way it needs in the moment. 

The practices can feel so so elementary because they are simple. These are the ones I’m focusing on these days. With my kids, I try to be stealth about it by asking, for example, “Do you see anything around us that you like? Why do you like it?” Gonna make a list as that might be most helpful here: 

1) Orient. You can orient visually by moving your neck left to right slowly and noticing something pleasing in the room. This tells your lizard brain you are okay. You can orient through sound (I love to do that) as well. Taste and smell, too. It’s about the noticing: for example, “Here I am, in this moment, hearing the sound of the wind and a car driving by on the road, oh, and the buzz of the refrigerator, wow it’s so loud, I never noticed that.” It brings us into the present.   

2) Self-touch. Embrace yourself, literally. Put one hand under your armpit and the other around it and just hold yourself. Or stroke down your legs. Or hand on heart. Pound gently on your legs and say, “These are my legs, these are my legs.” 

3) Grounding. Feel your feet on the floor. Feel your butt on the chair, your back against the wall, your hand on the table. I’ve done this one a lot recently, especially in tense argumentative moments with my husband. 

4) Self-talk. Ask yourself, “Am I dying? Is this exact moment life-threatening?” Usually the answer is no. Then tell yourself, “I am okay.” That doesn't mean life isn’t hard. You can be struggling and in pain and still fundamentally okay. 

5) Social engagement. This one is huge. It calms us right down to be social engaged, to feel we belong to a person or a group. So whatever way you can socially engaged during this time, do it!

6) Build capacity. With a hard sensation or emotion, imagine that you have a big torso. Feel your arm sockets and then your hips sockets and noticed the expansive space inside and allow that sensation or emotion to exist in there. If it gets really big, remind yourself that your torso is huge and then invite the sensation downward by stroking down your body and legs. There’s a chance you could get shaky or trembly. Allow that. That’s discharge and it’s a good thing. 

7) Track sensations. This is an opportunity to really get into your sensate body. Play with noticing sensation over content or story. Instead of “I’m so scared because I might lose my job and my friend might be sick and ....” notice “My belly is tight and my legs feel limp and now there is a lot of heat coursing down my legs and my jaw is clamped.” And just hang with those sensations as best you can and notice what happens next. Nothing is static and they will shift into something else and then notice that. This is my growing edge FOR SURE. 

Courtney: You’ve been teaching writing for many, many years now. As the pandemic hit, you offered a free online class for people and it’s inspiring all of this amazing writing. (I especially love seeing the handwriting you post on Instagram). Why did you decide to shape the offering in this particular way right now?  

Molly: When coronavirus started to get serious, incredible creativity started to surge. Doesn’t it always in times of collective social distress? People were offering free classes on social media. People were resourcing each other. I was vibrating in response to this outpouring, a real example that we all have unique wisdom to give. I immediately started crafting what I could offer for free because narrative is a massive part of going through any sort of portal. After initially feeling an astounding calm at the global pause/rest that many, not all, folx have been invited into, I became frantic, a little bunny running around trying to craft something quick. People needed it now! People were suffering! I needed to make it now! Urgency, urgency. It didn’t take me long to identify my own nervous system pattern of urgency and so I slowed the F down.

Real slow. So slow. I shaped the offering from that slow-as-a-turtle place. No rush. No pressure. I realized I didn't want it to be quick. I wanted it to be slow and long because this moment in time isn’t going away tomorrow. It’s the long game. So I made a 31 day (lunar cycle) writing experience/challenge over email. I wanted a space separate from social media. Simple. 5-minute prompt each day. Nothing flashy. Nothing fancy. Just sitting with yourself and a question. It’s way more my innate rhythm anyway. I didn’t want to contribute to the rush. I wanted to contribute to the slow. That’s why I shaped it that way. I love seeing physical handwriting. It reminds us of the body, the hand, the expression. And when we hear stories of others, we feel see ourselves. Story is an essential part of being a human animal. We need it. For ourselves. For our community. 

Courtney: You all live in the wilds of Montana, so you’re used to being connected to and finding solace in nature. Any practices that you'd recommend for people, like me, who are trapped in dense urban environments with maybe little bits of access to nature or none at all? 

Molly: First of all, I think about each one of you in urban places every day--you are contending with a kind of isolation I cannot imagine, this isolation from going outdoors possibly or from finding nature at all. I’m bowing down. I’m validating your strength. What will come of this time is a deep human hunger for nature. Most of us will run to the trees or parks or flowers growing out of the sidewalk. We will really start to crave it.

That, I would say is a starting point-- to feel that desire within you, especially if it’s a new one, to allow it to build, to watch the yearning build in you and to wonder about it and then to imagine what you will do with it once you can reach some form of nature. The body doesn’t know the difference between reality and what you imagine. So, use your imagination. Imagine yourself in nature somewhere and actually notice how your body feels as you imagine it, notice the emotions that surface. I would have rolled my eyes at something like this five years ago, but no longer. Try it.

