Your comfort levels

As we’re healing from trauma one of the most important things, as Babette Rothschild says, is to improve the quality of our daily life as much as we can.

One way we can do that is by paying attention to how comfortable we feel in the moment: physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

What do you do if you’re out walking and you get a tiny pebble in your sandal and it doesn’t feel really uncomfortable right there and then but you might feel sorer at the end of your walk if you don’t take it out, but you also think that taking off your sandal to shake the pebble out is too much hassle.

The small things become the big things so take that pebble out, make your walk as comfortable as possible. Listen to what your body is saying to you. Stop overriding its messages. This is how we show ourselves respect and take ourselves seriously. Making yourself as comfortable as you can be in any given moment is really really important.

So drink when you’re thirsty, eat when you’re hungry, rest when you’re tired. So many of us have a pattern of pushing through. We don’t trust that things will work out if we don’t struggle or fight for it. We might even think we’ll get some sort of prize for trying as hard as we can. Or maybe we have a belief that says the more we do, the more value we have. When we take it easy we feel lazy, good for nothing. It might even make us anxious to do less, never mind nothing.

Watch out for signs of discomfort and what you do to alleviate that discomfort. It might be easier to make yourself more physically comfortable initially as you usually only have yourself to answer to in this regard. But maybe emotionally you’re not comfortable saying No. Feeling comfortable in this instance in akin to feeling safe, they often go together. Remember by saying Yes when you don’t want to, is equivalent to saying No to yourself. Try saying No on the smaller things with people you feel safer with and see how it feels. Like anything, we get better with practice and dealing with whatever consequences there might be. Because there are consequences either way, it just depends on what consequences we’re comfortable with, or can become comfortable with.

The reenactment of trauma

The reenactment of trauma, or repetition compulsion as Freud called it, is everywhere. In our own individual lives and collectively.

If we don’t know about this phenomenon, we’ll think we’re being persecuted, punished, cursed, because we’re bad, shameful, unlovable or unacceptable. Insert whatever adjective was used to ever deride you and any conclusion that you came to as a result of how others treated you and your experiences.

Being traumatised is like being in a perpetual state of indigestion. It feels awful and we’re often desperate to resolve it once it starts to bubble up from our too full barrels: causing us debilitating symptoms such as insomnia, anxiety and depression.

We wouldn’t walk around for 40 years with a piece of food stuck in our throats but we walk around with many many undigested experiences because they felt and feel too overwhelming to feel. That’s why we dissociate, dissociation is what creates trauma as defined by psychiatrist Ivor Browne: unexperienced experience. And it’s good (and essential sometimes) that we dissociate, it’s a brilliant survival mechanism until it becomes a noose around our necks.

Sheskinmore, County Donegal, Ireland

I believe trauma repeats so we can resolve it. We don’t often see it that way though, and nor do others. There are many who rush to condemn us when we show signs of unresolved trauma especially when it is acted out, rather than in. Examples of act outs are violence, abuse, bullying and examples of acting in are agoraphobia and chronic illness to name a few. Many see the signs of trauma being reenacted as evidence of disorder and mental illness. I see it as a sign of unresolved trauma or as Freud said*: “an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things”. We literally cannot stand it, or thrive, when things are left incomplete, unexperienced and undigested.

The repetition of trauma gives rise to the most agonising frustration that whatever we’re going through will never end which leads us to feel hopeless and that we can’t escape our situation. It’s like a merry-go-round we can’t get off. But we can get off.

When you see repeating patterns in your life, write them down, write how they make you feel, feel into your answers, even if only for 10 seconds. Try feeling for a bit longer the next time, maybe 15 seconds. The repetition is an opening, an invitation to see the real truth of who you really are before any muck obscured your vision.

*Freud S: Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), translated and edited by Strachey J. New York, WW Norton, 1961