Triggers Are Your Divinity: Using Somatics and the Occult to Heal Trauma

Take a chance on all the things you can't see
Make a wish on all that lives within thee

I wanted a man to save me: from myself, my body and my trauma. Unconsciously, of course. 

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The thing is, you can’t be saved from any of these things. You can’t outrun your own body, mind and sensations. And you certainly can’t use somebody else to escape them. You must face them.

I learned this from dating Tom. Both poets, we attended an open mic night together. We both liked to play with words— in different ways, it transpired. From my side, I felt the kind of chemistry where you cannot wait to merge entirely with the person in front of you. I remember looking at him on our date and feeling an irresistible urge to touch him. 

We ended up going home together. He lit a candle in his bedroom and we started making out on his bed. Then I dissociated. I didn’t really know this person; he was a relative stranger. My nervous system didn’t like him and was triggered. I started to feel panicked as if I was having an out-of-body experience. I didn’t want to be there, and I didn’t want him to touch me anymore, except part of me did.

We stopped. I explained I had experienced sexual violence in the past. He was not the best person to tell about this but also not the worst. He didn't know how to hold me through it, my body felt that. He didn’t feel safe to me, my body also knew that.

Before I dissociated, I showed him my favourite FKA Twigs song and spoke about how it made me feel connected to the divine. I don’t think he understood this or how to cope with me being triggered. If I am to be so bold, I don’t think he knew how divine my body was either. 

Spirituality has given me comfort and healing when other humans could not. It is through ritual using the soundtrack of Magdalene by FKA Twigs that I found my wholeness.

For me, ritual means a practice used to connect to spirit(s), then subsequently deeper to my own body by awakening sensation. The ritual(s) that I partook in included following instructions given to me by my spiritual mentor at the time. I used specific words, objects, foods, and scents as offerings to a higher power. The roots of these rituals came from Occultist practices. 

These actions and offerings provided symbolic value to achieve a higher aim like connection, uniting with a spirit or gaining something from the material world, or all three.  I conducted rituals because I wanted quick cash and fast love, but from them, I got so much more. Once I was familiar with ritual I made it my own, adding in dancing, journaling and self-touch.

Do we acquire truth through words or through our bodies? Or is it a combination? As Rachel Sherrill tweeted: “I’m learning that energy is the first language we speak, not English.” Our bodies speak the language of energy not words.

Tom verbalised all the right things to me about commitment, but my body knew something was off, and there was a deeper truth that his words could not soothe. Still, I was convinced I wanted to have sex with this man, and it was the inconvenience of my trauma that was stopping me.

I have come to learn that language is limited. We can use it to over-intellectualise our sensations and stop us from trusting our intuition.  Other people are our greatest mirrors. Through my interaction with Tom, I became aware that it is also me who is unable to see my own divinity. Through this experience, I came to understand there is no situation in which we are never not whole, even when it really feels otherwise. Understanding ourselves as whole always is the basis of somatics.

Somatics is a methodology and therapeutic practice that includes checking in with your body and sensations. It means asking yourself where exactly in your body you are feeling sensations when strong emotions arise. “The word somatics comes from the Greek root soma, which means ‘the living organism in its wholeness.’ It is the best word we have in English to understand human beings as an integrated mind/body/spirit, and as social, relational beings.” Malkia Cyrilexplains.

Luis Mojica says our bodies are sovereign and do not act in line with what we think we want. Separate entities to our conscious mind, their wants and needs are different to what we think they should be, but ultimately they get our attention through heightening sensation to unite us with our psyche. Labelling sensations we are too scared to feel as “triggers” can misguide us and make our past seem permanent. These sensations are most often a cue to deeper desires and unmet needs. They can help us if they are truly felt; because to feel is to become conscious. 

Trauma is transformed through accepting, not shaming, our sensations. For me saying “trigger” feels contrived because all my body needed was time, space, and an authentic connection. The word “trigger” feels like it exiles and represses my body's needs and expression, and condemns them as pathological mistakes. The purpose of a trigger isn’t bad, they keep us safe.

