Interoception: one of our 8 senses

The ability to track and sense what is going on inside our body is called interoception, it is one of eight, not five as commonly taught, senses that we have.⁣
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When we haven't been co-regulated/attuned to from infancy, which is probably the majority of us, difficult emotions and their physical sensations will be very hard to stay with and process. We need support and help to feel the big stuff and our caregivers need to be able to soothe us when we get upset. If we are not soothed on a consistent basis, we shutdown and do all sorts of stuff to try and manage what we can't really manage because developmentally, we just can't.⁣

⁣This pattern of dissociating and avoiding then continues throughout life. We keep shoving stuff into our bodies, expecting them to be able to take it, until we reach breaking point and there is no other choice but to deal with it, or continue to suffer.⁣
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Bessel van der Kolk says in The Body Keeps the Score: "In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.⁣
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In my practice I begin the process by helping my patients to first notice and then describe the feelings in their bodies—not emotions such as anger or anxiety or fear but the physical sensations beneath the emotions: pressure, heat, muscular tension, tingling, caving in, feeling hollow, and so on. I also work on identifying the sensations associated with relaxation or pleasure. I help them become aware of their breath, their gestures and movements".⁣
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Making friends with our body and its sensations is essential to living a healthy and good life.⁣

Honouring the body

Our bodies are the repository for all of our experiences. When we don't process/experience these experiences, our bodies have to take on the burden of all this undigested stuff. This is fine for a while, but if we keep pushing things down into our bodies, it will eventually give and start to leak symptoms. Often the symptoms will be metaphors for what is going on with us.

The symptoms are the bread crumb trail to the root cause(s) but many of us get mired in figuring out and treating only symptoms.

Very often, the cause is unresolved trauma which places a huge burden on our bodies. They can only hold so much. The four books below talk about this very subject.

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Bessel van der Kolk

The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease, Robert Scaer

When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection, Gabor Maté

The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting, Alice Miller

Try and really answer the questions posed here, write them down, and start tapping on your answers.

Meeting and feeling pain

You can be 2%, 5%, 10% willing … whatever feels right to you. You don't have to meet your pain all at once. It's important to stay within your window of tolerance (what you can cope with without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down). The more willing we are to meet and feel our pain, the less our triggers and symptoms have to scream for our attention because we're already paying them attention.

Becoming who you are

If we feel we're broken and wrong, we'll try to fix ourself which is a long, exhausting and futile road. What if who we think we are is not actually who we are? Instead, our identity has been formed by a collection of different strategies and adaptations to an environment and people who weren't safe. If we feel safe, we don't have to strategise and become who we are not, we have the luxury of blossoming into who we really are.

But we can also claim this right to blossom, whatever age we are and whatever has happened to us. By becoming who we really are, we automatically shed who we are not. This process isn't easy and it certainly isn't painless but to tell the truth about anything, especially who we really are, is liberating, even if it's difficult.

I really like what Alaine Duncan says in her book, The Tao of Trauma:
1. People are not broken when they have a diagnosis of PTSD, they are simply awaiting reregulation
2. Trauma is dysregulated and disorganised qi (life energy)
3. The qi can’t be tainted
4. The overlay of dysregulation caused by traumatic stress is simply an overlay

I love how she describes trauma as an overlay. I see it as an overlay on our true self which remains untainted. Underneath it all, if we get quiet, we can sense and feel this self. It can pop up when we least expect it, but most need it.

Being who we are is living from the inside out, rather than the outside in. When our environment and the people in it are unsafe and chaotic, we don't have the luxury of living from our insides, it's too painful and overwhelming. We also don't have the luxury of resting in others and our environment, instead we have to become hypervigilant and second guess people just to survive. It might feel like your real self has withered away because it was never nourished or cherished, but it just didn't get the right conditions to grow and that is something you can do something about.

Learning to feel again

This is essentially what we do when we embark on our journey of healing trauma. It sounds too simple doesn't it? It is simple, but not easy.

We've all had experiences that we just couldn't experience because they were too painful, our survival was at stake, we were too developmentally immature to process them, they were too horrific and so on. But whatever caused our traumas, the end result is still the same: unexperienced experience.  We need to find a way to experience these experiences or life will find a way to get us to experience them.

Many times, we need to have a crisis in order to address what has gone unaddressed. It becomes too easy to ignore our pain, minimise it, distract from it, even with "good" stuff, until it becomes a mountain that is. Until the symptoms/conditions we have start to make our lives so uncomfortable that we're forced to deal with our hurt/unexperienced experiences. Let's start feeling again, slowly and gently.

