Connecting the dots

In the theatre of the body, trauma can be transformed. The fragmented elements that perpetuate traumatic emotion and behaviour can be completed, integrated, and made whole again. Along with this wholeness comes a sense of mastery and resolution ~ Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences

If you have ever questioned how you feel, or if others have ever questioned how you feel, and as a result you have wondered whether you're imagining your feelings, dramatising them, maximising them, taking them too seriously, going around the twist, have completely lost the plot, have just not gotten over them and you feel you “should have” at this stage, or you feel the pressure of others thinking that you're a broken record, take a moment and listen to your body. Do you have any chronic health issues that have not responded to allopathic medical treatment?

Our body is a container, and its symptoms are windows into our unconscious, all we need do is look and listen. The next time you or another question the validity of your feelings, or you feel like beating your self up for where you are, listen to your body's symptoms, they never lie. You can always, always trust your body. Your body is showing you, in every way that it can, how to take your self and your feelings seriously. If you choose not to listen or don't hear, your symptoms will scream as loud as they have to until you do hear what they're saying.

The majority of us would agree that stress is one of the main causes of disease. Stress, or more specifically, undischarged stress, can cause havoc with our health, it can contribute to heart disease, strokes, inflammation, insulin resistance, depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue syndrome, the list goes on. The presence of chronic symptoms in our body is our evidence of a cause, evidence that we're not stark raving mad. And so often that cause is the early imprint of feeling unloved which puts extreme stress on our system from the beginning. The stress and pain of not being loved has to go somewhere and so often our body absorbs it because we just don't have the resources to feel that kind of pain when we are babies and children and we often lack the resources as adults as well.

When we are not loved and wanted, there's no safe haven where we can be our self, have our needs met or thrive, so, we do our best to adapt and survive, we contort our true self in order to try and get the love that we need. The operative word being “get”. This relentless search for getting love changes who we are, and it can be a long road back to our true self. If the trauma of feeling unloved remains undischarged, it causes absolute mayhem in our bodies and lives. Until we can fully connect to that pain, we will continue to re-enact the trauma and/or manifest its effects in our body in order to find resolution.

We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways ~ Marge Piercy