Mine wisely showed me who is not the best partner to let into my body. Clarissa Pinkola Estes states, “the body is a God in its own right.” It is all-knowing, and its wisdom is timeless, thus we must remember to treat it with the same kind of devotion we ascribe to the God’s. Tom did not come to me with sincere offerings. His devotion turned out to flicker in similar tandem to the candle he lit. 

I was not saved by this man as I had hoped. I was rejected after this interaction. To my unconscious mind’s dismay, my saviour was my body, which I perceived at the time to be making extremely inconvenient sensations. In reality, my body picked up on the truth of Tom’s intentions before my conscious mind did.

There was a poetic licence to his words. I thanked God for his rejection, though. As painful as it was, it initiated me into a deeper and stronger relationship with myself and gave me greater reverence for my body and all of her sensations however uncomfortable. 

The space Tom provided could not receive my fullness, and who wants to have sex with someone who cannot receive all of you? I can no longer open myself up to someone who only wants part of me. I could call my body's resistance to that a trigger, or I could give in to the wisdom of my body and call it what it truly is: liberating. I had tried my best to suppress my intuition, thinking it was irrational fear due to my past.

The most sexually empowering thing I could have done was to have gone home. Instead of ignoring my sensations or shaming myself for not being “sexually liberated” enough to just do it.

We did not have sex but I stayed the night with him believing he could give me more what I needed than myself. I was wrong. 

On reflection, I was able to receive the information my body was trying to communicate to me at the time; that to be able to open up to sex, my nervous system needed a slowness and commitment that was not available from Tom.

The God in my body, my somatic divinity as I call it, knew that was not on offer. Hyperbole was charming in his poetry, but when it was used to exaggerate his ability to be present with me, it left a lot to be desired. 

This desire for greater connection prior to sex renders “triggers'' helpful. Exiling them as faulty reactions of my body takes me further away from the truth that my body was trying to unite me with; I did not want to sleep with someone part of me knew could not really care about me in the way that I needed.

Collectively, we have labelled certain sensations as wrong. In progressive spaces “being triggered” is something to be avoided, but for me, these sensations aren’t bad. I have learnt through Carolyn Eliot’s work that contrary to what we have been culturally conditioned to believe, all sensation is qualitatively neutral. 

The stories we have told ourselves about sensation are the problem. Fearing triggers, strange sensations, and physical pain means we shut down when our body is trying to communicate something pure, and protective to us, - even trying to heal us. We have been taught that all pain and discomfort are bad.

Our bodies are messy, complicated, disgusting, repulsive and tiring, but they are also beautiful, sensational, responsive and incredibly intelligent. The culture we live in wants them to be neat, predictable and disciplined. 

A few weeks after my interaction with Tom, FKA Twigs released Tears in the Club. When I listened to the song through my headphones on the train platform at Kilburn High Road I had a visceral reaction remembering what I had learnt through ritual and somatic therapy about listening to my body and trusting it when it doesn’t feel safe.

Twigs' voice opened my body up so vastly; it gave me the space to create a new self-mythology. Sensations evoked through ritual with the use of her music made me feel like healing fully was completely possible for the first time. Twigs’ art brought me closer to the God in my own body. 

When we have experienced significant distressing life events, it is hard to believe that life is safe and good. We have to imagine a new world before we are living in it. This new world has to weave all parts of us together. Somatics, healing and spirituality require a sophisticated understanding of non-duality and therefore help us integrate all parts of us. How can we heal from trauma if we are obsessed with separating ourselves into good and bad parts? 

Ritual allows us to create new narratives of faith and connection even at our messiest. Ritual allows us to feel and imagine what we want before it happens. Ritual allows us to exaggerate our wholeness until we can come to accept it as the undeniable truth that it is. 

The first time I did a magick ritual it was simple: I read some words that invoked the Whore of Babylon, and then I danced to Rihanna in red underwear. The next day I felt a rush through my body that felt like a full-bodied non-genital orgasm. Originally, I was not doing this to heal, I was doing this to attract more romantic love. To my surprise, it became so intoxicating I had to repeat it. I got to bring everything I was to it and saw my wholeness emerge in ways that had never felt possible before.

Magick rituals taught me that my power is innate and eternal and cannot be taken away from me by any violation, man, or institution. We are forever and infinitely whole despite how external circumstances make us feel. Ritual taught me this more than feminism. This, to me, is real empowerment.

