Karden’s Corner: by Karden Rabin
In comic book movies, the first film is always about how the protagonist becomes a hero. It’s called an origin story. If you haven’t looked back at your life to see how you’ve become who you presently are as if you were a hero in a comic, I highly suggest you do. In the meantime, I thank you in advance for indulging me.
Once upon a time, I was a jerk from New Jersey. Which is true. Alternatively, I could say I was a deeply insecure, emotionally repressed, sad, angry, intelligent, arrogant and immature young man. Which is also true.
I was basically asleep at the wheel as a conscious observer of my own life until my sophomore year of college. At the peak of my jerkdom, I got into a fight with a friend at a party. We were both drunk. During this fight, my friend enumerated – with the righteous truth made possible by alcohol – a dozen examples of how much of a piece of crap I was, especially as it related to how I treated others.
During the fight itself, my outward self was cursing her off and firing back, but another awareness in my mind that I was not familiar with (I would come to use Stephen Cope’s term True Self for this part) knew that every single thing she was saying was true and this part was sad and ashamed of being the person she was so vividly describing. Outwardly, I continued to act like nothing she said mattered and after a little while I ended up driving off with some friends.
But inside I was shaken. So much so (and the alcohol didn’t help) that I crashed my car into a berm on the way back to my college campus. No one was injured but the car suffered over $5,000 of damage. I was even more ashamed and scared. I lied to my family and friends and said the reason I crashed was that I had swerved to avoid an animal.
The new awareness in my mind stayed with me. It knew that underneath the crust of my arrogant and unkind personality was another self (in parts work we might call this the True Self). A person that I already was but didn’t know how to be. Over the next six months with the aid of the self help section at Borders Bookstore and readings recommended by my dad I started exploring how to become a better person (as I called it at the time). I read Dale Carnegie’s books, I read Alan Watts’ books, I read The Power of Now and many others. The idea that I could consciously choose who I wanted to be was novel, exciting and hard work…and little did I know I was just scratching the surface (figuratively, neurologically and somatically).
On October 30th, 2005 (a little less than two years after the fight with my friend), in the early hours of the morning, my mother unexpectedly died in her bedroom of cardiopulmonary failure due to internal bleeding from ulcers and a cocktail of prescribed and over the counter drugs that depressed her bodily functions. You could also say she died from the opioid epidemic (before there was a name for it) because she had been prescribed twelve Percocets a day for more than a decade for her chronic back pain by her physician. The two packs of Merit Ultima 100s that she smoked every day didn’t help either.
I think it would be more accurate to say that she died from the addictive behavior she used to cover up her deep pain spawned by brutal attachment injuries and emotional neglect inflicted upon her by her Eastern European Jewish immigrant, pogrom-surviving, multi-generationally-traumatized parents. And for which she did not have access to the incredible knowledge and clinical practice that we now have today.
I remember being led into the room where her corpse lay. I was left alone and for about three minutes I broke down into body wracking sobs of grief and experienced the most powerful physical-emotional feelings of my life. Then, completely involuntarily, they stopped. I remember it vividly. It was like some part of me forced the lid back onto a boiling iron cauldron and buried it under 100 feet of earth.
As I mentioned earlier, I was already detached from my emotions, but after that I was even more so. When I was sitting shiva and receiving the condolences of our loved ones, I didn’t feel anything. In fact, I spent my time consoling them instead of the other way around. I knew the right things to say, but I couldn’t feel any of the things that were supposed to go with those words. When I got back to college, I walked around campus for months in what I now can see as a functional shock-like state of dissociation.
My best friend would check in with me to see how I was doing. He’d observe that I was doing “too well.” And I would agree with him! My True Self had a strong hunch that not feeling anything was not normal and likely not good. At the same time, despite this cognitive awareness, I was powerless to access the emotions in the iron cauldron.
Occasionally, a song by Carly Simon or Jefferson Airplane would come on the radio that reminded me of my mother. For a few seconds or a minute at most, I would feel bubbles of emotions rise up from the cauldron in my chest and mist my eyes. I would get excited. Here were the feelings! And then, again, completely involuntarily, the feelings would get forced back into the cauldron and covered with the iron lid. Each time I was dumbfounded and disappointed. What was wrong with me?
