Exorcising my arse

No, that is not a typo, there is a devil in my glutes

Photo by Jon Butterworth on Unsplash

I’m keeping things light in the run-up to Christmas. If you sometimes have to take a deep breath before reading my posts, this one is more, “Don’t have any kind of liquid in your mouth while reading.” Swallow between paragraphs.

Today, I am exorcising my glutes, and that (unusually for me) is not a typo. There is a demon in my arse cheeks. That demon is called Shame. Shame’s residency in my body’s largest and sexiest muscle began fifteen years ago. It was meant to be a short-term tenancy, but owing to the fact that I’ve had bigger and uglier residents to evict from my corporeal temple, Shame is now a long-term squatter. Which, for a glutes demon, is rather apt.

This post is me nailing up the eviction notice, using the power of words to drive out the malevolent spirit planted in me, unwittingly, by my willingness to cooperate with bringing to light another person’s “stuff”.

But before we get onto my bum, let’s talk about invisible trauma. Which is a great conversation opener the next time you’re at a party and someone tells you they don’t do small talk.

A few months ago, I attended a Substack get-together in London. We were encouraged to share our elevator pitches.

“Trauma with humour,” I told the most elegant woman in the room. “I hope it might help people navigate theirs.”

“I don’t have any trauma,” she said, suddenly prickly.

Suddenly prickly. There’s the tell.

Show me a human without trauma and I’ll show you a newborn baby (but not all of them, because BIRTH CANAL!).

But many people don’t recognise they are carrying trauma because their definition of the word isn’t very wide. Until you start moving in therapeutic fields, you tend to think trauma encompasses only those things experienced by soldiers, members of the emergency services, and victims of violent crimes. The ‘big T’ traumas, the ones that can turn into PTSD, they are trauma.

But ‘small t’ trauma is a thing, and a powerful thing at that. Being bullied at school, being slapped by a parent, being shouted at by a teacher. The friend who wasn’t a friend. Those acid words they etched into you. That night your trust was betrayed. That time, aged nine, someone forgot to pick you up from your drama group, and you sat on the wall, alone, for over an hour, realising you didn’t matter, and wondering how to get home. That time you got lost at the zoo at three years old.

No matter how loving our parents, how supportive our friends, how good our school, life will find a way to bash us about, because that’s what it’s for. Life bashing us about is how we grow as human beings.

Small ‘t’ traumas shape our lives. They fuel our choices. They give us fears and insecurities that we have to work to overcome, unless we are happy to accept being permanently dented.

Every one of us starts collecting small ‘t’ traumas in childhood and keeps on collecting them through life like a never-ending release of trading cards. And yes, we trade them. Stored traumas are the source of all our less-than-loving actions, and just as with the big ‘T’ stuff, the behaviour driven by our small ‘t’ traumas can manifest as damage to others. If we fail to recognise that our psyches are thoroughly studded with small ‘t’ traumas, our lives will never be as happy as they could be.

By way of illustration of how a small ‘t’ trauma can rob a person of their deserved joy, let’s get back to my bum.

As a writer by trade, I spend most of my life sitting on my arse, and arses don’t like that very much. Sitting for hours is not natural for a savannah-evolved creature. Our musculature is perfected to stand and squat rather than sit in a chair, however ergonomically designed. So for a couple of decades, I’ve carried a lot of back pain, and have sought massages wherever I can. Usually free or “budget” massages because for the same couple of decades, also due to being a writer, I have lived with a lot of debt. Husband with a massage gun, yes please. Groupon Massage, yes please. Free Mother’s Day ten-minute massage, yes please. And that is how I met Gemma.

Gemma is her real name, but I don’t think she needs protection; a quick search tells me she’s not offering massages anymore, and when I tell you the nature of my buttock demon, you will have a possible Why.

Let me put you in my shoes. Actually, take those shoes off. Lie down on the bed. No, on your front. Mmm. The bed is firm but memory-foam-comfy. The lights are low. Your back is hurting, but a person who loves you very much is going to give you a massage with this excellent massage gun, exactly like the one you borrowed when you stayed with your aunt in Florida (and if you don’t have an aunt in Florida, imagine you have, and she’s lovely).

Your loved one applies the massage gun to your shoulders and starts working across and down your back. A little painful, but soothing and releasing. Further down your back. Mid-back. Lower-back. Very nice. Then the massage gun reaches your buttocks and all you can think is Gemma. Oh God, Gemma. A wave of shame washes over you. The buttock massage feels really good but you can’t enjoy it. The feeling of pleasure is obliterated by a feeling of humiliation.

So let me explain what you just experienced. I have tapped on the originating incident, but obviously not enough. It’s easy to ignore such a very small trauma, when I always seem to have bigger concerns. But it does regularly rob me of a measure of pleasure. And since shame thrives in the dark, I am shoving my buttock demon into the light to see if she melts, while providing an illuminating illustration.