Talking about being sexually assaulted did not heal it. Writing, performing and publishing poetry about it did not heal it. Writing a dissertation on the language of sexual violence did not heal it. Creating an exhibit about sexual violence against women did not heal it. Reporting it to the police did not heal it. Creating a safe club night for women did not heal it. Talking therapy did not heal it.

I had done and achieved everything feminism had encouraged me to yet I was not healed. Rightly or wrongly, some of these feminist environments and endeavours emboldened a hatred in me towards men. I believed women could not live in relation to men without the infliction of trauma. I believed I could learn nothing from men, in particular white cis heterosexual men. 

Being taught embodiment and somatic release healed me and is the most feminist thing I have been taught. To my unconscious mind’s dismay, I was taught these things by a man.

When I started working with a white cis male therapist, I was indignant I would be the one teaching him. Slowly as I worked with him, I realised a large part of the wisdom that was missing from feminist spheres was reconnecting with our bodies. Whenever we hear a new headline about gender-based violence or fear our right to abortion will be taken away, we expose our deepest wounds and stories in droves in an effort for change. 

If this were going to work, it would have by now. It is not our fault we have been separated from our bodies and that feminism exists in the intellectual realm. If you have faced violence and trauma, you would want to escape the site of it too; the body.

What I heard in feminist spaces were horrible stories of violence that will never be justified, but as women, we owe ourselves more than rehashing our trauma and calling it activism. We are owed (re)connection with our bodies and our erotic power. 

Audre Lorde famously wrote about women’s disconnection from their erotic power, expressing society fear women claiming their right to feel the power inherent in their emotional and sensational experiences. Lorde identified the erotic as a source of “knowledge”, innate and non-verbal, energy through which we can feel and understand life and each other. Our erotic power being sensational and pre-verbal, is our first language then, not our mother tongue. This innate language historically has been neglected in favour of rational knowledge. 

Silvia Federici highlights how connected women once were to their bodies and nature. Women knew which herbs to heal sickness and which induced miscarriage. All before the scientific method. This knowledge was used to justify burning women as witches. It was so powerful it threatened the formation of modern capitalist European society. If women could control their bodies’ ability to have children, then who would give birth to the labour force capitalism necessitates?

Still, for me blaming men and resenting the patriarchy doesn’t heal me because the pain is in my body. I projected my pain onto men everywhere, but it never ceased my anguish. I saw and felt it everywhere until I addressed how it was showing up in my body and how I was carrying it with me. Only I have the power to release it. Ritual provides this space for me. 

What is trauma? It is the body-mind's biological response to threat. Yet even when the threat ceases, the body-mind struggles to regain the state of non-defensiveness it held before the event(s). We remain in hypervigilant states and can experience debilitating anxiety. The body can manifest physical illness if stuck in situations that cause chronic stress. 

We are living in a world with more understanding of trauma, but not all psychiatry understands it. Diagnoses can help identify challenges one may face, but they should not be a life sentence. Understanding trauma can help de-pathologise many mental and physical illnesses because trauma isn’t permanent. It can be transformed through (understanding) the body. 

My understanding of trauma is a radical one. I believe it can be a call to remember forgotten bodily wisdom. That “trauma” in and of itself as a “problem” does not exist. The body's way of adapting to circumstances and its environment is natural therefore, trauma is not a biological response, it is biology. 

Federici speaks of “occult virtues,” as the body’s timeless capacity to experience a large range of sensations, and the psyche a large range of states outside ordinary states of consciousness. This (sensual) knowledge, and arguably erotic power, as Lorde puts it, was more easily accessible to humans before capitalism, patriarchy, and colonisation. 

Using Federici’s lens, we see that the body-mind when experiencing sensations like those present in a trigger could actually be a call to our ancestral knowledge and our bodies’ ability to open up to other states of being outside of what society has disciplined and colonised the body-mind into. What society considers sane in mind and healthy in body is actually very limited. Society, try as it might, cannot discipline, colonise or oppress the soul.

Trauma, then, is the collective denial of the truly vast somatic sensations of the body, and non-ordinary states of consciousness in all human beings. It is disciplining the body out of sensations that help heal us, guide us and open us up to magic, spirit, nature and abundance. It is the opposite of recognising the God in our own body. God is in our tissue however knotted it might be. God is the life force inherent behind every single sensation. Both good and bad. 

