Chapter 29 — When Meditation Opened the Wrong Door

Meditation, body scanning, unexpected traumatic re-experiencing and the later research which helped make sense of an experience once treated as unusual.

Something That Was Supposed to Help

Meditation was supposed to make things quieter.

That was certainly how I understood it.

It was presented as something calming, something which could reduce stress, increase awareness and help a person become less controlled by thoughts and emotions.

There seemed to be very little reason to regard it as dangerous.

I became interested in meditation through Sam Harris and the material which eventually developed around Waking Up.

This was some years before I began working with Dr Julian Lim.

At the time I did not have a useful understanding of Dissociative Amnesia. I did not understand the way traumatic material could become disconnected from ordinary memory and then return unexpectedly through sensation, movement or altered states of attention.

I was trying something which was widely described as beneficial.

Instead, something began opening.

The Body Scan

One exercise involved lying down and gradually directing attention through different parts of the body.

The idea seemed simple enough.

Notice the feet.

Notice the legs.

Notice the hands.

Notice whatever sensation was present without trying to change it.

At some point, when my attention reached my hands, something changed.

The sensation is difficult to describe.

My hands seemed enormous.

The closest description I have found is that they felt like rubber gloves which had been over-inflated.

They felt swollen without being physically swollen.

There was numbness and distortion.

The ordinary sense of where my hands ended seemed altered.

I later experienced similar sensations around my knees and ankles.

It was strange enough to disturb me.

But the physical sensation was not the end of it.

The Woodshed

The body scan began connecting with memories from the convent.

In particular, it brought me back towards events associated with the woodshed.

These were not memories I had consciously decided to investigate.

I had not begun the exercise intending to revisit childhood sexual abuse.

The material simply began arriving.

That was one of the earliest areas which I would much later work through with Julian.

At the time, however, I had no framework for what was happening.

I had meditation.

I had bodily sensations.

I had images and emotional states which seemed to belong somewhere else.

And I had very little guidance about what to do when an exercise intended to increase calm instead began opening traumatic material.

Not Calmer

The effects were not confined to the meditation period itself.

I became anxious.

There was fear.

My sleep deteriorated.

I experienced emotional flooding.

At other times the response seemed to move in the opposite direction.

I could lose motivation.

There could be a strange absence of energy or initiative.

The sense of myself could become less secure.

Sometimes the state seemed intensely activated.

At other times it seemed almost shut down.

I did not then have words such as hyperarousal and hypoarousal readily available to describe those different states.

I simply knew that the meditation was not producing the calm response I had expected.

The Fizzing

There was also a sensation which I have described as fizzing.

It was partly a sound and partly a bodily experience.

I find it difficult even now to decide exactly where one ended and the other began.

It was not a voice.

It did not contain words.

I did not experience it as somebody communicating with me.

It was more like a strange internal electrical or vibrating quality.

Again, I did not know what to make of it.

The temptation when something unfamiliar happens is to find an immediate explanation.

I had none.

Breathing Could Do It Too

Meditation was not the only practice which could produce unusual effects.

Certain deliberate breathing exercises could also change the way I felt.

That made the whole subject more confusing.

Breathing exercises were also commonly presented as harmless ways to calm the nervous system.

Yet deliberate alteration of breathing could produce tingling, dizziness, physical sensations and sometimes the same sense of being drawn towards material I was not intending to revisit.

Much later I learned that changing breathing can itself change blood-gas balance and produce very real physical sensations.

That does not explain every experience I had.

But it helped me understand why a technique described simply as “breathing” could sometimes make things worse rather than better.

The Problem of Something Supposed to Be Harmless

One of the hardest parts was trying to explain the problem to other people.

Meditation had such a positive reputation that an adverse reaction seemed almost contradictory.

If meditation was calming, why was I becoming more distressed?

If mindfulness was supposed to make a person more grounded, why did I sometimes feel less connected to myself?

The implied answer could easily become:

I must be doing it wrong.

Or:

There must be something wrong with me.

I felt like the odd one out.

Other people seemed able to describe meditation as peaceful, useful or transformative.

My experience was that it could open a door I did not know was there.

Trying to Talk About It

I did try to talk about what was happening.

The response was not particularly helpful.

The underlying assumption seemed to remain that meditation itself was unlikely to be the problem.

That made it difficult to know whether I should continue.

Perhaps I was supposed to push through the discomfort.

Perhaps the distress represented progress.

Perhaps an unpleasant reaction was evidence that something important was being released.

Those possibilities can sound plausible when somebody is already inside the experience.

They can also encourage a person to continue doing something which is making them less stable.

Eventually I backed away.

Later I Found Other People

Some time later I began finding articles suggesting that meditation did not produce only positive experiences.

I remember reading material, possibly including articles in Psychology Today, discussing people who had experienced anxiety, dissociation and other adverse effects.

That mattered to me.

