Reception and going free: Session with M

M has red sticky eyes. The lid of one eye is nearly stuck together with pus. He is on his own in his chair, a sea of activity going on around him from which he seems immune or un-involved. Yet this very separation- as if he were in a bubble all of his own- is also a dangerous situation for such a boy.
He is left to his own devices- and his own devices for self-care are to encapsulate himself in his own auto-protection of nurture. It is hard for a hungry boy to feed himself, and almost too painful to witness. He does this by ramming his fist deep into his mouth. He does this soon after we have lowered him down in the hoist on to the mat and soon after he had began crying from the pain and outrage of having his eyes vigorously scrubbed by a well-meaning teacher just before we wheel him into the treatment room.

I feel two emotions vying for attention in M and wrapped tightly around one another; sadness and anger.

There is nothing to say to M about this rather than to acknowledge in simple words this fact. Then the silence of the first phase of the treatment must take its course. His body is bound tight; a muscular tangle of resistance that is writhing up from contact with the mat. Nothing can rest easy and any small descent of a part of his body into the possible support of the ground becomes a trigger for a re-flux motion in his body- as if his whole body were vomiting itself back out from any environmental nurture, trying to  pack itself back into its own support only to then find the "outsider" within as if each  fascia, muscular, bone and organ association were again an intrusion of self by "other" as this self multiplied and separated indefinitely within.

So this was the first impression; a boy divided between need and rejection- who was slipping and hiccuping out of  any consistency of arrival, exiting from any kind of integration; caught between sadness and anger.

There is a sense that this rejection of outer care has gone into a kind of auto-immune free fall that creates a counter-current which is catapulting out any vestiges of his early life tendency for rooting towards a nurturing other. He cannot trust his own needs and repels them in one spasm after another as he reels and groans on the mat with a musculature armour that is like paper scorched in the sun and wind until it is burnt hard. He is weathering this as if he were the only survivor on a desolate patch of land; the sole survivor of a traumatic air-plane crash where the point of collision; the point of impact was still continuing internally as bit by bit he comes apart. To witness a child  writhing in this way, unable to take nurture from two adults so close by, is hard to bare. But  the first stretch of the treatment is simply  to bare it and to give witness to this desolation that he feels.

There is nothing more to say now to M who is altogether not present to receive words right now; as a baby is not ready yet to receive food that has not been partly metabolised and made ready for digestion. M is unable to digest very much and so we remain a basic container in which whatever he needs to act out can be done safely.

This acting out is the only thing that will allow the turgid material of undigested thoughts, feelings and actual food to begin to circulate once more, and it needs to come out in all the gargled anger and dismay of this 10 year old boy. This is a natural reaction I think to the fact that this boy is now tube- fed via his stomach having refused orally the quantity of food deemed necessary for his suitable growth. But a 10 year old child growing on the nurture of food that has been forced in, brings up deep problems of authenticity and of how this child feels his own body to either be or not to be, an extension of his push towards vitality. The tube then does not erase the initial issues of why he refused food and of the need to address ways of attuning to his biological need for food so that it is the end point of his creative and imaginative calling in relation to a wider world of co-dependant growth rather than something again and again imposed as an abstract law is imposed.

So between us Katsura and I encircle the child and create this neutral frame in which he can feel back through into his own sense of disturbance so that our non-reactivity becomes a mirror in which he can know these feelings. Only when shared and heard by other caring adults without it being acted on, changed or disallowed, can such complex metabolic, physiological and emotional knots be held for long enough that they become a real experience. Only as a real and witnessed experience can they have a chance to transform,

We create this neutral frame through our gaze and also through a level open-palmed contact that rises and falls with M's breath whilst creating a kind of porous skin or envelope that takes the self-care role that he assigns to himself away from his own anguished responsibility. It's important in this phase of the treatment that we remain neutral and so not subject to waves of reactive emotion or escalating dramas abut the plight of such an unmet child. For this in affect would interrupt out ability to actually meet him here and now where he is and to give him permission to voice and act out these feelings of being choked by his own unheard voice.

There are different levels of disturbance in this knot. First there is the spasms of pain that M experiences in his bowels and intestines and that create the root of this re-flux so that his breath is rising up into his chest and head with this dry hot wind that is collecting into this redness around his eyes and burning his throat. In comparison his abdomen, hips and sacrum are cold with a muddy turgid feel and  he is arching and lifting his lower back and pelvis off the ground almost like a fish curling on dry land trying desperately to breathe in this harsh and inhospitable climate; literally a fish out of water.

What we  can do  as touch therapists is to create an attuned sense of support so that as he writhes and first this portion and than that portion of his body arches up away from the mat, we are there to meet his falling, catching in and around his lower back, chest or head as it falls back through. This creates a sense of multi-levelled slow descent and so a kind of filtering system is established between the abrupt rise and fall of his hyper-mobility into something where there is an anticipatory glide in being met first here and then there. Space is also given immediately once a portion of his body has touched back down into the mat so that there is this pulsar on-off contact that begins to pace and extend this buckling rise and fall into something that is more like a sweeping through; an articulated undulation that begins to allow for a stretching out and a turning and cohering back within. The polarities of these two positions- of up and down- are gradually merged so that they are threaded through one another and M quickly begins to listen and work with this threading dance; to hear it and to shape it in the moment it is occurring. It is almost as if between Katsura and myself there is this gentle indication; like a catching or holding into shape as a playful possibility which each time after its moment of use is let go of again. This is the playful wakefulness that we are framing and modelling for M  by acting like small moments of punctuation; brackets of safe pause and of human witnessing to his on-going urges towards continual release.

