We must receive support before we can ever give it
Many of us were born and raised in homes where we did not receive the support we really needed in order to feel safe, seen, grounded, and valued. For whatever reasons, our parents and families and perhaps even our communities were unable to give us enough responsive attention for us to anchor a feeling of being empowered and supported into our Beings.
Because we did not receive this support for our very Being, our essence, we came to distrust ourselves and those around us. We became unable to receive support, even when it was sincerely offered. We came to feel that we were a burden and that we didn’t deserve to have support or feel supported. We tried to make it through our lives by being totally self-sufficient. Since we couldn’t receive support, we reasoned, maybe we didn’t need it.
We managed for quite some time in this way. But we found that we were unable to feel totally at ease with ourselves and our lives. And we found that is was difficult to establish intimate relationships with others. We thought that something was lacking in us. Or we thought there was something lacking in our partners.
Most likely, we kept attracting others who also had never truly felt supported. We each wanted the other to give us the support we had always wanted. But two things got in the way. First, we didn’t really trust enough to be real and vulnerable. To actually ALLOW the other person to support us. We hid our true selves because we believed, at our core, that we weren’t worthy of support. Second, our partner could not GIVE us true support, could not receive, accept, and support us as we were, because our partner had never been supported, and therefore did not have a secure and grounded base from which to offer support.
What we need is an opportunity to heal the trauma of insufficeint support. The trauma of needing support, deserving support, but not receiving it. This trauma came early in our lives. It came when we were still very young and unable to say what we really needed. For most of us, it came initially during or shortly after birth, when we were whisked away from our mothers’ bodies. Until just before birth, we had been supported, held, and even compressed and squeezed in a warm, firm physical space. An alive space. Our mother’s womb. We were deeply, physically, and energetically connected with, and supported by our mother’s bodies. Suddenly, we were squeezed intensely, then pulled up by our feet, hung upside down, dangling in the bright hospital room, slapped on the bottom, roughly wiped down. And the violations go on.
Others were born caesarian section and didn’t receive the deep compression of moving through the birth canal. In this case, the squeezing and compression that signals us to come fully into the body was missing.
(Insert quote from Somatics)
I had a typical 1950’s hospital birth, and was born with drugs and forceps. I was raised in a family that didn’t have adequate emotional and energetic resources to see and validate me as much as I needed. I learned early on to be quiet, invisible, and not to ask for anything. I learned how to get by. But without true support, I never learned how to thrive.
I’ve spent my life trying to solve this mystery. I tried every kind of healing and therapy I could, but the irony was, I couldn’t receive any of it. I couldn’t really receive support! Or at least, not much of it.
I finally started shifting in dramatically positive ways when I began receiving touch through full-body contact partnered movement. At last, the trauma of missing support was beginning to be healed. I began to realize that at least some of the trauma was about having missed very early and vital touch and body contact. This happened when I was a pre-verbal newborn and infant. My healing needed to happen pre-verbally through receiving physical nurturing and touch. Trust needed to come through allowing myself to receive that dependable, full-bodied physical support.
Ruthy Alon, in her book, Mindful Spontaneity, Moving in Tune with Nature: Lessons in the Feldenkrais Method, writes the following:
“When you cease resisting the force of gravity and allow your weight to sink into the depth, the sensation takes you back to an early time of your life, when you were very small and had no choices, when you leaned with total reliance upon a loving bosom—when you took for granted that those upon whom you leaned had your well-being in their heart, that your weight, surrendered fully, was the most precious gift in their eyes, that carrying you was a need within them. In your mind, receiving unconditional love was registered in the most dominant physical aspect of your existence—the manner in which you coped with gravity."
Physical life is so governed by the element of gravity that we forget to consider it. Letting go, or 'giving over' our body weight and leaning fully is interwoven with trust. In body language, receiving love is trusting the one who holds you, being willing to lean yourself onto the earth or onto a person, with no concern that you may be a burden and with no fear of falling, which is the most primary and direct fear in life.
I have been a mover, dancer, and touch junkie all my life. As I move and dance with others, now in this more connected and supported state, I recognize in other dancers, this pattern of the inability to give support. I have been dancing with and giving my energetic, but more importantly, physical support to my fellow dancers for over 10 years now. I find that it is only when dancers are first given this support, that they then begin to meet me, and others in a way that offers their physical support. I’ve come to think of this quality as ‘grounding’. When we are truly grounded in our own bodies, we feel supported by the earth, and in time, by the Source of all that is.
I have discovered that I have a special gift that allows me to be Somatically empathic with others. I can sense what another is feeling and how their energy is flowing, simply by being fully Present in my own body. And this ability is heightened when I make physical contact with others. I have discovered that I can use this special ability to help others come more fully into their bodies, into this physical experience, and into their moment. I can invite and guide others into deeply receiving support from me. I have found that this gift I give to others has a healing effect on the trauma of non- support. Moving with me, they are able to replace the old traumatic patterns of not being supported, by new ones where they are able to experience feeling completely vulnerable and completely safe with another, simultaneously.
"Having experienced a lot of bodywork over the years of being a professional dancer and instructor, I have never felt so nurtured, so cared for and deeply touched as I did during my work with Harmony Gates. Her ability to hold space physically and energetically is honest, vulnerable and revealing, as well as healing. By being allowed to enter total receptivity, I was able to receive myself in new ways, to meet myself in those places I push away from or hide from. Being able to stay at the edge of my own pain (physical, emotional) gave me the opportunity to release, expand, and be nurtured. At times, I struggled. At times, I cried. At times, I allowed myself to be cradled as if I was a fragile baby. The freedom that emerged is still integrating into my everyday life now and I am sure it will continue as my work with her continues. “Harmony has a true gift of allowing one to feel completely vulnerable and completely safe at the same time.”
--Melinda Deamon Dance Alive Instructor, Santa Monica, CA
Deep Relational Contact is a therapeutic method that addresses the deep trauma of-non- support. Trauma that remains with us as long as we are unable to trust ourselves, others, life. Unable to receive love and support.
Experience Yourself
Being
Deeply held
In the arms of the Mother
Surrender to being
Seen, accepted, received, nurtured, supported, and loved.
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