How Bad Swimming Lessons Traumatized Me
For almost all of my life, I have been a non-swimmer and afraid of the water. Conventional swim lessons have not addressed this fear and have made it worse, and they have also have left me with life long trauma that has affected my life both inside and outside of the water. Recently I found this white paper, Force and Trauma in Aquatic Lessons, which along with discussions with my therapist, helped me pull all of my various thoughts together on this subject.
Here’s a summary of the times I had attempted to learn to swim:
- Group lesson at age 3 (early 1970s)
- YMCA group lesson at age 13 (early 1980s)
- Community college group class as an adult (early 2000s)
- Week long retreat a year ago — success
I described my week long retreat success in another article. The community college class wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t designed to help people with prior bad experiences, and so I didn’t get much out of it. But it was the prior two attempts in my youth that were extremely traumatizing.
I only have a couple of memories from those first swimming lessons at age 3. The first memory was in a pool full of other kids successfully swimming freestyle (I picture them swimming like Olympians, though logically I know that not to be the case), with the instructor holding my torso at the surface of the water and pulling me along while I flapped my arms and legs to go through those same motions. My only other memory from those lessons was that I was always cold inside the pool, cold outside the pool (indoors with air conditioning), and always getting sick as a result. Although I don’t remember any more details, clearly I was uncomfortable and fearful, and learning can’t happen when one feels that way.
When I was age 13, the local YMCA had just completed construction of its new aquatics complex, prompting my father to proclaim it was time for us boys to learn the important life skill of swimming. Every Saturday morning during that summer, my father would take me, along with my brothers aged 10 and 6, to a group lesson which was probably taught by a high school student who was only a few years older than me. I was the oldest in the class by far.
The first lesson I couldn’t even walk up to the edge of the pool without trembling with fear. When I went back to my father to tell him I was too scared to go in, he would just yell at me to get in the water. Somehow I eventually made it into the water at the 3’ shallow end (which was a challenge even though I was already 6’ tall at that time) but couldn’t do much more than that over the course of the summer. Every subsequent Saturday morning I woke up in intense fear of going to the YMCA and begged my father to let me stay home, but to no avail. My mother (who didn’t attend) probably felt my pain but wouldn’t help me. Eventually I figured out that the path of least resistance was to just get in the water (standing on the bottom) to keep my father “happy”, stand aside, and get out of the way of the rest of the class.
I quote from the white paper about the impact of forcing an unwilling child to continue aquatic lessons (of course, this is in the context of the unwillingness being due to fear/distress, not for other cases such as simply being disobedient). I have experienced almost every one of these.
When a child is forced, there are many evidence-based potentially harmful physiological, psychological and developmental impacts.
The child’s arousal/stress level rapidly escalates (Refer to Stages of Arousal below)
The child’s feelings of safety and trust are severly compromised and may be entirely destroyed
The child’s feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, fear, shame and rage increase
The child learns that people are not safe and cannot be trusted
The child learns that their feelings don’t matter, are silly or wrong
The child learns that they don’t matter, are silly or wrong
The child learns that people can do things to their body without their consent, especially adults
The child learns that it is appropriate to respond non-compassionately, impatiently and even angrily to others in distress
Learned helplessness can become a default life-long coping strategy for children who are repeatedly forced
Regular exposure to highly stressful situations, especially at the hands of another, may result in permanent alterations to the child’s brain architecture and stress coping systems as a result of toxic levels of stress hormones
The child can develop a default defense strategy to situations of perceived danger, and with repeated stressors will slip into that state more easily
Trauma can develop
I also quote from the white paper about unhelpful strategies in response to a child in distress. And I have experienced almost every one of these also.
The following strategies are at best unhelpful and at worst, constitute force. They will usually result in escalation of the child’s distress and if carried out by the teacher or a swim school staff member, model unhelpful and forceful practices to the parent.
Harsh voice and/or stern facial expression, eye rolling, etc.
Isolation or restraint of any kind
Scolding, pressuring, threatening, forcing, punishing, shaming. For example saying things like, “everyone else is doing it”, “be a big boy”, “stop being so silly”, “if you don’t…then”
Denying the child access to their parent or primary attachment figure present. This includes forced entry without the parent in transition classes or sending the parent out of sight entirely
Attempting to reason with the distressed child. For example; “It’s not that bad”, “you’ve done it before”, “it won’t hurt you”. This is a form of shaming, invalidation and pressure, and will often escalate the child’s defensive responses. Also when the child is either hyper or hypo aroused, cognitive processes are compromised and since reasoning is a cognitive activity, it becomes futile.
By the way, it does not matter if my parents and instructors had the best intentions. The fact is that my experience was still hurtful and traumatic. Though to be fair, despite the article title, it was likely the combination of the lessons and my parents’ handling of them that was extremely traumatizing, rather than just the lessons themselves.
So what would have worked? Conventional group lessons didn’t work for me because the focus was on strokes and techniques, and the instructors were ignorant of the fear component or unwilling or unable to address it. Individual lessons at my pace with an instructor that I could trust were what I needed, though I realize that my parents did not have the means for that. Waiting ten years to try again didn’t help either, though there are reasons for that which I won’t go into here.
Although overcoming the fear of water was a liberating experience, unfortunately all of the associated trauma is still with me. Even though I know now that I am not in danger, the bad experiences weren’t my fault, etc. , the associated trauma doesn’t magically go away — the fact is that the trauma is stored in the body and you can’t think your way out of trauma. Therefore, even today I continue to suffer from many of the effects of force outlined above, mainly in the form of general anxiety. I have been working through the trauma in therapy for the last couple of years (here’s why I didn’t start working on it earlier), and it continues to be a work in progress.
I have not been back in the water since that week long retreat a little over a year ago. The reason is not fear or lack of desire, but I have many other things in my life that are keeping me busy. Also, there is the challenge of finding a pool, and even more challenging is finding one where I could be assured that there would be no other swimmers even remotely close to me, which would make me uncomfortable at this time. Plus, to be honest, working on my swimming is not a priority for me at this time anyway. But I am grateful for the fact that I know that I could, should I choose to do so.
