I kinda thought it might be useful to jot down my experience of healing, the experience of moving through trauma, and hear other people's.
Not in any structured way, this is just what occurred to me to talk about - I'd started writing all this as part of another post and it occurred to me it might be a useful thread to start so I moved it across here....
One thing I've learnt with all this is to really let go of left brain thinking or "searching" for something in the past. You have to just run with what is in your body and the fragments that come up, often momentarily unbearable. Those are the fragments of your trauma, unbearable the first time round (and sure feels like it second time round!!) but in those clues lies your salvation. Not sitting there endlessly describing how you feel ( as intepreted by the rational side of us) and trying to make sense of the amorphous covering of pissed-off ness or depression. But just listening, and feeling....Gotta dare dive into the bits that feel like they threaten your sanity, and then walk round with that feeling until your brain can detoxify the emotion around it long enough for it to start to reveal what it's covering, and integrate it.
It can feel like you've pushed off from familiar territory and its just an act of faith that it will come out the other side in a meaningful, liveable way. The new landscape is oddly familiar too, but in a nightmarish terrible way, because you are momentarily reliving things you never wanted to remember ever again... like a long distant part of you that feels like another life, another quality of existence.
Funny how much the brain is capable of sorting through. You can't do it logically because our left brain is not sophisticated enough to handle the complexities and impasses and know how to heal and develop "itself," just as our left brain doesn't know how we make our nails grow or digest our food. There is an inner wisdom, an innate ability of the brain to return to where it fell off the normal developmental paths, to heal, but only if we dare clear the blocks to that process. (That's the hard bit!)
You an start to get flicks of recognition about symptoms you've had for ages - for instance, like the one I have about men I don't know, a certain feeling and fear I get that is so familiar and quick..... it's now starting to mean something, connect with something, vaguely, deep down. Not in any form that makes sense yet. But it connects with something that makes sense, some memory, some insight somewhere, at long last it feels like there may be some REASON for it and it's not too far away.
That is the fascinating thing about EMDR - the way it gives you such a phenomenal insight into how your memories and defences and blocks work. How the brain remembers things in state dependant groups of seemingly unrelated things but that are linked with some fear. Some feeling, some commonality, a trauma channel containing everything that has been experienced as somehow related to the trauma, but may not be connected to each other. Memories from totally different ages or parts of your life. A bit like a computer file that you chuck everything relating to your finances. One that is so carefully walled off, it is hidden on your hard drive.
Things in the present that hold ANY of the characteristics of that composite, varied bunch of memories, all hugging together inside that time bomb, triggers something from that trauma channel - not enough to comprehend, just a general "red alert" that triggers a panic attack or flight into dissociation. The trigger itself can be as vague as a smell, a song, a colour, a look on someone's face, even a time of year. The trigger is not the answer. The answer is the tremendous reaction, or rather, what is hidden behind and beneath it. The trick is in looking for signs of it happening, learning to make anxiety your best friend and sitting with it until the fear and reaction lessens. Anxiety is the gate keeper, the "don't go here, it hurts too much" but it's not in itself dangerous. It just feels that way. You have to sit with the gatekeeper until the anxiety lessens, the file is not deemed as quite so dangerous.... so the next time you can get a bit nearer and nearer and so on.
To break the patterns of a lifetime you have to be prepared to feel and sit with fear and anxiety.
The rub being, that through a lifetime, your mind is conditioned not to notice when you are being triggered, not to feel, not to notice- it can feel as subtle as a slight sinking or darkening of mood or irritiation. Or just sudden crazy emotion seemingly from nowhere. The process of working through your pain and trauma means that bit by bit you become better tuned into yourself and suddenly....... "hey I noticed a change there, a loss of me or a sense of dissocation or spacey-ness". (Or, as I often get, a sudden thumping of my heart with absolutely no sense of fear or discomfort which feels very odd, slightly crazy) And that's what you work with then, those gaps.....
