The Distress Response in Aikido, Trauma Recovery, and Peacemaking

The Distress Response in Aikido, Trauma Recovery, & Peacemaking

An Experiential Workshop for the
2007 Conference of the German Aiki Extensions

Paul Linden, Ph.D.
Columbus Center for Movement Studies, Columbus, Ohio, USA
www.being-in-movement.com

What does Aikido have in common with trauma recovery and conflict resolution? In all three areas, people face challenges which evoke bodily distress responses, and these distress responses reduce people’s ability to act in effective ways. And in all three areas, the foundation for effective action is a mind/body state of calm alertness and compassionate strength.

THE DISTRESS RESPONSE    
The body responds to any form of stress by contracting. When people feel threatened or challenged in any way, they typically contract their breathing, posture, movement, and attention, and this can take six related forms. It may take the form of tensing and bracing as a preparation for strength and effort. It may take the similar form of tensing and hardening in anger. It may show up as stiffening and constricting in fear. It may take the form of collapsing and becoming limp in defeat and resignation. It may manifest in numbing of specific areas of the body or in an overall state of dissociation. Or elements of these can combine.

Contracting the body reduces ease and effectiveness. Acting in a state of contraction is like driving a car with the parking brakes on. Doing any kind of movement when the breath and muscles are made small (whether tensely or limply) will make the movement effortful, inefficient and awkward. But beyond this, the contraction response reduces the ability to think flexibly; it reduces the ability to function calmly; and it reduces emotional sensitivity and empathy.

In Aikido, receiving the attack in the contractive states of fear, anger, effort, and so on, interferes with the ability to move effectively and control the attacker. Moreover, the non-violence that is the goal of Aikido is based on receiving the attack in a mindbody state of calmness and kindness, which is just the opposite of the distress reaction. The distress response shows in the way people flinch away from the attack or attempt to escape it in various ways. It shows in the way people rush through the techniques. It shows in how people stiffen their breathing as they are attacked. It manifests in people’s touching their opponent in a harsh manner. And it shows in the way people try to muscle through techniques rather than relaxing and blending. Teaching Aikido students how to reduce the distress responses allows the students to more easily learn Aikido techniques.

A traumatic situation is one in which an life-threatening event overwhelms an individual’s coping and survival resources. Being traumatized is the condition in which the distress response becomes permanently lodged in the body, and the persistence of the distress response keeps trauma survivors bound to the pain of the trauma. Trauma survivors often respond to present situations with the fear, anger, dissociation or  passivity they experienced during the situations that traumatized them. This interferes with their ability to live with clear perception and effective strength, and it sets them up for being overwhelmed and traumatized again. Teaching trauma survivors how to overcome the distress responses allows the students to make better use of ongoing psychotherapy, and it allows them to live their daily lives in greater comfort and efficacy.

The distress response is detrimental in conflict resolution and peacemaking. Resolving conflicts in productive ways requires people to be able to speak and listen with respectful assertiveness as well as stay focused on the issues. The distress reaction manifests in such emotions as anger or anxiety, and in intransigence or tunnel vision, all of which interfere with the ability to interact well with the other person in the conflict. Moreover, the distress response creates a vicious circle. The non-verbal body language of the distress response shows that you are feeling/thinking “threat, danger, enemy, fight, run!” and that non-verbal message will elicit the same fight-or-flight physical arousal in your opponent, which will reinforce your distress arousal. In the state of distress, you will treat each other as enemies rather than fellow human beings, which will undermine any attempts at conflict resolution. Teaching people how to overcome the distress responses allows the students to approach conflicts in  more constructive ways.

CENTERING
Overcoming the distress reaction is a key to improving functioning in Aikido, trauma recovery, and conflict resolution (and in any other area of life as well). The distress response is a physical action of contraction, and it is possible to replace it with a physical action of expansion.
This paper will briefly describe a simple, systematic way of putting the body into a state of relaxed, alert expansiveness as an antidote to the contraction of the distress response. This process of cultivating and using this body state is called centering.