Within the patterning of this gradual circulation there is a rising and falling into uprightness and back down into lying again now on his side. In this position he then tips back and forth between my hands along the bone spine at the back of his body and Katsura's hands at his visceral front, M is beginning to articulate the pain and disturbance through his voice. Again he slams his fist deep inside his mouth almost ramming it into his wind-pipe. Yet as he manipulates this huge bolus that literally will not go down; cannot be swallowed, he uses it to stimulate his vocal chords. In this throttled gargle he is making sounds deep inside his throat, now and again shifting his fist so that more air comes through and the sound suddenly intensifies as if its subject drew closer.

M is now really into something- playing through the blockage and its momentary release through his strangled vocal chords and displaying this sense of stuck-ness and the necessity for something to come through however eruptive that might be, as a psyche-soma indication of his whole state.

There is more work to do now; a combination of the neutral holding frame together with a more physical approach to stimulation so that the on-off contact becomes in these chosen moments, a drumming reverberation on his chest that modulates his body instrument as the groans move into a staccato reverberation of multiple feedback that he begins to play with. There is something like a growling; an animal growl which is that of a wounded but enraged creature who is literally going through the motions of leaping out of their encapsulated skin.This is why it is so important that Katsura and I are there to act as a temporary skin in this moment of leaping out in order to catch this rage and  in a sense to house it so that the call reverberates back and so is witnessed. In that way it becomes a voice worth hearing; a body worth shaping and M in turn hears and feels back this indication of self validation in whatever situation is unfolding.

Even as M demonstrates this enraged sense of  his self-inflicted bolus in his throat; one that is mirrored around his bowels- so that nothing properly goes in and nothing properly goes out, something is shifting in that incrementally, as  Katsura and I become the neutral platform or stage for his performative anguished state, he begins to be able to rely on this ground little by little and to give his muscular contortions into a frame not of his own holding. There is the out-breath heard as a sign for the first time; a lingering of a groan so that it becomes a calibrated hum. I join this hum at a very low decibel and there begins to be a weaving in and out of sound vibrations. Katsura says that she sees what before was grey clearing into other colours that are distinguishable and not so mixed up in one another.

We begin to work at a deeper motor level using the simple on-off touch to create a sense of binding at M's back, at his knee and ankle and at his chest. There is a sens of describing a pattern that is a spreading outwards- a kind of flourishing or reaching out within the clear support and frame of our holding.

It is only safe to grow if there is a clear rooting. Between us we trace a pattern that M is describing  to us in his responsiveness and initiation as he lies supported between us on his back. It is a circulatory pattern that roots down through an opening of his groin into his left knee and leg and then deeply planting into the ground through his foot that is now held level. It then rises out the other side and travels back up and through his abdomen, diaphragm and ribs- channelled by the light yielding touch of Katsura as if  this were the side where the plant flowered. It rises into his face and his eyes are now open and mobile, blinking on and off into the pools of this opening as he witnesses being witnessed by Katsura. I support the back of his head and deeply into his upper back. Then trace an opening with my finger pads from the centre of his chest outwards over his heart. I also work lightly as if tracing an embroidery over the top of his head and over his eyes, spreading outwards to the sides of his face. I further work delicately at points either side of his throat and then again warm his chest with my open palm and secure a central still position at his lower abdomen. Now there is some more versatility in movement with an opening of his legs and a creasing and un-creasing of his knees in order to open the groin area which feels to be the root of this circulatory impetus.

Now with this synergistic patterning established, we all of us follow it through between support and letting go only to revisit the support on the next wave of its manifestation. Between this pulsar organic  holding, M is arranging  himself and indicating and communicating through his tightening and releasing of muscle groups and of  breathing phases his capacity and urge to sit up and then sweep back down again into the vertical and then to arch back up and through . He is looking around himself now with upright posture holding his frame in these mobile adjustments so that internally there is a softness to him; a letting go into this natural human exchange that becomes more and more playful.

Finally there is the time of suspension when we all just hang there in the balance of  this patterning - as if internalising it in the stillness of our company, attending together to the sounds in the room and the sounds within our bodies.

There is a sense that M has touched back into contact- filtering down until like ripples on ripples there is this collection of meeting strands and a catching back through. The catapult-release occurred in his vocal eruptions and in the release of his groin that allowed his lower back and sacrum to finally touch down into contact with the ground. He was able then to receive and utilise the warmth of this conjoint holding between Katsura and myself and to float-fly and suspend in this almost embryonic sac, before converging back into his own muscular impetus now fed through from the breath so that each movement was a supported imaginative calling that was heard and adapted in our role as ground, by Katsura and myself.

A sense of smiling came through even in the anguished displays and perhaps because of them.They were allowed and heeded; they were received and so could then go free.