What my shoulder was doing

I went because of my shoulder, which is not why I went.

The right one sat about an inch higher than the left. It had done this for as long as anyone could remember. My mother mentioned it in photographs. Two physical therapists had worked on it, competently, and it had come down and gone back up both times. An orthopedist in South Portland took an image, found nothing structurally wrong, and said, kindly, that some people just hold tension.

Some people just hold tension. I wrote that down in the car.

A friend gave me a name — Dell Ferro, in Yarmouth, somatic experiencing — and I put it in my phone for four months before I called. I had a specific fear that it would be woo, and a more specific fear that it would work, which I did not examine at the time.

The office was above a bakery and smelled like it. Two chairs, a low table, a window. No massage table, which I had assumed. No music.

"Nothing much happens in the first session," he said. "Mostly you sit there and I ask you to notice things."

That is roughly what happened. He asked me to look around the room and name three things I could see. I felt ridiculous. Windowsill. Radiator. A crack in the plaster shaped like Vermont. He asked whether the chair was holding me or whether I was holding myself up in the chair.

I had never once considered the question. I checked. I was holding myself up.

That is the whole method, as far as I can tell. Not insight. Not talking about my childhood, which we never did in any organized way. Just: what is happening in you right now, at this exact second, and can you stay with it for eight more seconds without doing anything about it.

He called it titration. Small amounts. He said the mistake people make — the mistake therapy sometimes makes — is going straight at the biggest thing, and that a system that gets flooded does not process, it just braces harder.

So we went slowly. Absurdly slowly. Sessions where the only thing that happened was that I noticed my jaw.

The shoulder came up in week five and he did not touch it.

He asked me to bring my attention there and tell him what I found. I said tight. He asked for more words. I said tight, and then, after a while, I said it felt like it was doing something. He asked what it was doing.

And I heard myself say: it's blocking.

I want to be careful here because this is the part that sounds like a story and I do not entirely trust stories.

What happened is that I sat in a chair above a bakery in Yarmouth and my shoulder was in a defensive position, and had been in a defensive position, and I could feel that it was a position rather than a condition. That distinction is the entire thing. A condition is something you have. A position is something you are doing.

He asked what it was blocking. I said I didn't know. He said that was fine, and that we were not going to go looking, and that I should just notice how the rest of me was doing while my shoulder did its job.

The rest of me was, I discovered, extremely tired.

Something moved. My hands went hot and my eyes went, and I sat there for about a minute and a half in a total physical event I had no narrative for. It was not catharsis. Nothing was revealed. I did not remember anything. My body did something and then stopped doing it, the way a leg unclenches.

He handed me a glass of water and said, "Let's stop there," which annoyed me, and which was correct.

I have been going for fourteen months.

I am not going to tell you my shoulder is fixed, because that would be a tidier ending than I have. It is lower. It goes back up. In March it went all the way back up for three weeks and I was furious.

What is different is smaller and more useful than a fixed shoulder. I can tell, now, when I am doing it. That is all. I catch myself holding a position and I have a choice about it, some of the time, which I did not have before, none of the time.

Eleven years, at minimum, that shoulder was up there. Nobody asked it to.

I still do not fully know what it was blocking. Dell has never once suggested that I need to.

A condition is something you have. A position is something you are doing.