There's trauma, and then there's Gnar

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In my 30s, I learned something important: the Californians are right. Trauma healing is real, and it can have wildly positive effects. I couldn’t argue with my life changing before my eyes as I got over my unfinished emotional business.

However, I also learned that people who are into woo and woo-adjacent healing practices are terrible at precision. Thus, the level of scientific rigor in popular trauma books is zero, and when healer types use the word “trauma,” they can be referring to one or more of about 6 different phenomena.

One of these phenomena is something I call “Gnar.” I find it fascinating because it has nothing to do with what most people think of when they think about therapy.

What is gnar? It appears to be the residue created by repeated repression. It is the metaphorical gunk in someone’s system caused by bottling stuff up.

But what is this residue composed of — literally what is it? Patterns of muscle tension? Something something nervous system? Obviously I don’t have any satisfying answers, and, after browsing some books on the subject, I’m not convinced that anyone else does.

Fortunately, releasing gnar works, whether or not we have good science about it. I’ve seen gnar release up close, and personally experienced it, and it is undeniable and unforgettable.

And from a practical perspective, it’s not that complicated. Let’s say the human system is like a pipe organ, and each pipe represents an expressive potential — an emotion or a mode of engagement, like receiving attention from a group. These pipes can become blocked by habitual suppression, and sometimes the block is made of gnar.

People who routinely suppress their emotions and desires, or resist intimacy, sometimes create a backlog of gnar¹. They become increasingly tense, in ways that are visually apparent from how they talk, move, breathe, exist. They also get increasingly defended, as greater amounts of suppression require more avoidance of potentially triggering experiences.

Then, if they’re lucky, they let it out, and they are suddenly less cramped up. Changes can be dramatic and immediate. This what’s happening when people report life-changing effects from doing weird shaking exercises. It is different from garden-variety, lowercase-t trauma in that it is not typically tied to a specific memory — although release is sometimes accompanied by a swell of related memories.

Some dramatic examples:

• A few years ago, I met a woman who complained to me that she’d tried all sorts of meditation and therapy techniques, and nothing worked. On the personality level, she was kind, but flat and withdrawn. Later that year, she did a psychedelic healing session, in which she screamed in anger for several minutes. A few months later, I had a call with her, and I might as well have been talking to a different person. Her emotional range and presence had been grayscale before, and then it was Technicolor.

• A long-time meditator I know told me that his seated practice had become increasingly stale. He started doing standing practice, and found that if he didn’t control his body, it “wanted” to make all kinds of awkward jerking motions, often accompanied by grunt-y vocalizations. After several days of this, his level of bodily awareness and pleasure increased, and he found experience permanently more vivid, as if a veil had been lifted.

• An acquaintance who had tried many meditation and healing modalities to take care of lifelong self-hatred and hyper-vigilance found Shamanic Dearmoring, an intense bodily release protocol that’s too weird to describe here, and after month of resulting emotional volatility, is much better, like “now I feel life has meaning” better.

• Someone I met attended the Hoffman Process, a therapeutic container designed to undo parental conditioning. Nothing was really working until an anger release session, where he hit a pillow with a baseball bat repeatedly and sob-screamed. By his telling, he had been your typical picture of a tense, emotionally distant high-achiever, but changed instantly, becoming more available to himself and others.

• In a yoga workshop after my divorce, teacher told me, specifically, to stay in a deep hip stretch longer than I wanted to. “Feel the anger as it comes up,” she said. “Fuck you fuck you fuck you,” I thought, as anger came up. Then, I lay on the floor, and involuntarily began trembling and sobbing, as waves of sorrow passed over me. Note that I really did not want to do this: I was newly single in a room of cartoonishly hot yoga women. But the emotion had taken over. As I wept, I experienced a rapid flash through memories of all the love I’d tried to give to people who didn’t want it. In the days after, I noticed that a romantic pattern of mine — being attracted to unavailable women, and turning away from healthier opportunities to commit — had vanished.

• Last year, I was at a gathering with a man on acid. He started lightly trembling, and asked me for advice. I suggested that he might see what it would be like to encourage the shaking — what if it wanted to be a noise, or a full-body movement? He began shaking violently, groaning, and occasionally retching, and I sat with him through it. At the end of the trip, he said he felt much lighter, and he reported subsequently that his emotional clarity had vastly increased. This matches my subsequent observations of this person, who I’ve seen a few times since then.

• More generally, at many silent meditation retreats, the first few days are uneventful, but then practitioners start experiencing spontaneous episodes of shaking and sobbing, and sometimes volcanic rage. Often, deep states of meditative absorption follow these releases. This reliably happens to me in solo retreats I undertake.

From one angle, these anecdotes are all the same: they represent the emotional equivalent of taking a long-overdue shit. It is just “I cried and then felt better” x 100. But there is also dissimilarity. How important are the differences? Are there meaningfully different families of emotional release experience, each with different optimal conditions and side effects? This is yet another unknown. The answers may lurk in the tacit knowledge of the best therapists.

Speaking of therapists — as you might expect, there are different schools of body therapy with different explanations for the gnar release process, different opinions on how central it is, and different procedures for facilitating it. Some encourage violent cathartic episodes with little post-release contemplation, while others encourage a steady drip-drip of smaller releases, with more focus on narrative. I don’t know which is better, and I suspect that practitioner skill is really what matters here, as with therapy generally.

You may notice that two of the above anecdotes feature psychedelic drugs. Based on what I’ve seen, they are not at all necessary for releasing gnar, but they can be handy for interrupting default patterns of suppression.

Gnar seems difficult to study. For one thing, it is difficult to predict in advance which gnar release protocol will work for a given person. You just have to try stuff — so, running a trial on one technique is unlikely to yield interesting results. Arguably, it is less about “technique” than it is about engineering a situation where bodily reactions aren’t interrupted by top-down control. One common attribute of big gnar release experiences is feeling like the emotion is piloting, not the ego.

Perhaps this is the primary blocker for most people in releasing gnar: we associate control with emotional health, and fear losing ourselves. Generally, a fine principle, but tragic in cases where temporarily losing ourselves is what would really help.

Gnar release appears to be a finite process. In my own case, after two large experiences, and maybe twenty smaller releases, I feel quite thoroughly de-gunked.

Those who need to release a big glob of gnar can do conventional therapy for decades and see no results. Then, they might go to a gifted somatic therapist, and have a staggering emotional release, and their world is new again. Such events cause some to believe that all suffering originates in somatic tension, and that if we all just got comfortable in our bodies, we would experience collective enlightenment. Some somatic therapists will claim as much. But this is obviously not true: we are thinking creatures also, who can cause ourselves plenty of real suffering with maladaptive beliefs that are easiest to interact with on the intellectual level, not with weird shaking exercises.

But if you’ve been doing therapy for years and nothing’s moving, perhaps it’s time to ignore your head and move your attention downwards.

1. This paragraph takes for granted a “storage” frame, where the emotions are somehow “deposited.” But a more accurate frame might be an enactment frame, where the relevant emotion is marked as unsafe, and then it becomes safe again when a full enactment is allowed — in this reading, “gnar” is a strategy of suppression and the resistance to changing it, not an unexploded munitions stockpile. Again, I just don’t know.