Not because somebody else's experience proved what had happened to me.

It mattered because it broke the assumption that the reaction itself was impossible.

I was not the only person for whom meditation had become destabilising.

The Research Caught Up

Over the following years the scientific literature became considerably more willing to examine adverse effects of meditation.

Researchers documented experiences including anxiety, depression, cognitive disturbance, emotional sensitivity, altered perception and traumatic re-experiencing.

Some studies found that adverse effects were not exceptionally rare.

Research also began identifying childhood adversity and pre-existing psychological vulnerability as factors which could increase risk for some people.

That does not mean meditation is generally harmful.

For many people it appears to be useful.

Nor does it mean that every unpleasant sensation during meditation should be treated as dangerous.

It means something more modest and, to me, more important:

the possibility of harm should not be dismissed merely because the practice is called meditation.

The ACE Score

Another piece of this came through the Adverse Childhood Experiences questionnaire.

The first ACE questionnaire I completed gave me a score of four.

I found the questionnaire useful partly because it was so simple. I did not have to explain my entire childhood. I could answer a series of relatively direct questions and see that particular forms of adversity had occurred.

Later I encountered a variation which used broader wording. It allowed significant adults and other people responsible for a child to be considered rather than restricting every question narrowly to parents or members of the immediate household.

Using that broader version, my score became six.

That mattered because some of the experiences which shaped my childhood did not fit neatly inside the household.

They involved adults in institutions and other adults who exercised authority over me.

Alcohol was part of that history.

I remembered being forced to drink alcohol as a child.

Two drinks in particular eventually came back to me: port and sweet vermouth.

For a while the second name disappeared again. I could see something of the bottle in my mind and several possible names came and went before “vermouth” finally returned.

That small experience was itself familiar: the knowledge was there somewhere, but access to the word was uncertain until suddenly it was available again.

I am careful about comparing scores produced by different ACE questionnaires as though they were mathematically identical.

What mattered to me was not whether four or six provided a perfect numerical description of my childhood.

The broader questionnaire recognised something the narrower wording could miss: some of the adults capable of profoundly affecting a child's development may live outside the child's home.

September 2026

In September 2026 I came across an ABC article about what happens when meditation goes wrong.

Reading it affected me more strongly than I expected.

I became shaky.

It was not because the article revealed that I had experienced something entirely new.

It was recognition.

Something which had happened more than a decade earlier was being described publicly as a real phenomenon rather than an impossible or peculiar personal reaction.

That distinction mattered.

Once again I encountered the strange experience of finding language years after the event.

Before Julian

The chronology is important.

These meditation experiences occurred before I began working with Julian.

I did not learn about Dissociative Amnesia and then reinterpret ordinary meditation sensations to fit that diagnosis.

The sequence ran the other way.

First there were the experiences.

Then there were years of trying to understand them.

Later there was Julian.

Later still there was a framework which made some of what had happened more intelligible.

That does not prove that every meditation-related experience was caused by dissociation.

It does establish the order in which the understanding developed.

Returning to the Woodshed

When I eventually worked with Julian on material associated with the woodshed, I was no longer simply being thrown into it by an exercise.

There was another person present.

There was context.

There was permission to stop.

There was no requirement to keep going because an exercise said that I should remain with the sensation.

There was no assumption that greater intensity automatically meant greater progress.

That difference was substantial.

The content could still be difficult.

But I was no longer alone trying to decide what the experience meant while I was inside it.

The Body Remembers Differently

The meditation period also changed the way I thought about memory.

I had tended to imagine memory as information.

A name.

A place.

An event.

Something which could be described in words.

The body scan confronted me with something else.

Memory could arrive as sensation.

A hand could feel wrong before I knew why.

A posture could matter.

A movement could matter.

A change in breathing could alter the entire internal environment.

A person could experience the physical shape of something before having a narrative explanation for it.

I am cautious about making strong claims about “body memory”.

Physical sensations can have many causes.

But I no longer assume that memory must first arrive as a story.

Observation Before Interpretation

That lesson eventually became consistent with the way Julian encouraged me to work.

Observe first.

What happened?

What did I feel?

What did I actually remember?

What came later?

What am I now concluding?

Those questions prevent one layer from silently becoming another.

During the original meditation experience I did not know how to make those distinctions.

Everything arrived together.

The physical sensation.

The fear.

The memory.

The attempt to explain it.

Later I learned that they could be separated.

I Do Not Meditate My Way Through It

My response now is different.

If something leaves me shaky or begins pulling me strongly towards traumatic material, I do not automatically close my eyes and investigate more deeply.

I do not assume that focusing harder upon the internal sensation is the best response.

Sometimes the better thing is to look outward.

To notice the room.

To notice something ordinary.

To allow breathing to proceed naturally rather than deliberately changing it.

To stop.

To return to the experience later, if there is a reason to return at all.

The objective is no longer to complete the exercise.

