ChapterTwelve

em·bod·i·ment

/əmˈbädēmənt/

noun

noun: embodiment; plural noun: embodiments

1.a tangible or visible form of an idea, quality, or feeling."she seemed to be a living embodiment of vitality"
Similar: personification, incarnation, incorporation, realization, manifestation, expression, representation, actualization, concretization, symbol, symbolization, paradigm, epitome, paragon, soul, model, type, typification, essence, quintessence, exemplification, example, exemplar, ideal, idea, textbook example, reification

◦the representation or expression of something in a tangible or visible form."it was in Germany alone that his hope seemed capable of embodiment”
◦

If you embody someone, you put him or her "in-body," as when an actor gives a complete and compelling representation of a character. You can also use embody to describe character traits you see in a person, like, “He embodies truth,” or, “She is the embodiment of goodness.”

Both the word and the notion of embodiment certainly has a lot of synonyms, doesn’t it? While when it comes to my usage I say: “Close but no cigar!” to most of them, there are a few that come close. So let me tell you first what I mean by embodiment and then we‘ll see which words come close.

I mean that once we are listening to and influencing our mind at what Abraham Maslow used to call a more actualized level, we are in a new ballpark. We have ceased living in our bodies from the shoulders up, literally. We are living by listening to our gut feeling, and we are sending messages from out heart and lungs which modify or brain’s amygdala. Our vagus never is sending more message to the brain than it receives. We are “embodied.” In our attendees’ case, this occurs from practicing what is bubbling up in us. We lose the sense of our own individuality by the boundaries between ourselves and others breaking down. Otherwise how does ‘ol Sally know when to phone us? We are not fixed, We are a new and different character seeking to create a new identity, a new purpose in life. So, how about incarnation, realization, actualization or exemplar as descriptors?

You know, I never even took a photo of my perfect painting, and that’s why I had to use somebody’s else’s as an example on the previous page. The story has an ending, but only years later when my son was 12 and wanted to paint. Art school was a 20 minute drive away. Living in the country he needed a drive, I went with him to art school, signed up too. In my intermediate class I’d be sketching and painting models who sat for us. My first night I painted another dog’s breakfast, but the next week I painted like a photographer. And how did it happen? My teacher had come around and said to me “Don’t you see the yellow ochre right there? And what about the purple.”

So, in the period of embodiment, after all the paint is on the canvas. I’m sure this is why Bessel van der Kolk named his book The Body Keeps The Score. Damn right it does! In the article she wrote about van der Kolk, The Limits of Talk Mary Sykes Wylie tells this van der Kolk anecdote.

In 1989, directly after Hurricane Hugo had ravaged Puerto Rico, van der Kolk accompanied FEMA officials to lend his expertise to dealing with the traumatic aftermath of the devastating storm. "I arrived in the middle of this devastation, and what I saw were lots and lots of people working with each other, actively putting their lives back together--carrying lumber, rebuilding houses and shops, cleaning up, repairing things.”

But the FEMA officials immediately told everybody to cease and desist until assorted bureaucracies could formally assess the damage, establish reimbursement formulas, and organize financial aid and loans. Everything came to a halt. "People were suddenly forced to sit still in the middle of their disaster and do nothing," van der Kolk remembers. "Very quickly, an enormous amount of violence broke out--rioting, looting, assault. All this energy mobilized by the disaster, which had gone into a flurry of rebuilding and recovery activity, now was turned on everybody else. It was one of the first times I saw very vividly how important it is for people to overcome their sense of helplessness after a trauma by actively doing something. Preventing people from moving when something terrible happens, that's one of the things that makes trauma a trauma.”

Pondering this striking lesson, van der Kolk wondered if perhaps the most damaging aspect of trauma wasn't necessarily the awfulness of it, but the feeling of powerlessness in the face of it, the experience of being unable to escape or fight or have any impact on what was happening. "The brain is an action organ," he says, "and as it matures, it's increasingly characterized by the formation of patterns and schemas geared to promoting action.

People are physically organized to respond to things that happen to them with actions that change the situation." But when people are traumatized, and can't do anything to stop it or reverse it or correct it, "they freeze, explode, or engage in irrelevant actions," he adds. Then, to tame their disorganized, chaotic physiological systems, they start drinking, taking drugs, and engaging in violence--like the looting and assault that took place after Hurricane Hugo. If they can't reestablish their physical efficacy as a biological organism and recreate a sense of safety, they often develop PTSD.

To complete our learning a way back to normalcy or to avoid getting stuck, we must actually do things, and to do them in Csikszentmihalyi fashion. He’d say:“Many lives are disrupted by tragic accidents, and even the most fortunate are subjected to stresses of various kinds. Yet such blows do not necessarily diminish happiness. It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable ― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow

Marcus Aurelius chimed in on this too:

You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

So embodiment is doing things until you are “in the flow” from day to day. In the future it may involve doing things until your brain scan normalizes. I say, in the future, because it probably won’t be the case for me, or most of us, but if you’re Paul Frewen and Ruth Lanius in London, Ontario, of you’re Bessel van der Kolk in Boston, that future is now. As they used to say in the space program “We have the technology!”

So, treatment in the future will likely mean that the diagnosis will be made by a PET scanner or a fMRI. No more quibbling over diagnosis, and probably a radically different DSM-VI. No more saying the patient has gone into remission - unless their scan indicates it. This equipment is obviously

prohibitively expensive but even now, in Ontario, if you can get your patient to the University of Western Ontario in London and you can get them seen by Drs. Lanius or Frewen, you can have this type of diagnosis today. This was the case in 1999 even when Ute and Stan Lawrence had their PTSD-causing accident on the 401. In their case, their scans (below) ended up in Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score.

They had been in the same accident, Stan driving, Ute in the passenger seat, They had the same experience of the 18 wheeler that crashed over them and of the 14 year old girl who burned to

death, but their brain scans were markedly different as was their recovery. Each, being different had to practice and embody something different to return to functionality.

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