It is possible to prevent or overcome contraction by deliberately placing the body in a state of freedom and balance. Action is much more efficient and effective when the body is relaxed, free and expansive. Every activity, whether it is primarily physical, intellectual, emotional, or spiritual will be done with greater ease and efficacy when the body is open.

The centered state is a state of wholeness and integrity. It can be described in different ways. Speaking in structural language, the state of integrity is one in which the musculoskeletal system is balanced and free of strain. Speaking functionally, this state allows stable, mobile and balanced movement. Speaking in psychological terms, this state involves reaching out into the world with a symmetrical, expansive awareness and intentionality  while simultaneously staying anchored in internal body awareness. Speaking in spiritual terms, this state is an integration of the body states of power and love. Speaking in ethical terms, this state creates an awareness of and concern for the effects of one’s actions on the wellbeing of others. Whatever terms we choose to use, they refer to one and the same mindbody  state.
For some mysterious reason, it is easy and automatic for human beings to drop into the distress response, but centering needs to be learned and practiced, and it needs to be engaged in voluntarily and deliberately. The key to centering lies in developing and applying body awareness.

BODY AWARENESS
What is body awareness? The simple answer is that it is the ongoing process of feeling and noticing your body as you perform actions. That’s a simple answer, but there is a lot hidden in it.

To begin with, most of us do not feel our bodies very clearly or fully, but since we don’t have anything to compare that to, we don’t notice how little we notice. And of course, we aren’t directly aware of the negative effects of not noticing our bodies.
 
Being aware of your body means:
noticing, feeling, sensing, savoring—
the rhythms, tones, qualities, shapes—
of your breathing, your muscles, your posture, your movements— 
how you deploy your attention inside and outside of your body— 
how intentions shape muscle actions and movements—
how all that is a response to what is happening to and around you— 
how it affects your abilities to respond to what is happening to and around you.

The purpose of body awareness training is to wake up the human capacity for choice. Once you are aware of doing/choosing the distress reaction as you do it, you will have the opportunity to choose expansiveness as an antidote to contraction.

BODY-BASED SPEAKING
The key to developing body awareness is learning to use body-based language for describing the feelings and actions that are part of the distress response. That means giving detailed and complete statements of precisely where in your body there is something going on and precisely what you are doing at that location. Body-based speaking means pinning down thoughts, feelings, and intentions by defining them in terms of observable, physical response patterns and tangible physical sensations. This is a process of pinning down emotions through operational definitions.

Normally, people are so used to feeling themselves as “mental” and “emotional” beings that they don't notice the physical substrate for mental and emotional events. However, emotional and mental responses can be defined in physical terms. Thus, for example, rather than thinking of anger as something in the mind, you could look at anger as a complex physical action, which might include clenching your fists, tightening your jaw, breathing more rapidly etc. The mental aspect of anger, then, would be what is felt or experienced when these physical actions are done in the body.

Becoming aware of the body events which bubble along within you, often out of your conscious awareness, is important in the process of self-observation and change for a number of reasons.

First, taking a body perspective transforms strong feelings from overwhelming, incomprehensible experiences to a series of simple physical events. Instead of feeling terror, for example, you may be tightening your throat, stopping your breathing, hunching your shoulders and so on. That alone takes some of the power out of the feeling.

Second, body-based language facilitates the development of a stable observer-self. By stepping back from the whirlwind of emergency arousal and studying the body as the locus of emotions, you will attain some distance from and perspective on the emotions you are experiencing. That mental stability is the foundation for being able to know yourself and make informed decisions about what to feel, think, and do.
 Third, examining your body will help you become aware of and understand what you are feeling. Very often our awareness is restricted to just one part of what we are feeling, but the whole of what we are doing is happening in our bodies. By scanning your body, you can bring into your awareness the body events of emotions you aren’t noticing, and you can start to feel those emotions and understand their influence on your actions and your life.

