Andrea Gunderson is a massage therapist whose clients find it difficult to be touched.
One woman, after undergoing breast cancer surgery, found she could not lift her left arm above her shoulder. It had “rebelled,” as she put it, against a physical therapist’s exercise regimen, and conventional therapeutic techniques hadn’t helped.
For the woman, a survivor of horrifying domestic abuse, the surgery had been the last, but hardly the least, of her pain. The larger healing was still to come. For now, she simply had to get the arm functioning again so she could start receiving radiation treatment, and because if she failed, she would never have full use of it again.
It was as if the arm refused to risk further pain.
“It would not be additionally traumatized,” said the woman, whom we will call Angela. “I had to find a way to get around this. I had an agreement I wouldn’t hurt myself.”
But Angela was in the right place: Gunderson’s office. For several years, Gunderson has been working with survivors of torture and abuse, most of them from Bosnia and Central America. The experience has fundamentally altered her approach to therapy.
“I began to see more and more with all my clients that they weren’t just a body,” she said, “that touch was touching the whole person. It wasn’t just touching a specific muscle I was touching who they were, their whole history.”
Thus Gunderson never goes into a therapy session with a preconceived notion of how to proceed or with an inflated sense of her role in the healing process. She and the client are in this as equals.
In Angela’s case, “neither of us knew what to do with the arm,” Gunderson said. “What we did was struggle and grope. Finally, we held it like a baby.”
“We just loved it,” said Angela. “Andrea (created) a place where it was safe enough to just be able to say to a part of my body, `I am willing to love you and care for you.’ It’s not just what Andrea does, it’s the miracle of what she can do in relation to the trauma the clients brings in.”
After several sessions, held over a week about a year ago, Gunderson was able to stretch the arm gently. “By the end of the week, I had full use of the arm,” Angela said, demonstrating by lifting it over her head a few times.
Gunderson initially went into massage therapy, almost 10 years ago now, because she wanted to stay home with her young children. She also was close to burnout at her job as an organizer for the Service Employees International Union.
“I was really tired of trying to impact whole organizations,” she said. One day, at her daughter’s swimming class, she met another mother who was a massage therapist. “A light went on. This would combine wellness, working one-on-one, and working at home.”
In 1988, she embarked on a year’s training course at the Chicago School of Massage Therapy and “went from a public to a very private sphere, a retreat into a very different way of life” — concerning herself not with people’s paychecks or working conditions, but with “what’s happening to them internally.”
But it was a change that was not altogether satisfying. Something was missing. She wanted a public dimension to her life again.
Gunderson had gotten a glimpse of how this was possible while still a student, when she volunteered with the AIDS Alternative Health Project, giving massages to people with AIDS and HIV. “That was my first experience with the way body work could be a powerful tool for working with people facing powerful life transitions,” she said.
So in 1991, when a neighbor told her about the Kovler Center, an internationally known place of healing for torture survivors, she jumped at the chance to plug into the Uptown organization. She now works under the auspices of Uptown’s Heartland Alliance for Human Rights and Human Needs, which sponsors both the Bosnian Mental Health Center and the Kovler Center. Most of her current clients are Bosnian Muslims who were tortured in Serbian concentration camps and witnessed the genocide of their people, but she began working primarily with Central Americans.
“For the first time,” Gunderson said, “I found a way to be politically active and make a statement with my work, and provide a tremendously useful service to battered bodies and souls.”
Healing wounds
Gunderson, who works with four other massage therapists at the Kovler Center, says the use of massage therapy to treat victims of torture and abuse is growing.
She argues that people must heal their emotional wounds through their bodies as well as their minds. “The body is such a powerful container of experience,” she said. “Nothing happens to us in our lives that doesn’t impact our bodies as well as our minds and spirits.”
For all of her clients, but particularly for survivors of torture, abuse and serious trauma, this healing can bring up powerful, often hidden emotions.
It’s not uncommon, Gunderson said, for someone to “break into tears on the table out of nowhere,” at which point, all she can do as a therapist is to take a calming breath and “let the person know this is a good place to cry. Treat it as a normal event.