Nature doesn't have to be the wilderness, as you know. It could be a shrub growing against a concrete wall. It's all available to us. One thought is houseplants. If you have houseplants, you could start a practice of talking to them, paying attention to them, putting them (or it) in the center of your living space and making homage to it. Make it a big deal. Or do this with the shrub outside. In my experience, houseplants respond in equal measure to the level of attention we give them. Zero in on any shred of nature within your reach. Focus there. It’s helpful to watch nature shows and Planet Earth but it might be more grounding to look around your physical environment and make the one green thing you can find THE THING. It could even be parsley you stand up in a glass with water on your kitchen table. We have all these cultural narratives about nature being sublime and massive and full of mountains and wild animals and, yes, that’s one part of nature, but nature is also anything green growing nearby you. We are all going to have to remember that, to tend to what is right in front of us. 

Courtney: One of the things you’ve taught me so much about is the danger of getting too attached to our own stories about ourselves or a particular moment. How do you see that showing up right now in the midst of so much information overload, fear etc.? 

Molly: For one, I wish everyone could limit news consumption. To know enough to know what is happening and then that’s enough. It really doesn’t help to get roped into a collective panic which just amps the collective panic. We all know this, anyway. I always say that story is meant to be fluid. It’s hard to live into that as a modern human because our stories fulfill a need--attention, love, safety, sense of belonging, status, okay-ness. For this reason, we don’t like letting go of or rearranging them, even the most painful ones.

We also have very little embodied ritual around storytelling. We don’t know how. So, it’s a powerful practice to inhabit your inner storyteller and really take agency. In times like these there is SO MUCH potential with story. For me, it’s always both/and. Including all of the above. Creating what narrative therapy calls a thick story instead of a thin one. Noticing proportion. How do you talk about this coronavirus era to your friend, your mother, your partner, your kids, yourself? What parts do you highlight, or leave out, or linger on? It will be different based on your audience. What are you hoping to get out of the story you are telling? Are you needing someone to hear you and validate your fear? Are you wanting to feel part of something?

When speaking of a collective story, it’s important to identify what identities you are showing up with…what’s your perspective, how could this be different for other people? There is no one narrative. Thank goodness. If fear and devastation is your primary story about this time, is there a way to identify and include even the smallest examples of joy and possibility?

Never like Pollyanna. Always real. It could be as simple as, “Today, I laughed with my sister and realize we haven’t laughed like this since we were kids.”

Same on the other side. If you are all, “The world is changing for the better, we are going through a portal and we are all transforming for the better,” then it’s worth noticing the moments of fear, not wishing them away or ignoring the, but giving them a little space: “Oh yeah, I am actually scared and my body feels heavy as lead today.”

This is a way of allowing for the fullness of who you are as a human being, instead of what you've been told about yourself or told yourself about yourself (“you've always been so fearful” or “you’re the strongest one among us”). It’s such a relief, really. To be all of the above.

This pendulation between states is also a natural way of attending to and healing trauma. Another very simple practice is to actually practice telling the story of you now, or the story of this era, in multiple different ways. As in, change it every day. With truth, but just see what it feels like to start it differently or include different parts or eliminate others. That keeps you flexible. Like muscles. If you only work your quads, your body is going to be out of balance. Gotta get into all the nooks and crannies, you know? 

Courtney: How do you feel this moment changing your own parenting? 

Molly: Low bar. It’s all about the low bar and presence. I’ve told friends I'm running “low bar camp” at my house. I’ve always tended to give my kids a pile of sticks and say “make something if you like.” All of the homeschooling plans and current options and ways to visit a virtual zoo or museum are incredible and then overwhelm the F out of me. You mean, I have to make a plan for all this stuff, too, so my kids can be learning at the highest caliber? Ugh. I don’t think so.

I get it. We need to occupy the kids so we can work at the same time. It’s real. And still, I want to make it as easy and simple as possible. I’ve had to set new boundaries with them: I am exercising now to take care of my body so I can have energy for myself and our family, I am working and you can’t interrupt me unless you really need something. My greatest joy is when I see them come up with a game out of nothing. Like a rock becomes the wheel for a train that is the couch and they are having the time of their lives.

This moment has REALLY made me understand the importance of slow and less rush. My kids are happier. They are happy to be home. They are happy to not be thrown in the car at 8am to rush off to school. I’m doing some deep thinking about how to transition to a new normal after coronavirus. What will it look like? How can I create more slow? I've always wanted it and we actually have a lot of it here, but the collective rush is hard to pry away from. The slow has also given me permission (why did I need permission?) to just be more with my kids-- we’ve baked and eaten an insane amount of cookies, and I’m not a cookie baker.  I also have loosened some of my hard lines, like screen time.

I’ve loosened in general. This time has invited me to identify my essentials: love, presence, food, simple, slow. Less pressure on parents to “be something” other than human beings who love and make mistakes and love again.

Molly is a delight to follow on Instagram (which makes me laugh because she was resistant to joining the social media train!) and her site is chock full of workshop opportunities.