The objective is to remain grounded.

Harmless

The word “harmless” interests me.

Many things presented as inherently harmless depend upon who is receiving them.

A medication can help one person and injure another.

A breathing technique can calm one person and make another light-headed and frightened.

A body scan can be relaxing for one person and unexpectedly reconnect another with traumatic experience.

Recognising that variation does not require rejecting the treatment, practice or technique.

It requires taking the individual response seriously.

Consent Applies Here Too

Looking back, I think meditation also belongs within the broader question of informed consent.

If a practice can occasionally produce anxiety, traumatic re-experiencing, altered perception, dissociation or prolonged distress, then a person beginning that practice should not have to discover those possibilities only after something goes wrong.

That is particularly important where people have significant trauma histories.

Information does not have to frighten people away from meditation.

It can give them permission to stop.

It can tell them that an unexpected adverse reaction does not necessarily mean they have failed.

It can encourage them to seek help rather than pushing further into an experience which is becoming destabilising.

Water

A much later experience showed me again how unexpectedly an ordinary physical action could connect with something from childhood.

A doctor had been speaking to me about hydration and the need for me to drink more water.

There was nothing unusual about the advice.

But something in me began reacting to it.

At first I did not know why.

I began waking during the night.

I would try to push whatever was happening away and go back to sleep.

Then nurses also began encouraging me to drink more water.

The reaction became more persistent.

Nightmares began leaving enough behind that fragments were still accessible after I woke.

I recognised the pattern.

I knew I was not travelling well.

I also knew from previous experience that memories like this sometimes went in one of two directions.

They might continue far enough for me to recover enough of the experience to make some sense of it, often through tears and shaking.

Or access could close again and the material could disappear, as other memories had done many times before.

This one was unwanted, but it was persistent.

Write It Down

One night I was asleep when a nurse came to take my blood pressure and carry out the usual observations.

I woke and saw her filling my glass with water.

Something connected.

I suddenly knew more.

I asked her to get me a pen and paper.

I was frightened that if I went back to sleep the memory might close again and I would lose it.

I wrote down what I could.

My recollection of the note is something like:

“They made me drink water which was straight alcohol.”

I think I also asked the nurse to write something down or to make sure the note was kept so that I would not lose the memory again.

The important thing was preservation.

I did not yet need to understand every part of it.

I needed evidence for myself that the memory had been there.

That small piece of paper stayed with me.

Later I opened my wallet and took it out again so that I could read what I had written.

The note became an external memory at a moment when I did not trust my ability to retain internally what had just returned.

Port and Sweet Vermouth

As more of the memory became accessible, I recognised alcohol as part of what had happened.

I remembered port.

And I remembered sweet vermouth.

The strange difficulty I had retrieving the word “vermouth” was itself part of the process.

I could remember enough to know that another drink existed.

I had vague visual material associated with a bottle.

Other names moved briefly through my mind.

Then the word returned.

Sweet vermouth.

That recognition also connected with an adult memory from much later in life.

I remember a menswear shop opposite the Paddington Hotel whose owner used a drink in the morning to settle severe shakes before opening the shop.

Shirley would pour roughly seven ounces into a larger glass so that he could get it to his mouth before the shaking caused him to spill it.

Within a few minutes he appeared remarkably settled.

I remember thinking of the drink as something normally used as a mixer rather than something many people would drink in that quantity by itself.

That later adult memory helped the name emerge, but it did not create the childhood memory.

They are separate layers which happened to connect through the same drink.

The Tests

The note about water and alcohol led further.

It began reconnecting with experiences which at different times had been described to me in very different language.

Some people called them tests.

Others called them exorcisms.

Those experiences belong to a larger part of my childhood and need more space than I want to give them here.

What matters in this chapter is the route by which access returned.

It did not begin because I decided one afternoon to investigate an exorcism.

It began with somebody telling me to drink more water.

Then came disturbed sleep.

Then nightmares.

Then a nurse filling a glass.

Then enough recognition for me to ask for a pen before the memory could disappear again.

That sequence taught me again why I had learned not to dismiss an apparently disproportionate reaction simply because I could not yet explain it.

Sometimes the explanation was inaccessible.

That did not necessarily mean there was none.

Another Door

Germaine left me with a door I learned to close without allowing the latch to click.

Meditation opened another kind of door.

I had not known it was there.

I did not deliberately open it.

And when it opened, I did not yet know how to close it.

Years later I can see the experience differently.

It was not evidence that meditation was fraudulent.

It was not evidence that I was incapable of meditating correctly.

It was evidence that my history mattered to the way I responded.

The practice met a nervous system which already contained experiences I did not fully understand.

Something happened at that intersection.

For a long time I thought I was the odd one out.

Eventually the research began saying something simpler.

Sometimes meditation helps.

Sometimes it does not.

And sometimes the most important instruction is not to continue.