“Waking the Tiger” by Peter Levine is a book that was suggested to me by a friend as one to read to better understand how the body responds to trauma.
In the very beginning I found a very interesting concept.
Peter writes, “Waking the Tiger: A First Glimmer.”
“Trauma was a complete mystery to me when I first began working with it. My first major breakthrough in understanding came quite unexpectedly in 1969 when I was asked to see a woman, Nancy, who was suffering from intense panic attacks. The attacks were so severe that she was unable to leave her house alone. She was referred to me by a psychiatrist who knew of my interest in body/mind approaches to healing (a fledgling and obscure field at the time). He thought that some kind of relaxation training might be helpful.
Relaxation was not the answer. In our first session as I naively, and with the best intentions, attempted to help her relax, she went into a full-blown anxiety attack. She appeared paralyzed and unable to breathe. Her heart was pounding wildly, and then seemed to almost stop. I became quite frightened. Had I paved the yellow brick road to hell? We entered together into her nightmarish attack.
Surrendering to my own intense fear, yet somehow managing to remain present, I had a fleeting vision of a tiger jumping toward us. Swept along with the experience, I exclaimed loudly, “You are being attacked by a large tiger. See the tiger as it comes to you. Run toward that tree; climb it and escape!” To my surprise, her legs started trembling in running movements. She let out a bloodcurdling scream that brought in a passing police officer (fortunately my office partner somehow managed to explain the situation). She began to tremble, shake and sob in full-bodied convulsions.
Nancy continued to shake for almost an hour. She recalled a terrifying memory from her childhood. When she was three years old she had been strapped to a table for a tonsillectomy. The anesthesia was ether. Unable to move, feeling suffocated (common reactions to ether), she had terrifying hallucinations. This early experience had a deep impact on her. Like the traumatized children at Chowchilla, Nancy was threatened, overwhelmed, and as a result, had become physiologically stuck in the immobility response. In other words, her body had literally resigned itself to a state where the act of escaping could not exist. Along with this resignation came the pervasive loss of her real and vital self as well as the loss of a secure and spontaneous personality. Twenty years after the traumatizing event, the subtle and hidden affects emerged. Nancy was in a crowded room taking the Graduate Records Examination when she went into a severe panic attack. Later, she developed agoraphobia (fear of leaving her house alone). The experience was so extreme and seemingly irrational that she knew she must seek help.
After the breakthrough that came in our initial visit, Nancy left my office feeling, in her words, “like she had herself again.” Although we continued working together for a few more sessions, where she gently trembled and shook, the anxiety attack she experienced that day was her last. She stopped taking medication to control her attacks and subsequently entered graduate school where she completed her doctorate without relapse.
At the time I met Nancy, I was studying animal predator-prey behaviors. I was intrigued by the similarity between Nancy’s paralysis when her panic attack began and what happened to the impala described in the last chapter. Most prey animals us immobility when attacked by a larger predator from which they can’t escape. I am quite certain that these studies strongly influenced the fortuitous vision of the imaginary tiger. For several years after that I worked to understand the significance of Nancy’s anxiety attack and her response to the image of the tiger. There were many detours and wrong turns along the way.
I now know that it was not the dramatic emotional catharsis and reliving of her childhood tonsillectomy that was catalytic in her recovery, but the discharge of energy she experienced when she flowed out of her passive, frozen immobility response into an active, successful escape. The image of the tiger awoke her instinctual, responsive self. The other profound insight that I gleaned from Nancy’s experience was that the resources that enable a person to succeed in the face of a threat can be used for healing. This is true not just at the time of the experience but even years after the experience.
I learned that it was unnecessary to dredge up old memories and relive their emotional pain to heal trauma. In fact, severe emotional pain can be re-traumatizing. What we need to do to be freed from our symptoms and fears is to arouse our deep physiological resources and consciously utilize them. If we remain ignorant of our power to change the course of instinctual responses in a proactive rather than reactive way, we will continue being imprisoned and in pain.
Nancy became a heroine twenty years after her ordeal. The running movements made by her legs when she responded to the make-believe tiger allowed her to do the same thing. This response helped rid her nervous system of the excess energy that had been mobilized to deal with the threat she experienced during her tonsillectomy. She was able, long after the original trauma, to awaken her capacity for heroism and actively escape.”
Peter Levine
In my experience, I shook like an earthquake was inside of me in the moments after learning that my father abused my niece. I trembled and rattled and felt totally out of control shaking.
I remember feeling that my body knew this truth all along, and now I was joining with acceptance, free to express this truth.
What I find so affirming is that it isn’t so much having to re-live the trauma, but regaining the escape muscles.
It wasn’t too long after the initial hearing of who my father really was, that I was able to articulate how I would deal with this.
How I responded was the key to my ‘healing’.
I somehow had found a way to escape.
Escaping is where the power is returned to you, where you are able to be a heroine in your own life.
I knew my inner power was very much alive and strong in the face of such tragedy, and it did feel like I too had myself again.
Like I found the part of me that had disappeared.
Little did I know I had found the missing escape muscle, which had left me immobilized in fear.
It is the feeling like you can’t escape, frozen in fear and terror, unable to bring to bear a muscle that allows you to run away.
My runaway muscle came alive that day, my runaway and be safe muscle was returned to me!
The trembling was my runaway be safe muscle coming alive! The waking of the tiger is waking of that muscle.
No longer immobilized by fear, with a paralyzed runaway and escape muscle, I now feel complete. It is when you live without this part, there is everything to fear, for you all you can do is be frozen immobile in the face of fear, unable to protect yourself, a helpless, hopeless victim when fear arises.
My last five years have been strengthening and flexing this runaway and be safe muscle!
(I had experience this, but didn’t have the language to explain it.)
