Finding ways to connect with your body after trauma and grief

How often do you ask to be held? Or tell a friend you need a hug when you are struggling and want to feel safe and supported? “Physical touch is as important as the oxygen we breathe in, the food we eat,” says Dr McGlone, professor of neuroscience. It’s fundamental to our wellbeing, our mental and physical health, and yet our buttoned-up culture often discourages and looks down on asking for help, admitting you need to be comforted. 

After watching her brother Tom’s body fail him and his death from cancer at just 19, Freya Bromley developed a complicated relationship with her own body. Not only did she feel disconnected physically and emotionally, but she discovered that everyone around her was often equally incapable of offering physical and emotional support. 

Afraid to ask someone to hold her, she used sex as a way to get the touch she craved. Finding that her friends rejected her attempts to discuss her grief about Tom, she would get hysterical over bad dates because people know how to be sympathetic about being ghosted. Discouraged to make noise through excessive crying at her brother’s funeral, her anger and confusion and pain built up until she started going to pools so she could scream underwater and let everything out. 

It was these two avenues – sex and swimming, particularly in the cold water experienced while wild swimming the tidal pools around the country – that most helped Bromley release her anger, find comfort in being held, and connect with her body again. It’s a journey she documents in her new book, The Tidal Year. Here she talks to Dazed about learning to appreciate her body, finding places to scream and her struggles to express grief and trauma.

There’s a study that found men are seen as whole, whereas women are viewed as body parts. In the book, you talk about how swimming helped you think of your body as a whole.

Freya Bromley: I’m always thinking [about my body] ‘if I could just change this bit, it would be better’. But when you begin to get in the practice of celebrating your body for movement and for being able to conquer cold and being resilient, you appreciate it more. 

I also think there’s something about seeing women’s bodies of all different ages, sizes [while swimming]. How often do we see a naked body of a 50, 60, 70 year old woman? And when I view their bodies I’m not thinking, ‘oh, look at her thighs’. I’m thinking, ‘that’s so nice, I can see the line where her calves are all red from the water and then her feet are just a bit more white because she’s had wet socks on’. Those things are really nice and those are the things you notice. You don’t criticise other people’s bodies as much as you do your own. 

And the swimming itself, I imagine you’re really thinking about your body especially the first moment when you get that rush of cold. Has that also helped in terms of thinking about your body as more of a functioning thing?

Freya Bromley: Definitely, because being able to have a body that can move you across a body of water is amazing. That’s something to celebrate, to feel fortunate for. It’s been really good to prioritise strength over something more aesthetic. Swimming also has an intensity that really creates a connection with your body rather than your mind. I think for anybody that has anxiety, depression, PTSD, or any kind of grief, you’re so in your head all the time that being able to be in your body is really freeing.

The only other way you get that is with sex. As a society, we’re not very good at finding acceptable ways to express anger. And when you go through something horrible, you’re so angry and confused at the world. How are you supposed to let those feelings move through your body? I felt like I wasn’t allowed to shout, not allowed to be aggressive. For a long time, [I coped] through the intensity of sex and then had a slightly more healthy way of doing it with swimming. I think those two things are really, really connected.

In the book you say that sometimes you want your body to feel like it’s everything – the sex side. And then sometimes you want the feeling that your body is nothing and the weightlessness that you get from swimming. Do you see those as a binary?

Freya Bromley: I guess you feel like you’re drifting between the two a lot of the time. Watching Tom get ill gave me quite a complicated relationship with my body because I watched his body fail him. I’d love to say it made me appreciate the amazing things my body can do while I’m well. But it also makes you feel like at any point you can be let down. 

When you’re swimming, you’re floating, you feel weightless but you also feel held. Lots of people say that to me, ‘I really like swimming because I get to feel held’. And I think for lots of us, why we have sex is not the actual sex, it’s not for the orgasm. I was sleeping around a lot when Tom died, because I was too scared to ask for anyone to hold me. How many of us are sleeping with people because we just are too scared to ask for a hug?

It’s interesting, that dual aspect of swimming, because you have that weightlessness but then you also really feel your body, especially in cold water.

Freya Bromley: I think that intense feeling of the cold also helps me connect to anger in a different way because it feels so intense. When I first met my partner, I remember him saying, ‘I’m into swimming because it’s a really good place to scream’. I still do that quite a lot because if you have so much frustration, what are you supposed to do with that? Where in London can you go to scream? 

There’s a lot of cultures in the world that have wailing, grief cries. When somebody dies people at funerals will audibly cry and scream. And it’s really important for the grieving process for you to be able to express those feelings. But if you go to British funerals, it’s like everybody’s trying to actively not cry. I think there are some things that you need to move through your body. So I always recommend people to go to a pool and scream. Or have someone to fuck really intensely. And then you can make that same noise, both are the same.

You talk about using sex as a way to cope with your grief – was it just a distraction or has it been healing as well?

Freya Bromley: It was just a distraction at first. Not just sex, but dating created so much drama in my life. People do not know how to talk about death, they didn’t want to talk to me about death. But if I said, ‘this guy I’ve been on three dates with who I thought really liked me has ghosted me’, people know what to do. It’s like, ‘Oh, come over tonight. We’ll reread the text together and I'll bring a bottle of wine’. So I almost used it as an excuse to cry with my friends. I would get hysterical over dating stuff going wrong. 

But now sex has become a bit more healing because it's a way to express intense, ugly emotions. Sex is a way for me to get my anger out, which sounds weird, but it’s so intense to be overcome by your body or to make noise when you orgasm. It’s almost the same as screaming and getting that anger out. I thought that if I expressed my anger, I would never come back from it. If I went to where my grief wanted me to go, I thought I would never return from that place. And now I find if I do express how I feel, I often feel better afterwards.