Trauma: unexperienced experience ~ Ivor Browne

When the threat is inside

The internal threat that a lot of us face is the unfelt pain and hurt we are carrying. When our response to overwhelming experiences was too much for us to bear, especially when we were infants and children, we stored it away. The definition of overwhelm in this context is anything that short circuited our nervous system, and this is very much dependent on our developmental stage.

Psychiatrist Ivor Browne says: instead of a way of avoiding external danger, it [dissociation] is now utilised to deal with the threat of internal stabilisation; whenever we are faced with an overwhelming experience that we sense as potentially disintegrating, we have the ability to suspend it and "freeze" it in an unassimilated, inchoate form and maintain it in that state indefinitely, or for as long as necessary.

I believe these unassimilated experiences are what cause anxiety. They mount up because we're too afraid of feeling them. When a threat is internal, it can seem as if there is no escape. But there is, the way out is to befriend and feel our difficult emotions and sometimes dreadful physical sensations. It is simple, but not easy.

There are many different ways to help us do this, safely and gently. What is key, as Bruce Perry says, is a bottom up approach, in line with our neuroanatomy. In order to change a neural network he says, you have to activate that neural network. So in order to change our stress response, we have to activate it through somatosensory routes, i.e., running, breathing, walking, chanting, visuals, rhythm and so on. As Peter Levine says, this is like walking a tightrope, too little activation and nothing changes, too much and overwhelm results (which keeps the trauma loop going), just enough activation is the goal so we can make much needed changes.

Do we get or give love?

Do we get or give love? Maybe neither. Maybe we are love, but when we first arrive in this life as newborns, we need as clear a mirror as possible to show us just how good, lovable and valuable we are. This mirror doesn't have to be perfect because perfection doesn't exist. It just has to be good enough.

This is why attachment is so important, we cling to our 'rock' like barnacles, but that doesn't make us clingy. It makes us human with valid needs. Without our rock, we're like rudderless ships, at least for a while until find other rocks to remind us of who we really are. Can we ever know we are love/loved/lovable without others? I don't think so.

Synchronicity

Lately I've been noticing more synchronicity in my life. Or maybe I'm just seeing the signs more clearly and I'm actually following them rather than questioning and rubbishing them as unimportant or insignificant.

What I have found is that exactly what I need at the time shows up in these signs/coincidences/synchronicities.

A recent example of this synchronicity is a couple of years ago I heard Meggan Watterson being interviewed by Tami Simon of Sounds True and I found it interesting but thought no more of it until I got an email from the bookbub.com with a daily list of the special offers. I saw Meggan's book, Mary Magdalene Revealed for €1.99 and bought it on a whim.

I grew up catholic in Ireland but I am no longer catholic, if I ever was catholic in the true sense of the word (deliberate use of small case letters). I don't belong to any religion, but I do believe in God and I admire the person that Jesus was.

It's all the paraphernalia around the catholic church that I don't like, particularly the shocking misogyny, abuse, slave labour and child trafficking that went on in Ireland for years and years, with collusion from the state. I'm ashamed of it, even though I'm not responsible for it.

There's a quote that really resonates with me, but I'm often afraid and ashamed to share it in case people think I'm religious or God forbid, catholic. It's from the gospel of Thomas, in the Gnostic gospels. I even have an issue with the term gospel as it reminds me so much of being preached to and the hypocrisy of the catholic church on so many issues. But the quote feels very true to my experience.

I've learned from Meggan that the gnostic gospels are the mystical side of Christianity. That I can get on board with. Just as I can get on board with Rumi as a Sufi but not agree with a lot of the teachings in Islam, particularly about women. That is my issue with all religions actually, the way they treat women; one half of the human race.

One day I was reading about Meggan being in mom-mode and "cleaning up as if I had seven arms and calling out directives at my son as if we were suddenly under some sort of deadline to get everything organized in his room", and her son sang the line "I want to know what love is" because he was feeling ordered around and it immediately disarmed her. She says, "He has skillful means at such a young age. With one lyric, he snaps me out of the trance of who I don’t have to be".

I want to know what love is, is a song by Foreigner from the 80s and one I've always thought was cheesy and a bit soppy. Meggan talks about hearing that very song later that day in her yoga class, but this time it was sung by Krishna Das. I then looked up this song out of sheer curiosity to hear it sung as a chant and I was moved to tears. It made me hear the song and its lyrics in a whole new way. I was meant to hear that song and to learn about Krishna Das. It was exactly what I needed in so many ways and it will reverberate in my life for a long time to come. It was an answer to what Joan Borysenko calls "a simple prayer of the heart: help".