Boundaries.

I’ve had two weeks back at the shelter home now, which has provided me with an opportunity to settle in a bit and begin to develop some kind of relationship with the girls here.  In that time, I was also able to attend the beautiful wedding ceremony and reception of one of the Raksha Nepal staff. 

Monsoon season officially started on 29th June, and it’s no joke.  While I’m sure the most dramatic rains are still to come, we’ve seen rain every day (sometimes all day) from then.  My timeline for travel to the next district is still TBD, as the rains affect transport to and within these districts.  My intended next district – and the furthest away – involves crossing a river on foot over which there is no bridge.  This makes access to it impossible during floods.  In addition, as I’ve already discovered in other districts, bus rides are complicated in rainy conditions, even without flooding.  The roads in and around the villages are primarily dirt, causing nearly unbearable dust in dry conditions, and mud resulting in sliding and incapacitated buses in wet. 

In the meantime, I’m very happy spending time at the shelter home.  The girls in the DMP sessions are beginning to get a better sense of how they can use therapy, and are starting to embrace it not only as a therapeutic space for free dancing, but a safe place for using the body and movement to explore some of the thoughts and feelings that are more easily avoided in keeping up their busy daily schedules. 

Upon meeting these girls initially, I was struck with what I saw.  I’m aware that because of the somatic experiences of trauma, some severely traumatized people are not able to tolerate aerobic or physical activity, as the arousal that these activities provoke in the body can closely resemble the states of autonomic arousal that was present during the traumatic experience(s).  The body, unable to properly separate the sensations of exercise and fight/flight, can launch into flashbacks and dissociations.  These girls, however, appeared happy and energetic.  They love to dance and exercise, and issues of touch do not seem problematic (there is plenty of hugging, hair-braiding, and other forms of “good touch” that they are drawn to with each other).  On the surface, they seem quick to trust new people (at least me, a new woman to whom the shelter staff has already given approval).  For the most part, they are a picture of well-adjusted, resilient children and adolescents.  And there is good reason for that.  The shelter is a safe, loving, clean, supportive place that offers plenty of activities and resources. (To be clear, I am not the only psychological support offered to the girls at the shelter - Raksha Nepal provides access to psychologists in Kathmandu.  I am, however, their closest access to psychological support geographically, making it potentially their most regular at this point in their processes.)  But as we begin to explore some deeper work, it is becoming clear to me there is more there. 

This makes me think a lot about boundaries – what they show and don’t show; who they trust or don’t trust; appropriate and inappropriate touch; dancing for fun and exercise, dancing for emotional processing, and dancing to escape; processing and avoiding; recovery and recovered; nervous system arousal and stress responses.  The issue of boundaries is one I feel I am dealing with constantly in my own parallel process here. 

Boundaries can be explored as distributions between barriers and points of exposure.  One evokes an image of blocking out, while the other a more open point of contact.  For example, our skin is simultaneously our last barrier and our first point of contact between self and other – one which the mosquitoes here are continuously violating.  An embodied understanding of the boundary between reality and memory/fantasy is an integral part of the recovery process.  Equally important is an embodied sense of self – where the self/body begins and ends, and how close (physically and emotionally) others are allowed or welcome.  The establishment of boundaries is an important part of trauma recovery.  However, boundaries are fluid and ever-changing.  I am continuously re-evaluating my own boundaries in the work here, from my boundaries between work and ‘home;’ my relationship with the girls; the lines between therapeutic dance, dance/life skill teaching, and DMP; teacher and therapist; language; culture; private and public; and the list goes on.

I’m living in the shelter with these girls.  I have my own room, but I cannot so much as go to make myself a cup of tea without passing a collection of girls asking if we’ll have dance today.  The girls often behave in a way as if I am in a position of constantly giving to them.  But what they may not realise is how much I am also relying on them.  I rely on them to translate for me.  I eat with them – the food which they have prepared for me.  We are constantly available to and involved with each other. 

They are so excited for what I am offering, and they’re used to being busy nearly all the time, that I find myself wondering about their boundaries between being busy and having downtime -  a struggle that resonates well with me in any environment, but perhaps even more so here.  My time away from them is mostly spent in my room.  And in my room are my computer begging me to write copious notes and plenty of books and articles on DMP, group processes, trauma, and cross-cultural therapeutic work, which are all so tempting to delve into in the many instances that I don’t feel like I fully know what I’m dealing with. 

