We can't hold our pain on our own. We need attunement, not just as babies, but all throughout our life. That need never goes away, nor should it.
Peter Levine says that trauma is what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness. Maybe this is what really hurts us, having no one to hold us, no one who believes us, validates us and our experiences, nowhere to rest and be our self.
Self-regulation (the ability to soothe our self) is a myth, says Bonnie Badenoch and I agree with her. We always need co-regulation, even when we're on our own, we're drawing from a well of having been supported throughout our life and the warmth of knowing we have someone now. Hopefully we all have the fortune to have people in our life that can hold our emotional experiences with us, and if not we can work towards that.
Robert Stolorow calls this a 'relational home'. He says, "Emotional experience is inseparable from the contexts of attunement and malattunement in which it is felt. Painful emotional experiences become enduringly traumatic in the absence of a relational home or context of human understanding within which they can be held and integrated".
Don't go it alone, reach out.
