Just like a wild animal

When a wild animal survives being chased and caught by a predator, and then manages to escape being eaten, they will discharge the energy that their nervous system produced to enable them to flee, fight or freeze, by shaking violently for as long as necessary. If the animal doesn’t discharge this energy, they will become hyper vigilant and see threat and danger everywhere, even when none exists. This hypervigilance exhausts their systems and they will not survive for long if this continues.

The same thing happens to humans after experiencing something traumatic. However we’ve forgotten and been socialised away from our wilder nature, deriding it as primitive, savage, reptilian. Have you ever started to shake or tremble when something traumatic happened, but either you or someone else stopped it? Maybe you were even frightened that it was happening? But once upon a time we did shake and know how to discharge trauma, or we wouldn’t have survived as a species.

When humans are faced with threat, our nervous system gears up to flee or fight, if these defences aren’t possible, we freeze (this is called ’tonic immobility’ in the literature). We can freeze psychologically and/or physically, I believe both are types of dissociation that act as protective analgesics.

When we freeze physically, our muscles will stiffen so as to enable us to remain as still as possible, we might not be able to use our voice, even if we want to. Immobilisation comes from our autonomic (automatic) nervous system and is not under our conscious control. It is crucial to understand this so we don’t later blame ourselves for “not putting up a fight”. We also need society to be more trauma informed about immobilisation, especially in cases of rape and incest. Too often freezing is seen as acquiescence which has profound implications for the victim being more prone to developing PTSD and being retraumatised and the perpetrator not being brought to justice.

When we freeze psychologically, we mentally leave our bodies and can watch what is happening to us as if from afar or above. It helps distance what is unbearable or indigestible in the moment so we can process it at a later date. But as we know, this rarely happens, we become afraid of the many experiences that we’ve dissociated from and we develop strategies to contain them as best we can. Until, they start spilling and leaking into our lives and we can’t ignore them anymore. This is when we might be diagnosed with things like; anxiety, depression, PTSD, fibromyalgia and so on.

It is crucial that we get back in touch with our minds and bodies, slowly and gently so they become safe places for us to inhabit.

The interview that the quote above is taken from can be found at: http://www.dailygood.org/story/1901/trauma-in-the-body-an-interview-with-dr-bessel-van-der-kolk-elissa-melaragno/

Fearing fear

Being afraid of fear can be really incapacitating. The capacity to handle any difficult emotion starts when we’re babies. If we’re soothed when we cry and get lots of hugs, kisses and are held close as much as possible, our capacity to feel all of our emotions, without being overwhelmed, grows along with us. Our container or window of tolerance grows, or doesn’t grow, in proportion to the amount of support and love we receive, or don’t receive, throughout our life.

What happens when our caregivers can’t help us build a container within our self, is that we’ll create one for ourselves as best we can. We’ll try and contain any chaos in our environment and ourselves so as not to feel like life is falling down around us. We’ll stuff emotions down into our too small containers so we don’t upset others.

Fear, like all emotions, has its unique sensations in the body. When these sensations feel awful, we have the ability to push them away, for a while, this blocks the energy of that emotion flowing through our bodies and this is where problems start. We’re not talking about pushing emotions away once or twice, we’re talking about dissociating becoming a life time habit and coping strategy.

We all have a tipping point, when our containers become full, they start overflowing. This is when we notice symptoms like depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, unexplained infertility along with many other chronic issues which always have an emotional contributor or cause. Building our capacity or window of tolerance in order to be able to feel painful and difficult emotions cannot be overstated. It is a life changer.

Stop questioning your self

The willingness to look inside and self reflect is not the same as constantly questioning your motives, behaviour and worth. One is taking responsibility, the other is self punishing. Why do you feel you need to be punished?

When you haven’t been able to trust from the start, and haven’t been trusted in turn, you question everything and everyone, but mostly your self. You are unsure of who you are, and as a result you feel ungrounded and scattered. There’s nothing more exhausting than second guessing your self all the time, it creates chaos in your life and in your relationships.

I think the first step in trusting our self is being able to metabolise difficult experiences and people. We can’t metabolise anything that we can’t feel; that we dissociate from; that we can’t accept or that we don’t trust (our feelings for example).

And that takes time and resources. The first step is to learn to trust yourself. Feelings aren’t 100% right 100% of the time, but you know what, in my opinion, mostly they are. So take a risk, if you make a mistake, apologise, either to your self or someone else if you get it wrong.

It is only by using your muscle of trust that you can learn to trust and trust your trusting. You then begin to realise what belongs to you and what doesn’t. This has the effect of lifting burdens that aren’t yours to carry. Natural boundaries form around you because you trust your self and act accordingly.