Why is Gemma trapped in my gluteus maximus? In my free ten-minute Mother’s Day massage fifteen years ago, we chatted, and I told her I was an EFT practitioner. She was interested in EFT, so we exchanged numbers and agreed on a therapy swap. For every hour of one-to-one tapping I did with her, I’d get an hour’s massage. We carried out this swap three times.

In most respects, her massage was the same as any other: familiar pummelling and kneading techniques using alarmingly strong knuckles and thumbs. But Gemma had something extra. She was the first massage therapist ever to massage my arse. And honestly, it was a game-changer. So much pain in there. It was shocking how much my bum needed therapy. I thought, This woman really knows what she’s doing.

I mean I won’t say I wasn’t a little embarrassed at first, the way you are when you have to have an intimate examination at the doctor’s, but lets face it, at least your arse cheeks are external, and it’s just a big muscle really. Our culture has managed to sexualise it, but in this context, it wasn’t sexual. She was a professional, doing her job, and a very good job too. If she wasn’t embarrassed about it, then why should I be? I presumed that for her, it was no weirder than massaging my shoulders; she was just focused on getting my muscles less tense, wherever those muscles happened to be.

Let’s jump into the experience at the end of my third massage.

She says we have a bit of extra time before the hour is up and where would I like her to focus for the last five minutes. I say, The glutes, please. Afterwards, while putting on my shoes, I ask her when she’d like the tapping session I now owe her, and she says she doesn’t want one. She doesn’t want to massage me anymore. I can feel her emotional distance.

I’ve been vulnerable and almost completely naked with her; we’ve shared intimacies. Now I feel rejected and weirdly ashamed, prickling with tears as I catch the bus home. This small ‘t’ trauma has already had an emotional impact on me, but it is not the end of it.

At the time, I am running a regular drop-in tapping group at a community centre. Partway through the next session, guess who drops in? We finish the rounds of tapping we are in the middle of: someone’s fury with their unreasonable downstairs neighbour.

“Who’s next? I ask.

“I have an issue,” says Gemma.

“Oh yes?” I say. You won’t believe what’s coming.

“I want to know why people always want me to massage their bum. It keeps happening. I give them a back massage, and when I say is there any area you’d like me to go back to, they say their bum.”

Shame drops through me like a stone.

“Hmm,” I say, “interesting. Okay, let’s start.”

Because no matter how I feel, this is not about me. This is about Gemma. So I stay professional. I lead the whole group in tapping on Gemma’s issue about not wanting to give people the arse massages they keep asking for. Only Gemma and I know that I am one of those people.

We separate out the different aspects of her emotional response: her annoyance (which shades towards anger), her embarrassment. I’m aware more than ever that she has to lead the exploration, and I mustn’t impose my own thoughts, feelings or insights, which she will (more than most clients in this situation, given I am one of her ‘perpetrators’) resist.

With her leading, we explore the possibility that she might be attracting these experiences to give her an opportunity to heal something. We invite her subconscious to come up with other instances where she has experienced similar feelings, seeking the foundational trauma, which I do not ask her to reveal. You can get good healing in group EFT, even keeping things private. Within a few minutes, she gains sufficient insights and resolution to announce that we are done, and leaves the session early.

There are often benefits for the therapist, when tapping with clients. But in this case, not quite enough to rid me of my own side of the pain that Gemma and I co-created. All these years later, I still have shame and humiliation jumping in to spoil the party every time I get a massage below the knicker line.

What a pain in the arse.

But everything that hurts us is here to tell us that we are not in full alignment with the splendour of who we really are. Every glitchy interaction (like mine with Gemma) is information. I’ve been in a bit of information overload recently, but still, I value this memory as a chance to make you laugh while illustrating that even the smallest of invisible traumas deserves our attention because we (wonderful you and me) deserve peace from our pasts. Deserve joy.

And as we approach this season of joy, let’s notice where we’re pinching it off and do the kindness to ourselves of committing to let that stuff go.

If you’re committed to letting some stuff go next year, consider joining the therapeutic writing challenges I’ll be running on this Substack. In the first Healing Challenge of the year, starting on January 14th, we’ll be Writing Home in a private and supportive community (more details here). If this appeals, now is a good time to upgrade to an annual subscription: there is a discount until the end of the month.

If you enjoyed this bum story, tell the world by clicking on the heart! Tell me by jumping into the comments. But don’t tell Gemma.

I welcome your humiliating stories so we can bond in mutual shame. Let me know of any spit-take sentences, and please don’t hold me responsible for any casualties of laughter-ejected liquids; I did warn you. Me, this week I dropped my iPhone in the loo twice in 12 hours (after never having done it in 13 years of having one), which is definitely the universe telling me something; honestly not tough to interpret.

Technology allowing, see you next week.