The shelter provides its own boundary, and while I can leave it, going anywhere else can be its own production in terms of transportation and timing, and I don’t have much reason to go anywhere else.  This brings up for me the boundary between worker and tourist.  I am definitely a tourist in Nepal – I don’t know the language or culture, I cannot eat large quantities of rice, my clothes and skin colour scream ‘westerner,’ my visa and inability to be paid for my work even tells me so.  But I’m working, and working enough that I don’t actually have the time to properly explore any of the country for pleasure, as a tourist would do.

It’s easy to feel lonely and isolated in this environment, but my most immediate access to other people is to my clients and students.  There is in some way a sense of always being ‘on,’ as I’m technically always at work.  But this is my home right now, as it is the home of the girls and staff.  And so for that reason, the line between home and work is a blurry one.  Anyone who’s ever run into a teacher outside of school may understand the awkwardness of what that relationship is outside of a classroom.  And while my therapist back home and I may have discussions about how we might handle running into each other in public, outside of therapy sessions, it is generally accepted that everyone here is in therapy with me, but that we just don’t discuss the contents of a session. 

 As the girls begin to embrace therapy with me, I am seeing all the work there is to do – an impossible amount for 6 months.  Where is the boundary for who would best benefit from individual and group therapy, and how can I accommodate that in the limited time of a day, and of my visa allowance?  In a therapy session, everything that happens is information.  But the input of information doesn’t stop just because the therapy session is over.  Where is the boundary between what is ‘fair game’ to address in therapy and what the therapist or teacher really has no business knowing or seeing?  And this goes both ways.  I am not only their therapist or teacher, but an actual living and breathing human being of whom they see many different sides.  My underwear hangs on the same clothes line as theirs to dry.  I’ve never seen my therapist’s underwear, and I think it would be strange if I did.

All that said, I feel that the sense of boundaries here is different from what I’m used to anyway.  A closed door does not mean the same thing.  In my stays in the districts, unless my door is locked (which is not always an option), my room seems to be community territory at any time.  Their concept of boundaries seems so much looser and different to mine.  In some ways that’s useful, as they likely don’t view the fluidity I’m experiencing as strange or off-putting.  At the same time, facilitating a sense of personal, body, and emotional boundaries necessary to their recovery may be more difficult if they don’t have much experience with reflecting on or determining their own boundaries in any way.  And therein lies more boundaries – cultural and language.

And then there are the boundaries between my different roles here.  Dance is inherently therapeutic.  But there’s dancing to feel happy and forget your problems, dancing to learn steps (and in the case of the PSI methodology, life skills), and dancing to process things that may not yet be accessible in words.  I am a part of all three of those here.  And they all overlap.  It feels important for me to differentiate between them for my own self-care.  In some sense, I am a therapist all the time because I am a person who is a therapist - in the same way that I am always American, even if I live in England or travel to Nepal.  But I cannot actively be a therapist all the time – it would be unmanageable. 

Sometimes I want to just dance for fun, too – but when I do that here, it’s with my students and clients – who are one and the same.  When teaching technique, choreographed steps and a curriculum of life skills which are unknown to the girls here, there must be rules and consequences and order – it’s a classroom setting with a clear structure of authority.  But in therapy, the aim is more democratic, and the basic boundaries are around safety and confidentiality, with everything that happens in the space being co-created and informative.  These varying aspects of using dance are best viewed as points of exposure rather than barriers; they can work well together and support each other, but identifying where one ends and the other begins is difficult.  And as I’ve said, a framework of boundaries is important, especially for those who are recovering from traumatic experiences. 

But in what seems like a culture very based in an illusion of hard boundaries: - right and wrong, firm definitions between castes, public and private, male and female roles - perhaps the confusion that I’m experiencing in setting boundaries with them is a beneficial part of their process of developing and determining boundaries for themselves.  After all, the work in its entirety is meant to push against the boundaries within which women and girls have been placed in this traditional culture.  Finding, distinguishing and testing boundaries is a process.  Hopefully by exploring the process together, the girls are developing an implicit embodied sense of determining and setting boundaries, in all its movement and fluidity.   

As always, if you would like to help fund this voluntary project, please visit my gofundme page here.