Forgetting the Body: Embodiment, Trauma, and Living Outside of the World
I have started and stopped this piece a dozen times in trying to write it, lining up my words and then peeling them away again, uncertain of where to start or where I even want this piece to be going. Part of it is a level of overwhelm in wanting to get the material right, the inherent richness of what it is I hope to write about and the demands that richness places on trying to speak and write in ways that don’t slot easily into the way I typically use language. The other, I am certain, has something to do with the vulnerability of the topic itself, a kind of exposure that may arise in trying to speak so directly to some element of one’s lived experience that is not part of the more cognitively and symbolically organized world that I typically write about. My desire, at this turn, is to evoke another segment of being that lives alongside those dimensions of experience but is not one I often verbalize. As such, I’m going to ask you to come along as I stumble through something quite new for me, trying to organize and articulate an element of being that is fundamentally preverbal. Something which, though I may try to capture it in words, will always by its nature escape easy description and the naive familiarity of language.
Even thinking about writing this piece raises some strange sensations. Reflecting on its content, I find myself more acutely aware of how my back lands against my seat, the way my wrists compress against the edge of my laptop, the gentle resting of the back of my lips against the front of my teeth, and then beyond that, the strange sensation of somehow being able to feel the emptiness of my own mouth, the spaces surrounding the tongue as it explores its role in helping me to sip my morning coffee.
There’s something obvious about this statement, but let’s say it anyway and then build it out from there: embodiment is an essential part of the ontological experience of being. Of course, how each of our individual bodies is situated within and reach out towards the world is in no way uniform and what it means to be embodied in the sense of having a body-object is going to be distinct for everyone. But the sense of having some matter of form that one exists from and which serves as the physical basis for our internal experience of the world around us is one that, given its essentialness, frequently risks being taken for granted.
I feel like I often work with clients who are quick to forget their bodies. I can’t say for sure how much this extends to the broader population, but from what I gather in general conversation with people outside my practice as well, I would venture to guess it is one of the more common ways in which we forget ourselves. Certainly, many of us have activities or habits which perhaps bring us back into the possibility of being engaged with or curious about our bodies: the physical demands of exercise, taking up crafts which involve the use of our hands, the occasion of going out dancing with friends, and the physical sensations that accompany sex and foreplay are all places that invite an increased sense of bodily engagement or stimulation. These are often heightened and highly specified experiences where the body commands our attention, and yet many still operate in ways that attempt to divert attention elsewhere. Gym sessions are accompanied by headphones funneling in podcasts or music, a focus on certain elements of craftsmanship might distract one from the possibility of being with the activity of creation, layers of self-consciousness or a history of trauma might divert one away from being able to be with the pleasure of moving one’s body in the uninhibited joy of dancing or the shared ecstasy of sexual pleasure.
It seems strange that we would need to be recalled to our bodies. Though this is perhaps the dual nature of their ubiquity. In their being everywhere they recede into the background. This being everywhere also means that the body is inextricably wrapped up in the various forms of suffering we have encountered. It becomes hard to imagine a body that could ever manage to avoid the experience of some kind of trauma. Thus, the forgetting that happens is not merely about a kind of taken-for-grantedness, but captures the fact that being with our bodies by design means being with various forms of suffering, of distancing, of the impossibility of the desire for merger, of being with the various ways in which we have been objectified by others, in which the world has somehow tried to communicate to us that our body might not be ours, or that the way we are being in it is faulty.
And this only captures the subjective aspects of what it means to be in a body. There is also the felt reality of a body as thrownness. As something we are given that does exist in a world among other objects, some of which have the ability to gaze upon and judge what that body is and what it can or cannot do. Ailments or developmental considerations may bring on certain physical limitations; moments of inadequacy can claim our attention when participating in athletics or other forms of physical competition; bodies are violated, scolded, and become the unwilling site of other’s demand and desire, in ways that can be both viciously obvious and insidiously subtle. To say nothing about the body as the ultimate site of death, the place where, through some unpredictable set of circumstances, it simply gives itself up to the impossibility of forever, to the insistence of finitude.
Given all of this, it can be interesting to recall someone to their body who gives the impression they do not think about it much as a locus of experience. Or whose thoughts about it fit through a relatively narrow aperture that dismisses much of what it provides the experience of being. By way of example, as I’ve written in this space before, a fair amount of my client base comes to me seeking some insight into compulsive behaviors around sex or pornography use. That work often lends itself to an exploration of the embodied nature of sexuality and what it means to feel one’s own desire as an embodied presence. Tending to the compulsion will frequently reveal that some aspect of desire or the seeking of stimulation gets externalized precisely because the internal experience of it overwhelms or has never been granted a place where that experience can be safely held, and held without shame or judgement. Pornography and the pursuit of sex in this manner not only objectifies the other. It serves to objectify the self. Much like in de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, the inability to understand another as existing for-itself limits the extent to which we can understand our own being-for-itself, leaving us the limited register of the in-itself and being an object among objects. Which, as is often noted in existential literature, can become a desirable place of safe retreat.
Merleau-Ponty calls our bodies the sentient sensible, his way of describing their ability to both touch and be touched. I think about Merleau-Ponty often these days, especially as I continue to reflect on the kinds of relationships that AI does and does not enable with the self (a topic I will hopefully be coming to write about in greater detail soon). But there is another essential element to his work and the means by which he understood the human body as being the center of something essential about human connectedness and intersubjectivity. For Merleau-Ponty, the possibility of intersubjectivity is primarily communicated through the body. Being-with is always organized around the flesh and the situatedness of our being within this corporeal form, our incarnated being. In a world where so many of us seem to exist divorced from our bodies, what does that mean about the possibility (or more specifically the current limitations) of human connection?
For those of my virtual clients who live close enough but might otherwise struggle with aspects of managing their schedule, I often will suggest the value of their coming into the office at some point. I do not want to be dismissive of the kind of good work that can be done virtually, and as someone who was engaged in a long-term virtual therapy, I am completely understanding of the geographical and temporal constraints that can lead to the necessity of doing the work online. I was also fortunate to have a few occasions to see that therapist in-person and know what it was like to share space with them. To feel what it was like to be with them. Even after the first instance of meeting them in person, it changed my impression of the work, of who they were, and what it meant for the two of us to come together session after session. The same applies to the folks whom I work with and the shock that can occur when you meet someone who disturbs the mental image of who you thought they were once you have a chance to shake their hand and invite them onto your couch.
We live in a world where many seem not only to be forgetting their bodies, but are indeed actively rejecting them. Where denying aspects of corporeality becomes a means to containment of something otherwise intolerable. Too much of our world and the ways in which we’ve come to communicate about it seem designed to conceal the basic means by which our body is the first place we enter into it. And yet, by virtue of this, the body is unrelenting. It refuses to be dismissed. The subtlest gesture—physical, verbal, emotional—can reach across to another and invite them to reclaim the territory of their body. To contend with the expansiveness of what it means to possess a physical form. To delight in its limitations and ability to channel the overwhelm of all it can contain. To reclaim it as the dwelling of our being, that place to and from which we emerge, which feels and is felt, the site of lived-in perpetual discovery.
