JSA Lowe
It is a specific body, it comes out. It stays in until it comes out. It can be known as well as it is possible to know another person's body, distinct from one's own but related. I first met the body in my infancy, we became more intimate as phobias and disordered eating began as a pre-teen, and since then I have never gone more than a year without it. Sometimes you can put together a few months in a row, and call that "a good summer," and be grateful to your lover and friends for helping keep it at bay that long, though they seldom are aware this is a project in which they are assisting. Perhaps they would be angry if they knew. They will be angry anyway.
Its existence is instigated by what we have been trained to call object inconstancy but what is perceived as, for the first part, the clear vision of the inside of the arms, the tender part of the breast and throat, being scraped. That is one of its manifestations. A first one, a raw gulping feeling, at first. People say "my heart stopped," "my stomach fell," "the bottom dropped out." There is a clang or zing of chemical shock, as the first washes of epinephrine and cortisol flood your entire body in a second. Following which, it is like receiving an injection, the flush moves outward and the skin begins to radiate a distinct searing pain, you can look at the palms of your hands in wonderment and watch it move up your forearms.
When the hours after being left turn into days, this is when the difficulties present themselves. The withdrawal of the object at first is met with disbelief, then soon thereafter, compulsive checking. The phone, looking at it again and again, just in case. Carrying it around the house, the laptop. The inbox, refresh, refresh, just in case. Checking the trash can, social media, because surely. Because who could. Because I know I couldn't. Because I would imagine that no one could, but this one has, but surely there has just been a mistake. A simple misunderstanding we will be laughing over by dinnertime, swapping texts by tomorrow. Checking again. It is simple and old: When the mother leaves the room the baby checks and checks and checks. Because surely she is here somewhere and I am just overlooking her, it is a game, I will solve it, I will just look one more time.
This tenacious belief in a simple error, an easily rectified miscommunication, next will drive the trauma-body to ignore the numb physical self in favor of wild mentation. Chiefly there will be inner arguments—the constructing and revising of different kinds of pleas, from the overt and plain to the crestfallen and wounded, from the strategic to the dignified, from the outraged and indignant to the unabashed heart-on-sleeve courtly-love model of standing beneath your electronic rose-entwined tower with my lyre/boombox and, pouring forth all my sweetness, issuing the most irresistible pleynt of longing you have surely ever heard (although my professor has warned repeatedly: we do not live in an economy where this is valuable, we live in a market and making such offerings is a sign of devaluation and undesirability). All these urgent rhetorics are frenetically created and discarded again and again, leaving an outbox full of unsent messages, and never in them must be a single description of the effects of the abandonment,
because one thing about the trauma-body is that no one is moved by hearing about it or seeing it. It must be kept hidden. It must be hidden.
While its mind is racing, the physical trauma-body begins to manifest, slowly, initial numbness wearing off, with the raw-skin sensation, as above; progresses rapidly to a torsional failure of the chest walls to rise and fall in any kind of regular rhythm. The torso can be held still and attended to, and a regularity can be forced. When the attention is dropped, however, breathing dips back into a rough, stochastic approximation of pattern. There is a synchrony missing, one typically taken for granted. When I am residing in the trauma-body I become aware that, while my heart usually beats in some kind of metrically appropriate way in concert with my lungs' expanding and deflating, this entire percussion is now completely off. It is moving, but erratically; it is functional, but in jerks.
This extends to the musculo-skeletal edges of the trauma-body and it shakes uncontrollably, losing both fine and gross motor control, and cannot speak without its voice trembling. The diaphragm is weak and flaccid; further the trauma-body's voice is always on the brink of tears. There may at this point still be enough self-control, anger, and shame at the body for its possessor to harden the larynx and push out speech that is not quavering. This should be done as long as possible, to keep open any opportunities. Non-objects and objects alike are alienated by the trauma-body's weakness, and applaud its strengths, uninterested whether those strengths come in ugly lunges.