Funny how all that stuff can be just under there and you are unaware.
Not in any structured way, this is just what occurred to me to talk about - I'd started writing all this as part of another post and it occurred to me it might be a useful thread to start so I moved it across here....
One thing I've learnt with all this is to really let go of left brain thinking or "searching" for something in the past. You have to just run with what is in your body and the fragments that come up, often momentarily unbearable. Those are the fragments of your trauma, unbearable the first time round (and sure feels like it second time round!!) but in those clues lies your salvation. Not sitting there endlessly describing how you feel ( as intepreted by the rational side of us) and trying to make sense of the amorphous covering of pissed-off ness or depression. But just listening, and feeling....Gotta dare dive into the bits that feel like they threaten your sanity, and then walk round with that feeling until your brain can detoxify the emotion around it long enough for it to start to reveal what it's covering, and integrate it.
It can feel like you've pushed off from familiar territory and its just an act of faith that it will come out the other side in a meaningful, liveable way. The new landscape is oddly familiar too, but in a nightmarish terrible way, because you are momentarily reliving things you never wanted to remember ever again... like a long distant part of you that feels like another life, another quality of existence.
Funny how much the brain is capable of sorting through. You can't do it logically because our left brain is not sophisticated enough to handle the complexities and impasses and know how to heal and develop "itself," just as our left brain doesn't know how we make our nails grow or digest our food. There is an inner wisdom, an innate ability of the brain to return to where it fell off the normal developmental paths, to heal, but only if we dare clear the blocks to that process. (That's the hard bit!)
You an start to get flicks of recognition about symptoms you've had for ages - for instance, like the one I have about men I don't know, a certain feeling and fear I get that is so familiar and quick..... it's now starting to mean something, connect with something, vaguely, deep down. Not in any form that makes sense yet. But it connects with something that makes sense, some memory, some insight somewhere, at long last it feels like there may be some REASON for it and it's not too far away.
That is the fascinating thing about EMDR - the way it gives you such a phenomenal insight into how your memories and defences and blocks work. How the brain remembers things in state dependant groups of seemingly unrelated things but that are linked with some fear. Some feeling, some commonality, a trauma channel containing everything that has been experienced as somehow related to the trauma, but may not be connected to each other. Memories from totally different ages or parts of your life. A bit like a computer file that you chuck everything relating to your finances. One that is so carefully walled off, it is hidden on your hard drive.
Things in the present that hold ANY of the characteristics of that composite, varied bunch of memories, all hugging together inside that time bomb, triggers something from that trauma channel - not enough to comprehend, just a general "red alert" that triggers a panic attack or flight into dissociation. The trigger itself can be as vague as a smell, a song, a colour, a look on someone's face, even a time of year. The trigger is not the answer. The answer is the tremendous reaction, or rather, what is hidden behind and beneath it. The trick is in looking for signs of it happening, learning to make anxiety your best friend and sitting with it until the fear and reaction lessens. Anxiety is the gate keeper, the "don't go here, it hurts too much" but it's not in itself dangerous. It just feels that way. You have to sit with the gatekeeper until the anxiety lessens, the file is not deemed as quite so dangerous.... so the next time you can get a bit nearer and nearer and so on.
To break the patterns of a lifetime you have to be prepared to feel and sit with fear and anxiety.
The rub being, that through a lifetime, your mind is conditioned not to notice when you are being triggered, not to feel, not to notice- it can feel as subtle as a slight sinking or darkening of mood or irritiation. Or just sudden crazy emotion seemingly from nowhere. The process of working through your pain and trauma means that bit by bit you become better tuned into yourself and suddenly....... "hey I noticed a change there, a loss of me or a sense of dissocation or spacey-ness". (Or, as I often get, a sudden thumping of my heart with absolutely no sense of fear or discomfort which feels very odd, slightly crazy) And that's what you work with then, those gaps.....
Funny how all that stuff can be just under there and you are unaware.
