Experiencing sexual abuse as a child can profoundly alter how we breathe.
It is as though the way we breathe is altered to create self preservation and to keep us detached from the violating experience.
I had never considered that I breathed any differently from anyone else.
I suppose my breath or limitation of, was not something I thought about amongst the heaps of other symptoms that presented themselves in my life.
And yet the core cause to many of those symptoms was the restrictive pattern of breath that had adapted itself to trauma.
Taking small moments during my everyday to notice how I was breathing and slowly gently, allowing the breath to find its rhythm back to its organic natural flow, was the most powerful key to freeing my body from the past .
The first thing I noticed is what I can only describe as upside down breath. The inhale and exhale and the way my belly met the input and output was back to front.
When consciously feeling this breath, I was hyper vigilant to my environment and ungrounded. It kept me safely in an existence of chest and head, from the waist down all was numb.
It took time, the courage to be with the upheaval of emotions, patience and going back again and again to my breath, that being in my body slowly became accessible.
To know and reassure myself that the pain, the shame, the disgust was not my body at all, but the experience it had been subjected to and only by meeting it with my breath could my body be free from the past and the habitual coping mechanisms that had intelligently been put in place for survival.
During sex and touch, I would notice I would hold my breath as though holding on to my breath could keep me from fully being available. It kept a safe controlled distance between me and what was happening.
In moments of overwhelming sensation I would flip and revert back to up side down breath to take myself far away.
We Were Created To Breathe With Ease.
The breath is the bridge to our internal world, our body and as we exhale how we connect, soften to, feel safe and receptive to our environment and life.
Our belly is meant to swell, our rib cage is meant to expand, we are meant to be aware of the sensation in our genitals that our rhythmic breath stirs.
The sensation of breath is how we once upon a time grounded and self soothed.
Coming back to our natural breath, not changing it through some breathing practice, but allowing ourselves to breathe as we would have as babies, before the experiences of sexual abuse and trauma, is profound medicine to our body and the reclaiming and reintegration of the fragmented innocent self.
Small Steps To Remembering Your Breath.
The breath that your body once breathed is still accessible.
The breath altered during the happening of the abuse, to protect from the present and future danger and stayed in it’s trauma altered state.
This also created an ability to numb out to the body and it’s sensations.
We can remind our body of its natural pathway of breath, slowly as part of the everyday, so our body can begin to feel at ease, open and remember. And to gently begin to allow the stimulation of sensation.
Breathing practices have their place and benefits but only after we are at ease with our natural breath. We can find that breathing practices such as pranayama are another form of controlled breath. We can also find in breathing practices such as kundalini yoga that we become more disassociated from the body, a state of being that is already effortlessly available to those who have been abused.
I suggest that rather than this being something that we make time for, and therefore, try to control and DO, that this exploration of remembering the breath is part of every day activity, to establish a new “normal”.
For example, when you are in bed before you get out of bed in the morning, can you place your hand on your belly and take one long, slow, deep breath. Can you feel the rise of your belly against your hand.
While walking can you take one long, slow deep breath, notice your feet, your belly.
While sitting during the day, can you take one long slow deep breath, feel your buttocks on the chair, your feet on the ground.
Simply throughout your day, every day, taking that one long slow deep breath and noticing, feet, belly, breath.
If you feel safe with one breath, explore increasing to two, three breaths and gradually allow the felt sense of belly breath into part of your daily experience.
