Trigger warning: This story discusses childhood incest and abuse.
My eyes rest in the direction of the sea while my mind begins to worry. The whitecaps of waves tumble over themselves where there was once a calm and steady current. I have only ever swum in water as cold as 60 degrees without a wetsuit. Today it’s 55, and I’m only in a bikini. Will my body acclimate?
The body I bring to the sea has been bound to trauma since birth. We have had an estranged relationship throughout my life from years of childhood incest and illness. My consciousness has acted as if it were separate from my body, depersonalized, divided. Most of the time I have felt as if I’m hovering over my own head, watching my life pass me by as opposed to being an active and embodied participant.
This is symptomatic of complex-PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) caused by violence within development or reoccurring over long periods of time. Incest survivors have it; genocide survivors have it; prisoners of war have it. I have it.
Swimming has served as a way to relieve the strain through floating freely in the buoyant water. The salt keeps me surfaced effortlessly, finally helping me to feel safely held in the way I always should’ve been. This body of water brings me back to my body made of mostly water. But the dropping temperatures of the waves in winter will be a new experience for me. Will it help or will it hurt?
The Golden Gate Bridge stretches to our left. My friend and I stand on the curved docks at Aquatic Park in San Francisco, which creates a circle of open water where the swimming community can play year-round. I usually swim in a wetsuit in the colder months, but have decided intuitively this year to go as long as I can sans extra gear. There’s something liberating about the sensation of skin on sand, skin on salt, and skin on water.
I arrive at the shoreline and quickly remove my clothes, leaving me robed in nothing but a two-piece swimsuit. Before my body becomes too cold from the 55-degree air, I pull on my neon yellow cap and clear goggles over my head. I walk to the water and feel it with one foot. “Tolerable,” I think.
I enter slowly — right, left, right, left — until the water subsumes my waist. Then, I wait. The top half always adjusts much more slowly than the bottom half. I take a deep inhale and dip myself in, just up to my shoulders. I wade for a while. In and out, in and out, allowing my limbs to attune to the cold.
Lastly, I flood my face.
The face is the worst part of the process. I surrender to the sea and immediately the muscles contract, causing corporal memories to release all over again. The tightness, constriction, and pain that surge in me underwater remind my body of the times I was expected to sexually service the men in my family, or of the various surgeries and seizures I suffered before the age of five.
I take myself through the usual exercises. My eyes travel — right, left, right, left — as I continue to dunk myself in and out, inviting my face and all my other parts to adjust to the chill. I talk myself through it, “We’re safe now. It’s just cold water.” My body calms down around the new truths that I tell it.
I am breaking old neurological pathways and creating new ones as the bilateral movements of my eyes lock the repeated messages into my brain. This is a method I learned through Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), a therapy especially helpful for those with complex-PTSD. I lift my feet from the surface of the sand and begin to swim, head above the water. I am moving forward now.
My friend rushes past me. She chooses to wear a wetsuit and is already a more proficient swimmer. Her adjustment time is slower and swim speed faster. “I’ll catch up!” I yell as she glances at me over her shoulder. She continues on and I follow. I am not alone here.
All parts of me are now submerged in the sea. The pain passes. My body is doing exactly what it is supposed to. I acclimate to the 55-degree water. “Just one time around,” I tell myself. I begin to swim.
As soon as I start, my body remembers the proficiency of the movement. I have been swimming since I was a little girl, competing since high school, and using it as exercise as an adult. Swimming feels as natural as walking to me.
Right, left, right, left. My arms pull my body as my feet propel me forward. My hands pass my hips, making them shift from one direction to the next, as they whip out of the water and crush the surface once again. My core serves as my axis, my center, as I continue on. The cold is helping.
The secret to open water swimming in the chilly sea is to stay entirely embodied. To foster an awareness of what’s happening within and wait for the signals that tell you it’s time to get out. For me, the first sign is when I lose feeling in my pinky fingers and my toes begin to tingle. The second more urgent one is when my core begins to shiver. All the blood that has rushed to my organs to keep them warm is now cooling. That is when I know it’s time to return to land.
But I lose my mind before that. Before I can’t feel my pinkies and toes, and before my core cools down, anxiety begins to make my brain spin. Catastrophic stories wash themselves in the womb of my subconscious, birthing narratives of drowning and death, of me never making it back. These narratives trigger my fear response, which reminds my body of all that I’ve ever been afraid of: the sexual violence, the surgeries, and the seizures of my youth. Enough trauma to make me proverbially, and then literally, freeze in this chilly sea.