Fourth, once you understand feelings as series of physical actions, you begin to realize they don’t just happen to you. They are physical actions that you are doing, even if you aren’t normally aware of your role in doing them. And once you realize that you do your emotions, you can do the opposite actions. You can replace one set of actions with another. Looking at fear, for example, instead of tensing muscles, you can relax them. Instead of reducing breathing, you can increase it. Instead of shrinking, you can open up. When you do the opposite of fear, you will feel the opposite of fear, and you will become the opposite of afraid. You will become relaxed, alert, and capable.
Physical thinking offers a clear and distinct avenue for creating internal change. The body is solid and graspable. Once you can experience mental, emotional, intentional and behavioral patterns as lived body configurations/actions, you will be able to identify the configurations of dysfunctional patterns and then deliberately construct more positive patterns as replacements. By altering physical configurations, you will also be altering mental, emotional and behavioral patterns.

AIKIDO ROOTS
The essence of centering  is expansiveness, that is, being present and wide open in breathing, posture, movement and intentionality. The concept of expansiveness and methods for achieving it are, I believe,  part of Aikido, but they are usually more implicit than explicit in Aikido instruction. It was in Aikido practice that I had the opportunity to study myself in movement. Aikido was my laboratory for developing and testing my ideas and methods of body awareness training. Aikido pointed me in the direction of expansiveness. However, the concepts and exercises are generally not brought out in the specific, systematic ways that I need to learn and like to teach. In the end, I had to develop my own training methods. These training methods emphasize breaking complex, global processes down into modular units of exercise and skill acquisition.

In the workshop for Aiki Extensions, I showed examples of the basic awareness and expansiveness exercises I use in working with the three application areas that this paper focuses on. Any one of these applications merits a whole book, but I think that a brief survey can make clear how Aiki-based mindbody training can be extended into daily life activities. Detailed written descriptions of the techniques of body education processes that I teach demand a good deal of space, more space than would be appropriate here. For those readers interested in seeing exactly how the techniques are done, the articles and books on my website provide a detailed and extensive description of the somatic education methods I have developed and their applications in various areas of life. 

EXPANSIVENESS EXERCISES
I call the systematic process of body awareness teaching that I have developed Being In Movement® mindbody training (BIM). BIM is an educational process which uses practical movement experiments to help people learn how to examine the body as the self, and it explores the underlying links between structural/functional efficiency, emotional/spiritual wholeness, and social justice. By examining how breathing, posture, and movement simultaneously shape and are shaped by thoughts, feelings, and intentions, BIM teaches people how to discover the underlying ideas that rule and restrict their movements and how to develop more effective strategies for action—strategies based on mindbody integrity. In teaching expansiveness, I work with a number of interrelated elements: muscle tone, breathing, posture, attitude,  movement, intentionality, and task performance. In this paper, I will describe one brief exercise for each element. In actual teaching, I use a much broader range of exercises.

Muscle Tone
Since most forms of the distress reaction are built on muscular contraction, relaxing your muscles offers a quick way of undoing them. (Limp resignation is not built on muscular tension, and it demands a different starting point undoing it.)
Let your tongue relax and hang softly in your mouth. What does that do? Most people find that as soon as they relax their tongue, immediately their throat, shoulders and breathing soften as well.
In addition to letting your tongue soften, let your belly hang free and loose. I start by having students stand up and alternate tightening their bellies and letting them plop out. Then I have them release their bellies without doing a preliminary tightening. People generally experience a noticeable release even though they had not first tightened their bellies consciously, and they realize from this that they had been unconsciously holding themselves tight and that they probably hold themselves tight all the time.
This process of core muscle relaxation is rapid, effective and totally unobtrusive. You can practice it anywhere, anytime, and you can use it in any situation to help decrease the distress reaction.

Breathing
When people confront a difficulty or a challenge, typically their breathing stops or gets shallow. Constricting the breath is a key element in the distress response, and breathing more openly is the foundation for efficacy. I usually start instruction in breathing by reminding people to relax the belly. Next I have them touch their bellies and experiment with their breathing until they discover how to drop the movement of inhalation into the pit of their bellies, expanding the belly and the lower back as well as the chest when they inhale. This is just the opposite of the pattern of breathing involved in fear or anger, in which the belly is tightened and the chest elevated during inhalation.
   
