Lesson Two-Trauma has to be released

From Beth:
Trauma works in mysterious ways-- a person may scream, cry, faint, lock up physically or freeze mentally. If I am to free any student from fear of water, I must listen closely to their words and watch carefully with my eyes for the clues from their bodies.

Lesson 2, August 1, 2012

I arrived at Lesson 2, eager to learn. I was checking in with Beth beside the pool when a man arrived with his toddler for the child’s lesson. There had been a scheduling mix-up, so I quickly said, “Please take him.” I was delighted for the chance to practice in the pool. At first I felt silly floating and blowing bubbles but then I just let myself enjoy feeling silly and playing. 

My fun was interrupted by the terrified screams of the toddler at other end of the pool. My teacher and mom antennae went up, but I could see he wasn’t even in the water. He refused to get in, not with Beth or his dad. Beth was gently assuring. I wondered why he was so afraid. Beth took them to the outside pool and I resumed my floating and bubbles.

I thought about how some kids are more sensitive than others. This can be a good thing, as well as a challenge [I count myself among the “too sensitive”]. Things that happen to siblings might deeply affect one and the others don’t even remember it. When I was four, my three-year-old brother and I were playing on our farm. He decided to walked along the top of the cow tank and slid down the metal roof into the water. He was thrashing in the deep tank while I shouted desperately, “Swim over here, swim over here!” Then he floated lifelessly in the cow-tank--suddenly my mother and sister were there, screaming at me about drowning my brother as they pulled him out, blue and limp. They hit his back repeatedly to force the water out of him and maybe breathed into his nose [though I don’t remember this]. My brother survived. As an adult he swims with ease, loves water and runs his own fishing guide company. I am afraid of deep water and never learned to swim.

Is that tension Beth sees in my shoulders, my neck, my head all the history, fear and sadness trapped in my body? While practice, I let the water cradle me.

When I return for my lesson the next day I felt more comfortable in the pool from all the time I spent in the water between lessons. Beth pointed out again how tightly I hold myself---is this how I protect myself from the fear, from memories? Relaxing because someone says relax is not easy, but Beth finds ways to help me relax. I build on that.  I clench and let go, practice relaxing. It makes a huge difference. When I used to run hill repeats I would mentally chant, “hills are my friends.” Now I internally chant, ‘the water is my friend, it will hold me.” 

We talked about the child from yesterday. Beth wanted to be sure that I wasn’t upset. She said that he’d had a trauma, not involving water, and now every new situation triggered terror. This might be true for many non-swimmers. The other night I was watching the TV show, Treme, set in post-Katrina New Orleans. In it a thunderstorm booms loudly during an elementary school band class. The kids freeze with fear. The teacher says, “It’s just a storm. It’s not a hurricane. It’s not Katrina.” 

I want to remember this in my body:  this is now, now then when that scary thing happened. It’s just a rainstorm, not a hurricane.

Shoney's First Lesson-Finding Courage

From Beth: 
I knew right away after reading Shoney's initial email that she would be someone I could connect with easily. 
I sensed through her words the courage she was mustering to take on the task of learning to swim. 

July 25, 2012 Lesson One

At 55, I’ve gone years without trying to learn to swim, years since I’ve been in a swimming pool. But this summer I ran into an acquaintance. She looked so healthy and happy. She was biking to the Millennium hotel to swim in their pool. She did it every day. I felt a sudden, intense longing to swim. I wanted that—riding to the pool along the creek path, the confident joy. I wanted to be a swimmer.

I went home and searched the Internet to see if anyone offered lessons at the Millennium pool. I didn’t want group lessons: they had never worked for me. I wanted the right teacher because despite the adrenaline pushing me to find lessons now, I knew my frustration or fear could defeat me. Beth’s website came up and I explored it just enough to see that she taught adults who were afraid of water, that she was a runner and that she appeared close to my age—I had a good feeling about her and thought I would try one lesson. I emailed her quickly before I chickened out. 

I wrote that I was athletic [30 marathons] but afraid of deep water and had never grasped the coordination—using my breath/arms/legs together to be able to swim. I wanted a supportive, encouraging teacher.

Beth offered to put me in touch with some current students and thanked me for my background information and best of all, told me that the pool at the Millennium doesn’t have a deep end. While I appreciated the offer to talk to current students, I didn’t want to think too much about my lesson ahead of time. I was glad that she cared about my background---but really, knowing there was no deep end sealed it for me.

