What is also true is that in those times when we have to betray our own authentic experiences in the interest of survival, we also lose access to important parts of ourselves.
We can become more and more disconnected from our bodies, our felt sense of knowing and from experiencing ease and well-being.
Our bodies can become like storage containers for offline, disowned parts of our lived experience.
This creates a sense of lostness, loneliness, disconnection, reactivity, fear, overwhelm, numbness, absence, hopelessness….
These emotional pains that cannot be held in our relational web in real time become the drivers of deep brain stress. As they accumulate, they lead to physical pain or illness.
This is because emotional memory and processing happen in the [amygdala & limbic system] brain structures that also assess and respond to threat. Those centers then signal for survival or thriving functioning in all of our body systems - digestion, respiration, cardiovascular, immune, endocrine, integumentary (skin)....
That message of ‘I’m not okay’ needs to get through to us.
This postponed message can come in many ways including anxiety, depression, emotional dysregulation, physical pain, digestive, immune dysfunction, illness ….
The wisdom of the postponing is to put the danger communication on hold. Our body wisdom is waiting until a time when there is more capacity in us, the environment, our relational web to receive and include it’s communication - a time when the receiving of that communication might actually serve it’s life enriching purpose.
This message is sensing, ‘Can you be with me now?’
‘Is it safe to let down, to be here now?’
Painfully, we as a culture respond to our ‘symptoms’ as a problem without seeing the deeper need for response to what is actually driving the symptoms. We try to quiet or get rid of the messenger,
when what is driving the symptoms really needs to feel:
‘Yes, I’m here. I see you, I feel you, I can be with you. It is safe to be here now, to feel now.’
This responsiveness can feel confusing to the conditioned movements of our unconscious habits that needed to manage or move away from overwhelm, disconnection, pain..
The confusion comes because the stopgap responses of moving away from or tightening down on our fear, pain, sadness were what helped us survive when our nervous systems were developing in environments that could not respond with care. But this ongoing immobilization of ‘life force’ is of course not sustainable.
Yet, we wonder why we don’t feel well when so much of what was alive in us has had to be immobilized.
This is why attuned healing relationships and communities are so powerful in healing.
They give us a different felt experience….
one of attuned relational safety.
No words needed.
Just the feeling of : I can be right here, right now,
an experience that occurs in the native language of our deep brains that are constantly scanning
for danger or safety
Healing happens at the speed of relational resource.
It is the fuel for the healing journey.