I was disciplining my body when around Tom. Unconsciously or otherwise, in his presence, I attempted to diminish my true erotic power because it was not telling me to have sex. Arguably contradictory like Tom’s promises. But our erotic power isn’t synonymous with lust. It is a sensational experience of the truth. Which in this case was my body rejecting someone I thought I wanted.

Healing my trauma demands a practice of devotion to my body and my nervous system, bringing myself back into my body. Learning to speak the language of my body rather than applying rules to it about how I think it should function.

The state of our orgasm mirrors the state of our nervous system. This information is evidence of how potent our erotic energy is and helps us understand how integral our body is in healing, how it holds onto pain for us, and if listened to properly, shows us the route back to our fullest selves. 

When I practise magick rituals, I feel an ecstatic energy running through the whole of me. To me, this energy is the divine, it is how I know there is more than just the material plane, so I can trust in a bigger plan for my life that makes all the pain I have experienced bearable. 

Other times my body convulses of its own accord and repeats the form it took when I was being sexually assaulted. This is frightening, but in order to process it, it helps to cultivate awareness over fear. On good days this energy passing through my body feels like a cosmic orgasm bringing me into alignment. On bad days, it feels like the violence of my past is trapped inside me on repeat. 

Owning our pain and our pleasure as one is spiritual. Through ritual, I’ve had spiritual experiences that connect me profoundly to both my body and something bigger than myself in truly erotic ways. Had I not experienced the pleasure of this somatic divinity through ritual, then I would not have realised that the interaction with Tom fell dramatically short of what I knew my body could feel. 

I have learnt the hard way that my body's sensations are not something to be feared or shut down to give myself over to what somebody else wants. No. That prolongs my suffering and repeats the cycle of trauma. Now I refuse to discount my body, my occult forces, my intuition, my sensual knowledge, my erotic power, my innate truth, my somatic divinity - whatever name you want to call it. 

In Body Work by Melissa Febos, she describes a historic and cultural pressure on women to prioritize “the feelings and the desires of others - sometimes total strangers-” over our own. Yet, I had become so familiar and at home with my body through ritual and somatics that I was able to prioritise my own experience over what Tom wanted. A man I had met twice.

My body needs slowness so that I can feel the sensations I was trying to run from. Ritual works so well for me because it allows me to dedicate time and space to my fullest form; to my messiness, to my wholeness, to convulse, to shake, to release old versions of me and to let new ones emerge, to feel everything. This is a form of self-worship.

Ritual helps me move energy through my body, transforming my trauma. I have to do this. I was not blessed with the luxury of opting out of healing in this life. In truth, I don’t think any of us are. We de-pathologise our pain by understanding that no one in this world gets off scot-free. Not me, not you, not Tom. We can use our pain as a pathway to divinity. This became obvious to me the more I let myself feel sensations I had not allowed myself to before.

Through spirituality, I have been able to create safety in my body by sitting with the complexity and beauty of all of my emotions. So, why would I accept when Tom offered me less?

Magick gifted me the knowledge that I am not restricted by the material world's disciplining of my body and the men who chose to hurt me. I am freed by working with the occult forces of my body. My awakening may look like the biological process and sensations of trauma, but now it has formed a connection to something so much larger than myself, who I am, or have ever been. 

FKA Twigs' art helped me move trauma out of my whole body and connect to something bigger. It is this understanding of my body and divinity that I believe was lost on Tom. 

I want to transform my trauma, and that doesn't happen by using others to run from myself. In fact that repeats it. Healing occurs by listening to my body and letting it do the talking. Letting it shake, shout, scream and say “no”. Letting it feel guttural rage, grief and total heartbreak. 

In other words: Letting it be triggered.

For how violated it has been and how I am still dealing with this.

What was or wasn’t in Tom’s arms is no longer what I am looking for. His touch could not reach the deepest parts of me. 

It is through ritual I found the truest parts of myself. Maybe it was never Tom’s responsibility to find those parts of me, but now I know that sleeping with men who cannot receive the fullness of me is not a ritual that bears repeating.