It was my senior year and I had no idea what I was doing after college. I knew I was “supposed” to go to law school or Wall Street, live in NYC, make a bunch of money, be successful, move back to NJ. After my mom died, I was still clueless, but the pressure of what I was supposed to do vanished – the power of the explicit and implicit influence our primary attachments have on us cannot be understated – and (at least for me) when that attachment deceased, so did much of her influence.
Friends invited our family to their vacation home as a refuge for a few weeks around Christmas to help us mourn the loss of mom. While we were there they said we had to work with their wonderful massage therapist. I had always liked massages so it wasn’t a surprise that I said yes. What was a surprise was that during the session I had the experience of a voice that was not mine in my head announce: “this is what you’re supposed to do.” As in, I was supposed to become a bodyworker. I am not a religious person nor do I believe this was a religious experience, but it was without doubt the most inexplicable thing that has ever happened to me. I can’t help but think a similar experience is what the Joan of Arcs and Mohammeds throughout time have had happen to them.
In any event, I listened to the supernatural announcement and when I saw my family that afternoon I told them that after I graduated from my outrageously expensive liberal arts college, instead of going to law school or Wall Street, I was going to massage school. To their credit, they took it well and didn’t protest.
Massage therapy school was the best experience of my life. I was totally in love with what we were learning and I was pleased to discover that I had a natural talent for it too. Was it patently obvious to an outsider that I was learning non-opioid based ways of ridding people of their pain on a crusade to save my mother? Probably. But believe it or not, I had very little awareness of this.
What I was very aware of was that over the course of my training, between yoga in the mornings (which I had never done before) and hours of receiving massage, my body did some fascinating things. The first was to feel (which was a big deal for an emotionally repressed person like me) and release an enormous amount of rage. In fact, sometimes the discharge of rage was so palpable from my body that my fellow students would stop working on me because they felt unsafe. The wild thing was that although I could feel it in my body, I had no idea why it was there or where it was coming from. I’d tell them that I was freaked out too by what my body was doing!
Over many months of this, not only did the rage subside but the tightness and constriction in my muscles that inhibited many yoga postures went away. Even though I didn’t understand the mechanism at the time, I knew that my increased mobility was from the release of the anger, not the stretching of my muscles. It was wonderful, I felt light and literally more comfortable in myself. In fact, my entire family agrees that after massage school my irritability, short temper and NJ jerkiness was diminished even more than it was from practicing Dale Carnegie and Eckhart Tolle’s teachings (we’ll talk more about top down and bottom up approaches in subsequent articles).
For the next decade I practiced massage therapy. And though the most profound shifts I had at massage school had been emotional in nature, I somehow overlooked that and fully devoted myself to being the best structural bodyworker and functional movement therapist I could be. I worshiped on the hallowed ground of “if I can just get all the biomechanics of this human being to be perfectly aligned and moving correctly, all their pain will go away and they’ll live happily ever after.” Using this perspective I helped many people and built up a respectable reputation as a bodyworker. At the same time, there were many peoples whose pain would stubbornly persist despite all the best structural and functional (much less conventional and medical) therapies applied to them. This was very frustrating and disheartening, especially since one of those individuals with stubbornly persistent pain was me.
Not long after my mom died I began to experience back aches. In the beginning they were after a long period of standing or sitting. Then of course, there was a deadlifting injury at Crossfit and that was the first time my back “went out.” And from there, the bouts of my back going out increased in frequency and the back pain would extend for months at a time. Despite all my knowledge and training I was inexorably marching down the path of chronic back pain that contributed to my mother’s death.
Ironically, It was in the midst of teaching anatomy and kinesiology to yoga students (while I was secretly in a lot of pain) that I found the 100% non-anatomical cure for my pain. On the shelf of the yoga studio was Healing Back Pain by John Sarno MD. In his book he posits that the vast majority of pain is the result of the mind repressing painful emotions. He further goes on to say that once you become aware of this and deny the structural basis for the pain and instead focus on the emotional connection and expression, it will go away. And you know what? It did. My pain melted away in the very midst of reading the book.
I couldn’t un-experience what I had experienced. From that moment on, I couldn’t continue practicing bodywork as I had been. I mean, I had just made my pain go away by reading a book, thinking some thoughts and acknowledging an emotional origin of my pain, WTF?
