Healing Happens at the Speed of Relationship
This work is about coming home to the body.
Which, before anything else, begs the compassion and self-empathy to acknowledge that there was a very good reason why we left.
Often that reason is that our experience in this body felt overwhelming, that being here and now in the body was not so good for us.
If we can begin by acknowledging that the process of leaving, freezing, shrink-wrapping some part of our experience, was wisdom, we begin to heal, to develop internal safety and trust.
We may also begin to recognize the roots of our felt sense of disconnection, pain, overwhelm.
There have been many moments where being in our bodies, sensing our full experience and feeling okay in our environment including connections with other humans was more threatening than ‘acting okay.’
So ‘acting okay’ helped us survive, to make it through those experiences of aloneness.
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 or 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.
Often emotional pain that cannot be held in our relational web in real time becomes the driver of deep brain stress and eventually leads 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 and then signal for survival or thriving functioning in all of our body systems - digestion, respiration, cardiovascular, 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 emotional dysregulation, physical pain, illness ….
It has been on hold until a time when there is more capacity in us, the environment, our relational web to receive and include it’s communication.
This is a life serving message, asking ‘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.
What is driving the symptoms 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 not sustainable or enlivening.
This is why attuned healing relationships and communities are so powerful in healing.
They give us a different felt experience….
one of relational safety.
No words needed.
Just, 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
attuned connection.
Healing happens at the speed of relational resource.
It is the fuel for the healing journey.