On land, my anxiety is my greatest source of power — the fight, freeze, flee, and fawn triggers alert me that something’s wrong in my present environment and make me disconnect, depersonalize, and dismiss myself. On land, I have learned to isolate to find safety.
“Relax,” I remind myself. I invite my mind to return to my body as I float. Here, my body is my greatest source of power. My survival response in the cold water is to do exactly the opposite of what I learned in the violent environment of my childhood: to surrender, to move, to remain, to self-please. The ocean allows me to reconnect, to reassociate, to listen attentively to my body. In the water, I am powerful, I am whole, I am integrated, I am strong. I am embodied. I am safe in communion, as my friend swims just a few laps ahead.
I begin to feel my skin tingling from the chill, while my body warms itself by the constant movement of my stroke. This feeling brings me back to the joy of my body, which I’d let go of to survive the objectification of it so long ago. At 34 years old, I reclaim my body as mine in this big body of water. It’s about time.
When I was 22, I couldn’t walk 20 minutes without needing to take a break. I could function about three hours a day before landing back in bed in an emotional and psychological stupor. By 24 I knew why. The repressed memories of childhood incest and illness had finally resurfaced. My brain, body, and being were ready to heal from the trauma and recreate a life of safety.
This process was excruciating. I worked to heal my body, to rewire my brain, to resurrect my being, all while grieving the loss of my family system, advocating for better health benefits, seeking solutions to psychosomatic symptoms, and building a new community.
At the same time, I tried to find a career that accommodated the complexities of recovery, the needs of the business, my bank account, and my invisible disability. For me, complex-PTSD caused increased anxiety, paralyzing depression, constant triggers, debilitating fatigue, and unexplainable pain patterns throughout the body. Life outside of my childhood home remained as unmanageable as it was inside my childhood home, just for different reasons.
I’d returned to swimming as a way to heal, an unintentional reason to connect back to my body. I started in a pool, floating with my hands clinging to a foam flotation device, reminding my legs of their freedom while chit-chatting with a friend. As my health improved, I picked up my pace and was able to swim further, faster, and compete once again. Then I found the open water in Aquatic Park.
I had never felt more joy than swimming in the ocean. I was raised about five miles from the beach in Southern California where the ocean quickly became my first therapist.
I visited at least twice a week. Sometimes with friends, but often to simply sit at the shoreline and listen to the nothingness spoken between us. Somehow, in front of this big body of water, I felt free of the pressure that built up in my body. The tireless tension from trapped memories. The fears of the future and what else life would bring that I couldn’t manage.
Near the sea, I was relieved of all these feelings and felt empty enough to receive the alternatives of a violent upbringing: security, peace, the reality that one day I would be okay. The salt from the ocean kept me afloat, so I didn’t have to work so hard to hold myself up. The current carried me, so I didn’t have to decide my life’s directions alone. The sun warmed me, so that I could simultaneously feel the tickle of the cold water and the thawing from the beamed light. I felt these juxtapositions so acutely in the open water.
Now, I swim at Aquatic Park frequently to continue these corrective experiences.
I am nearing the end of the loop just as my fingers begin to lose feeling, my toes to tingle, and my core to shake. I have swum from one side of the marina to the other, as my body has processed a cycle of its own. It began with the memory and sensations of trauma, it swam through the safe and steady presence, and it now completes the cycle with a remembrance of joy that I can carry with me back to shore.
My body and I are one even if just for a moment.
I remove my goggles and my cap and just as slowly as I entered, I exit the ocean the opposite way: head first, waist second, feet third. My friend follows me out. I feel grateful for her companionship in this process of swimming in circles and breaking cycles.
I wrap my towel around me and quickly change back into clothes more appropriate for land, ensuring my body safely begins its warming process. I thank the sea for being with me as I head back to the car. When my anxiety returns throughout the day due to the weight of the world, the triggers of trauma, or the deciding of life’s directions, I feel the pressure building in my body, the tension increasing. My body and I begin splitting again, I seek isolation to be safe.
“Relax,” I remind myself, entering back into my body where all is becoming well. I reach out to my swim friend frequently to relieve my fears and remember I am safe in communion. The lessons from swimming in the ocean remain in me. The power it has to hold so much all at once so gracefully models for me who I am meant to be.
As I practice these lessons on and off land, I experience my body transforming post-traumatic stress into post-traumatic growth. Shedding the skin of the past, while developing the surface of the future. These circles can be swam and these cycles can be broken. I know because I’m doing it. Because I’ve done it. I am not the first to round the rim from perpetration to healing and will certainly not be the last.
The juxtaposition of this journey wills its way out of me, as I see in the reflection of the sea that my greatest gifts are yet to be.
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