“I am often haunted by the stories I hear and the emotions I witness,” she said. “Just as often — much more often — I am profoundly moved by the strength of my clients and their determination to heal, their determination that the world will be a good place for them. The work we end up doing together ends up being light in the face of tremendous darkness.”
Sometimes the body work is the only way Gunderson and her clients could communicate.
“I didn’t work with an interpreter, so communication was (often) based on touch,” she said. “I simply touched where it hurt. I could be working around scar tissue where they’d been shackled in prison, or headaches due to skulls broken from beatings.” She also worked around their “psychological wounds from having lost faith in humanity and the possibility of healthy human touch.”
One such battered soul was Matilde de la Sierra, a doctor from Guatemala who had been tortured by her country’s military in the mid-’90s. She was “a very scared person” when she came to Gunderson’s office in early 1996, still suffering a great deal of physical pain and flooded with horrible memories.
During that first session with her, Gunderson recalled, “We spent a lot of time making the space safe. She was mostly aware of tension, everywhere in the room. I asked her to place me in the spot in the room where the tension felt least exacerbated.” When de la Sierra had Gunderson stand as far from her as possible, “I knew it would be a long time before I’d touch her. It was several months before she even would lie down on the massage table.”
In the meantime, de la Sierra and Gunderson talked. Using techniques of Hakomi therapy, a body-centered method of psychotherapy developed in the early ’80s by Ron Kurtz, Gunderson got her to focus on her body, mentally enter it and simply notice what it felt like and what was going on.
And what colors she saw.
“She found a sphere of hard, cold black in the pelvic region,” Gunderson said. “This became a metaphor of the rape she had received from the torturers. Previously she had been unable to discuss sexual abuse in psychotherapy. This allowed her to handle it.
“She also found a patch of sky blue in the solar plexus. This also became a metaphor — hope. But her heart area was gray. Sadness.”
Still, after 10 months, shortly before she moved out of town, de la Sierra “was on the massage table and would let me work in areas of her body,” Gunderson said. “She would relax into it. This was brand new. She left with a much fuller awareness of her internal experience, and a greater ability to manage her internal agitation. And she took with her these metaphors for hope and for her wounds.
“She had triumphed over her own absolute fear of another human being touching her.”
The first step in getting her to allow touch back into her life had been a simple one. She and Gunderson hugged each other. This is a traditional Central American form of contact and also, Gunderson explained, “It was face to face. We were equal in power.”
Hugging also helped Gunderson work with Angela, the woman with the rebellious arm. Angela had endured a domestic variety of abuse and torture perhaps even more chilling than the political torture with which Gunderson was by now familiar.
Asking for a hug
Angela speaks only guardedly and elliptically of what she had been through.
“I was extremely abused by a group, starting when I was very young,” she said. The horrors ranged from child pornography to psychological and physical torture. Abuse at this level, you aren’t just talking about a body — you have to talk about a mind, a body, a spirit. They were systematically injured, defiled. The goal was to destroy mind, body and spirit.”
Even before the healing of her arm was possible, she had to learn how to accept any sort of touch at all from another person. “Eventually,” she said, “I was able to ask for a hug.”
Maybe most of us take hugs for granted. Not Angela. “If you can make that clear, what it means to a trauma survivor, an abuse survivor, to be able to ask for and receive a hug . . . We worked five months specifically on hugs.”
Angela said she was out of touch not merely with others, but with herself. She used to joke that she could leave the room without opening a door. That is, her body didn’t matter. It was that part of her that was abused; it belonged to others. She could leave it whenever she wanted because there was no person left in the body.
“The work (with Gunderson) kind of gave me a place to be,” she said. “My body wasn’t a place I went to center myself. It wasn’t a place I respected — it wasn’t a place that was part of me. It was a place of profound rage — I think I caused my cancer — and profound grief, and, I’m just beginning to realize now, profound terror.”
The wonder to Angela is that she found healing through touch.
“As a child, I was brutally violated,” she said. “I never thought it would be through hands that I would heal.”