Posture
I begin working on postural stability by having people sit slumped down and then move into an upright sitting position. I ask them to feel how sitting upright is accomplished. Most people think that sitting upright is accomplished by throwing the shoulders back or by straightening the back, and practically no one notices that the whole process is built around pelvic rotation. When the pelvis rotates backward (the direction in which the guts in the pelvic bowl would spill out over the back edge of the pelvis), the stack of vertebrae has no foundation on which to rest and it slumps down. Rotating the pelvis forward—in the appropriate way—provides a foundation for the spinal column and the torso as a whole and creates upright posture.

Most people rotate the pelvis forward by using the superficial muscles in the back to pull upward on the rear edge of the pelvis. I have students pull their shoulder blades and back pockets together, and   they feel how their backs arch and their postures become tense and top heavy.

To find the more effective way of coming to an upright sitting posture, I ask students to slump and notice that when they do, the pubic symphysis (the bone in front of the pelvis, just above the genitals) points upwards. The more appropriate way to rotate the pelvis forward involves moving the pubic symphysis forward and down so that it points toward the floor. This uses the iliacus and psoas muscles (which are muscles deep in the front of the body) to do the movement. This new sitting posture creates an effortless stability and a physical sensation of exhilaration and power, which is the opposite of the weakness and inability produced by constriction.

 Attitude
The next step in the development of expansiveness is the development of a loving heart. I ask people to imagine a situation in which they have to deal with a boss who is antagonistic, critical, and disrespectful, and I have them note the physical changes they experience. Generally people feel tension in the chest and shortening of the breath as well as other tensions throughout the body. Then I have people imagine someone or something that makes their heart smile. This not only reverses the changes created by imagining the uncomfortable situation but also produces sensations of relaxation, warmth, softness and openness in the chest.  These sensations of being “warm-hearted” are the bodily manifestations of love. Not only does the chest soften, but the whole body becomes freer and more unified, and this improves body use and the coordinated delivery of power in any action. Of course, seeing love as a foundation for power also ensures that power will be used wisely and constructively.

Power and love, contrary to the model that our culture uses, really are inseparable. Love without power is limp and ineffective, and power without love is rigid and harsh. (Here I am using the terms with their more usual meanings, as though they were in fact separable.) In either case, love or power is diminished to the point where it becomes just a shadow and not true power or love at all. Power is the foundation for the ability to love, and love is the foundation for the wise use of power. This is not mere philosophy but is simply a shorthand method of stating that the body and the self must be soft and receptive as well as integrated and strong in order to function well.

Movement
Walking offers a convenient place to begin the study of movement since the movements of walking are fundamental parts of many other activities.

To develop people's awareness of an efficient walking gait, I have them walk around and practice propelling themselves forward with their rear foot. They step forward using an exaggerated pressing down and back with the ball of the back foot, which gives them a new experience of walking.

Having students walk with this new awareness transforms their walking. The back/down energy reflects off the floor into a forward/up movement of the body. They have a ground to stand on, a foundation for themselves. Their posture opens upward. Their walk becomes more erect, clearer and more energetic. People often conceive of walking as falling down onto their forward foot, rather than springing up off their back foot, but when they walk that way, they sag and fall downward. Their energy droops. The new way of moving is mechanically more efficient and powerful. It is also much more confident and alert.

Intentionality
Another element of the process of developing empowerment and wholeness has to do with intentionality. Intention is the process that shapes posture, movement, and action. Helping people directly experience the intentional foundations of their actions is a way of both moving them to take responsibility for their responses and showing them how to improve their responses. 

When you have an image of a movement and intend to execute the movement, your brain sends nerve impulses to the muscles which will do the movement. The muscles can act with a range of force, from a barely perceptible tensing to an all-out clenching. However, even below the range of what is barely perceptible to most people, there is still physical activity, the faintest stirrings of the muscles. You could call these faint, normally imperceptible tensings “micromovements.” All you have to do is wish to begin moving in some direction and your body will begin to do that movement, either at a microlevel or in larger, more obvious ways.

