Every once in a while, an acupuncture treatment produces a tremendous emotional release. In my decade of practice, I’ve seen it about half a dozen times. It usually comes as a surprise and the patient sometimes has no idea why the emotion is coming up, but in my opinion, it’s always wonderful and transformational when it does.
That’s when the needle bursts the bubble. Interestingly, most times the patient doesn’t even know that they had a bubble.
These sorts of reactions were warned to me and my classmates on one of the first days of acupuncture school, and we frequently reviewed how to help a patient through that release so they feel safe and protected. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately depending on how you look at it, the faculty and students had a lot of experience with emotional releases from traumatic experiences since the acupuncture school was located on the north side of 14th Street in Manhattan, which was only a few blocks from where the World Trade Center towers stood and which happened to be the furthest block south that remained open immediately after September 11th.
It happened to me. The needle burst my bubble during my second year of school. I’d been receiving practice treatments from my classmates for many months, and the usual group of friends that I trusted enough to practice on me knew I had PTSD. We had exchanged nearly a dozen treatments up to this point, and all of them left me feeling that usual relaxed state that I absolutely love about acupuncture. However, this one burst the bubble.
We were in a class practicing a specific protocol not intentionally directed towards treating my PTSD. After only the second needle was inserted the tears began to form. Then they started to flow. Then they flooded and turned into waterfalls. I’ve never cried so hard. It continued for forty-five minutes.
Thankfully, I never felt unsafe or even out of control. One of my classmates pressed an acupressure point to help calm me while the other gently dabbed at my tears. Neither one tried to rush the process. Instead, they held a safe space for me to release and release and release while frequently checking in with me to see how I was doing.
After about the twentieth time my classmate asked me how I was doing, I finally felt like I was able to take a calm deep breath without crying. The needles were removed and I slowly got up. I felt tired and a little worn out, but what fascinated me was how much lighter and calmer I felt. Before class, I thought I had felt fine. It was seven years since my traumatic experience and I thought my day to day life was going well. I didn’t even know I had a bubble.
That’s something I’ve learned from having PTSD, that when I saw the tree rip apart and hit my dad while he was walking towards me in our driveway after having retrieved the mail from the mailbox, my body formed a bubble. It was a bubble to protect me, a survival bubble. Over time, layers of the bubble have released, sometimes giving way to emotional releases, sometimes slipping off without me noticing.
I’m not sure if I’ll always have a bubble, but I find comfort in knowing that when they burst, I feel better. They always remind me that I can grow stronger.