Cue the montage sequence (this is the part of the movie where in a three minute sprint, the superhero learns how to use his powers). The next two years were a blur of experimentation and empirical learning inside the laboratory of my own mindbody. Initially, I had the advantage of zero academic or clinical training in psychology or trauma so I postulated my own theories and followed my own intuition to find, feel and heal the emotions that Sarno asserted were behind my pain.
The pain in my body was my guide. When my back hurt, instead of stretching, reaching for my foam roller or rushing to my chiropractor, I would lay down in solitude and answer its call. I would clear my mind and focus on the pain in my back. I would begin with sensation, the S of Peter Levine’s SIBAM (sensation, image, behavior, affect, meaning) conception of consciousness. I would ask myself “what other sensations am I feeling in my back along with the pain?” This would lead to feedback like tightness, gripping, pressure etc. Then I would thank my body for the answer and quest deeper. “What emotions are cohabiting with the sensations?” Amazingly, the boiling cauldron finally began to release its contents. And I would feel sadness, grief and rage in my body. Memories from childhood as well as metaphorical images would arise and bring context and meaning to long trapped emotions. After discovering and discharging the raw physical force of the feelings, my True Self was able to attend to and coordinate the different parts of me that needed validation, soothing, reparenting and perhaps most importantly, self leadership. The pain would go away (which was awesome) but that was no longer the goal. Becoming whole was what mattered. Maintaining and expanding the richness and depth of the feeling of being alive via embodiment was what mattered. Integration, though an accurate word for this process, barely does it justice. This was a global awareness, attunement and coordinated reorganization of my psychology, neurology and soma – or as I call it in my work, a total consciousness rewire.
I call myself, my clients and my students self-healers, as I believe that the agency for healing comes from within. That being said, we are not lone-healers. Throughout my journey, wonderful mentors and clinicians worked with me when I would get stuck or needed the support of someone else to feel things in my body that were too much for me alone. They are indispensable and I am forever indebted to them.
And of course, the quintessential readings also crossed my path. Margaret Paul’s Inner Bonding, Gabor Mate’s When the Body Says No, Howard Schubiner’s Psychophysiologic Disorders, Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, Peter Levine’s Waking the Tiger, Stephen Porges Pocket Guide to Polyvagal Theory, Richard Schwarts’ Internal Family Systems Therapy and many more. Each book explained and expanded upon things that I had discovered in my own personal exploration. It was revelatory and radically affirming of my experience. I also saw all of them as seamlessly interrelated approaches for navigating and healing the seamlessly interrelated human mind and body (via the nervous system). They are different, in the same way that a hammer and a screwdriver are different, but they serve identical purposes in that they both exist to repair a piece of furniture or build a house.
I eventually got my formal trauma training in Somatic Experiencing and in mindbody syndromes with Howard Schubiner MD and Charlie Merril PT. But I still don’t have any letters after my name bestowed by a university. I am just a person who, through his own self-healing, endless fascination, practical learning, devotion to helping people and no small measure of dumb luck, is regarded by many as good at this stuff.
This is how I became a mindbody practitioner. I no longer care much for biomechanics or functional movement. I care about human beings, their nervous systems and all of their parts. I teach people how to safely and sustainably access, integrate and lead their total consciousness through top down and bottom embodied nervous system practices. My specialty is helping people heal themselves from chronic pain and psychophysiological disorders like chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and IBS. Along with my co-founder, I lead a program called CFS School which trains students from around the world how to heal themselves from the aforementioned maladies and I conduct my private practice out of my clinic in West Stockbridge MA.
Over the next several weeks I have been invited by the Trauma Research Foundation to submit a series of articles related to all things mindbody and embodied. I promise that the subsequent articles will be shorter, more coherent and always of immediate practical value to your own self-healing and to the clients you support.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for listening to my story. I have never publicly shared it before 🙏
DeMelo, Juno, “I Have to Believe This Book Cured My Pain: A science writer investigates the 30-year-old claims of an iconoclast doctor who said chronic pain was mostly mental.” The New York Times, Nov. 9, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/well/mind/john-sarno-chronic-pain-relief.html
Karden Rabin is a mindbody practitioner specializing in psychophysiologic disorders and the co-founder of CFS School