There is no separation between the mind and the body. Intending something is the beginning of doing it. And underlying every action, is the intent to do that action, though people are not often aware of the volitional foundations of their actions. (To be more precise, every voluntary action has an intentional foundation. Simple reflex movements do not arise from intentions.) Experiencing the intentional foundations of action moves people in the direction of taking responsibility for the things they do.

There is a specific intentional shape which promotes efficiency and effectiveness. The Six Directions Reaching exercise is a way of practicing the intention of expansiveness. I have people stand quietly, with a centered posture, breathing calmly, and feeling their body smiling. Then I ask them to sense in their body that they are reaching, with their feet and legs, deep into the ground. After half a minute or so, I ask them to reach, with their shoulders and head up into the sky. Next I have them reach, with one side of their body, out to the horizon, and then with the other side. Then I have them do the same reaching toward the horizon with the front of their  body and then with the rear. And last, I have them reach out in all six directions simultaneously.

People usually experience a physical lengthening toward each direction. And reaching out in all six directions usually produces a sensation of spaciousness and brightness. This exercise is a way of practicing constructing an open, even, symmetrical, expansive awareness of the whole body.

APPLICATIONS
Once people can construct an expansive mindbody state. They can then begin practicing applying that state as a foundation for effective action in Aikido, trauma recovery, and peacemaking.

The logic of all three areas of practice is the same. First, in the ordinary way, try an activity that would be part of Aikido, trauma recovery, or peacemaking, and notice what happens your breathing, posture, attention, and movement. Typically that will be a distress contraction of some kind. Second, bring your body into the state of openness, using one or more of the methods described above. Third, try the activity again while holding your body in the expansive state. Typically, people will experience greater ease, balance, awareness, and effectiveness.
For an application to Aikido, any of the Aikido self-defense techniques will do. Although it is often not dealt with explicitly, any punch or grab or kick will elicit some degree of distress, especially in beginners. Having people practice opening their bodies will make a noticeable difference in the smoothness and power of their defense movements and in the speed with which they learn the techniques they are practicing.
For an application in the area of trauma recovery, you could ask the client to say one word about the trauma situation— perhaps “rape” or “crash” — and notice their body distress responses. Talking about a trauma in psychotherapy is necessary for healing, but all too often, talking about the  trauma is emotionally overwhelming and amounts to practicing being traumatized. Instead, opening the body allows the client to talk about the trauma while staying anchored in a state of comfort and empowerment. This helps the person break the chains of the trauma.

For an application in the area of peacemaking, a role play of a conflict situation will offer opportunities for practice. For one simple example, you could have people work in pairs and ask one person to get close to their partner and yell “NO!” It may sound trivial, but even this symbolic attack will usually elicit a real physical distress response. Having people practice opening their bodies in a learning situation will make a noticeable difference in their ability to respond to a real-life conflict in an assertive and calm manner.

CONCLUSION
The body is the constant in all of life’s activities. Whatever you may do, your body will be part of the action. The distress response alienates you from yourself and others, and it reduces your ability to live well. However, improving your awareness and control of your body will improve any and every action in your life. In particular, the state of somatic expansiveness is an antidote to the distress response and a foundation for effective and kind behavior in Aikido, trauma recovery and peacemaking. Body education which focuses on the three applications described here improves the ability to live in a more constructive way. Working directly with the body can be challenging to many people, but it is important.

PAUL LINDEN, Ph.D. is a somatic educator and martial artist, founder of the Columbus Center for Movement Studies, and the developer of Being In Movement® mindbody training. He holds a Ph.D. in Physical Education, is an authorized instructor of the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education, and holds a sixth degree black belt in Aikido as well as a first degree black belt in Karate.  His work involves the application of body and movement awareness education to such topics as stress management, conflict resolution, performance enhancement, and trauma recovery. He can be contacted at:

Columbus Center for Movement Studies,
221 Piedmont Road, Columbus, OH 43214, USA
(614) 262-3355.   
paullinden@aol.com
www.being-in-movement.com