I was excited before my first lesson as I wandered the hotel hallways looking for the pool—then feeling joy: the pool was in a big open room, three sides of windows and high ceiling. I didn’t know I associated pools with claustrophobic rooms.  Nor did it reek of chlorine [something else I didn’t know I disliked]. It was freeing that this pool had none of the negative associations with past pools [dark and smelly] where I’d been unsuccessful since childhood. 

I felt comfortable with Beth immediately. She was competent and gentle. We talked about how I was feeling [mostly excited] before I put on the first pair of goggles I’ve ever owned and got into the pool.

I showed her that I could float on my back and front. I put my head under water. I could blow bubbles. When I floated on my front, Beth pointed out some simple adjustments I could make to my head position. Who knew it mattered? With a few changes I felt more balanced and floated with more ease.  She saw how tightly I held myself  and suggested ways I could relax my shoulders and feel what I was doing in the water--in my body—not just in my brain. She had me turn over, put my face in the water, arms straight ahead and kick to propel myself while blowing out. At first I did not move forward at all but I did get my head in and got the idea of blowing bubbles into the water. After some practice I was able to propel myself across the pool standing up just a couple of times to take a breath. I enjoyed my lesson. It went too quickly! Maybe this time I would really learn to swim. 

Shoney's Story-Why she never learned to swim as a child

My fear of deep water began with my mother. Her brother drowned when she was 9. One of my earliest memories is of my mother describing in detail the last time she saw her brother, how he fell from a boat and what his body was like after three days in the river. At 89 she still frequently describes this event in detail and I feel how deeply she was traumatized by it. She never learned to swim and refused to come to family outings near water. She just couldn’t watch. On hot summer days after working on the farm, my twelve siblings and I would go to a local lake—I often played in the water but was afraid that one of my brothers or some other boy would pull me under---a terrifying experience for me, not being able to breathe, not being able to reach the surface. I entered the water on-guard and never went in very deep. 

One summer when I was about nine my mother signed up us younger kids for swim lessons.  I asked her about this recently, and she said remembered hauling us over to the swimming pool [but never staying to watch]. It was a cold summer and we were always frozen and purple when she came to pick us up. I never got beyond sitting at the edge with my feet in the freezing water watching the other kids and feeling embarrassed for not getting in.

When I entered high school we were told that to graduate we had to swim the length of the pool. The fear of this test hung over me for four years and yet I can’t remember if I ever took that test. It’s possible I thrashed around for half a length or showed them I could float.

When I was 21 I had an accident that escalated my fear of deep water.  While cross-country skiing across a frozen river on a cold Wisconsin day, the ice cracked below me and I was completely submerged. While plunging deep down under the icy water I saw my own death announced in a newspaper;“21 year-Old-Girl Drowns.” Fortunately I popped back up through the hole and was rescued by my adult Eagle Scout skiing buddy. 

Throughout my life I longed to learn to swim. I signed up for group lessons a few times. The results were always the same. The instructor would rush the group through a series of fast verbal instructions and move on. I couldn’t coordinate my legs, arms or breathing and was quickly left behind—discouraged, embarrassed and feeling clumsier than ever. And no one helped me overcome my fear of deep water. 

Throughout my life I have overcome many obstacles and fears and now at 55 I’m determined to learn to swim and to conquer my fear of deep water. At 89, I want to be one of those women I see who do lap and after lap, moving smoothly through the water. And so I begin my story of learning to swim with Beth.

Outreach to adults learning to swim

Several weeks ago, I was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal for a piece on adults learning to swim. The story is online at this site:
 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443545504577567472616437732.html

Racing across Lake Tahoe in 2010

I found myself extremely frustrated by the message that was conveyed. Nothing of real value that I had said was included in the article. As a result, I decided to do a trade with a current student, who is learning to swim at age 54-- to have her convey my message to adults learning to swim. My name is Beth Davis. I am the founder of SwimBoulder, Inc. and Boulder Swim for Life, Inc.  I have been teaching swimming since I was sixteen when I worked for my swim coach in Lexington, Kentucky at the University of Kentucky.  In 1994, I made teaching swimming my career. My experience with adults first began with coaching Masters for the City of Boulder and at the University of Colorado. Over the recent years, I have been privileged to work with numerous adults who either were learning to swim for the first time, or had been traumatized by prior attempts. More and more adults are wanting to learn how to swim. My goal is inform adults on what to look for in an instructor and share what I have learned that works. Swimming has been a big part of my life. I began competing at age six. It's what I've relied on the most to facilitate healing from a climbing accident in October, 2010. It's what I know inside and out.