Eventually the cardio-respiratory and muscular arrhythmias have a knock-on effect within the digestive system. At the first blast of object-loss, there is an immediate instinct to vomit; this can be suppressed, although an urgent evacuation of the colon probably cannot. The digestive tract settles for a few hours then into a kind of uneasy numbness; motility is slowed and the body may feel deceptively well. It may manage to eat, but it will be the last thing it eats for a while. At some point, typically during a sound sleep, the trauma-body wakes up in alarm, all its adrenaline flashing, racing through, to dispel anything within. Then begins the long anorexia. An empty stomach may seek to signal its hunger, but the small intestines writhe and clamp down so that nothing can be admitted. Of course being deprived of calories and fluids does not help the brain re-regulate, so for a time during this anorexic period, the mind may briefly become determined again to scaffold and fabulize all kinds of arguments the object is not in the least interested in entertaining.
Over the first few days the mouth becomes very dry. Sides of cheeks stick to teeth and the tongue develops impressions of molars and incisors, from being swollen. There will be peeled dry skin from the lips, from biting, and a taste of blood in the mouth. Very scant saliva.
This dryness extends to speech. When asked even simple questions, the trauma-body cannot answer readily, or often at all. A great indecision unveils itself and opens like a chasm. For example, the object may have briefly returned, to send one last scathing email or collect its belongings or utter a few more disgusted indictments; this is not the object for which one longs, so the verbal faculties literally dry up, in the face of this encounter. All the jangled and meticulously macerated and composed inner arguments evaporate, and the trauma-body turns into open eyes, scanning the face of this person for any sign of the object, only to be rebuffed.
The eyes cannot be closed from this point forward.
This is the point at which the trauma-body may harm itself, usually by slicing, to manifest its owner's contempt for it. The trauma-body provides an innocent tool. It is the owner trapped by its despicable weakness who wishes it to bleed, be harmed, go away. After the failure of pain-induction to remove the trauma-body from itself, at that exact moment the brain pulls to a silent standstill. This ends the anxious vomiting phase of the trauma-body and its second stage sets in, paralysis.
Motion slows, past earlier movements of stumbling and clumsiness, to inertia. Neuromodulation is disrupted. Oxytocin and vasopressin have diminished their stores quickly. The long muscles were spasmodic until settled into catatonia. When this stillness sets in, eventually, the trauma-body will find itself horizontal, which is a kind of mercy, in a sprawled position, usually not fetal but stretched haphazardly along any flat surface so that the eyes can stare forward at any convenient edge, most typically where the floor and wall encounter themselves. The eyes cannot be dissuaded from their intent and busy work of staring forward, of staring.
Conversely the ears have been slowly sealed, as if returning to neonatal protectiveness. Concerned non-objects will contact the trauma-body and try to rouse it. Their intentions are helpful and they cannot but fail to soothe. Their pheromones, speech, movement, and insights are not aligned with the object's identity, which is all the trauma-body is capable of recognizing in that moment. It is neither the fault of the trauma-body nor of the non-objects. There is no resonance or co-regulation possible, under any circumstances, very likely.
The feet and hands which at times have twitched in agitation, now lie very closely to each other and motionless. The skin, which may have been damp and clammy, is now very like paper, or wax.
The trauma-body is instinctively drawn to beneath, to below: the bed, the sofa, the house, earth itself. It seeks maximal underneathness.
At this stage the trauma-body is complete. Its agitation has slowed into an inertia, which is deceptive and can be mistaken for a quieted state. The brain however is not at rest, but rather completely frozen and incapable of thought or processing stimuli. Fortunately, the trauma-body
cannot perceive any stimuli. This stage of completion and outward near-death often lasts for up to several days. There is nothing for it to fight, and it cannot flee; so eventually it will seek, like water, its lowest level, and freeze, vision its only alert function, to await predation patiently.
An outcome is typically resolved with intervention. Either the possessor of the trauma-body reasserts agency (glimpsing an item in its peripheral vision, perhaps, or nudged by an animal companion); or the non-object environment becomes sufficiently activated. Whenever the trauma-body manages to leave the preferred horizontal position and accept water, perhaps even another fluid, it has shifted out of the cycle and may effect a partial recovery. Additional resources include inducing forced hibernation with soporifics. The talking-cure cannot be used until later in the process, because the trauma-body, as we have seen, is incapable of linear or indeed any speech.
Often these or similar measures will restore the trauma-body into the background of its human container, until it is needed again, or feels its life-web of interpersonal regulation being ripped into and removed. When the allocortical structures begin firing, warning of imminent disconnection and object withdrawal, the trauma-body will reappear as needed, to do its important work of containing and acting for that which suffers.
[unfinished]