On integrating the the darkness and not letting it defeat you : reflections on processing trauma!

Some people endure terrible darkness.. some people can be deeply hurt to the point where the tender self has to decide in time whether to fall or rise, some pains and wounds can cut into us so deep and sometimes life reawakens them…

At this time of year around the anniversary of my head trauma I feel the full onslaught of it as a rush or a field of body memory I am fighting to break out of.. I can get ‘captured’ by body symptoms some days. I feel if I can just get the spin alignment right I will burst through.

I heard a helpful and profound thing from a Buddhist teacher a few years back he said that massive traumas spin or twist the body energy of chi or tsa and I certainly experience these spins or vortexes of energy running through my body and limbs at times..

At the age of 17 when I nearly died one of my legs was pinned through the upper part of the lower left leg’s two bones with a metal rod and I spent 101 days in skeletal traction which even today is felt as a twist or spin in my pelvis and spinal axis.. that trauma was reawakened and repeated on the anniversary of my husband walking out and stirring up all the unresolved grief of my life,

Peter Levine addresses the two spin vortexes in his first book on trauma Waking The Tiger. According to Levine there is both a centrifugal and centripetal force in trauma and its hard to imagine but the two can overlap energetically, one spins us energetically clock wise and the other anti clockwise.. According to quantum physics nothing is as solid as it seems, and the mind body shock of trauma seems to splinter our reality and fragment it. In the case of massive body traumas we can get to the point where the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems fight each other or one gets hard to switch off, so either when we want to get going it is hard to do it, or when we wind down or want to relax or go to sleep it can be hard to do that. We may feel we need to stay hyper alert energetically, even if unconsciously… thus problems with letting go, falling asleep, staying asleep and waking up to a fully conscious state not ‘bled’ or shot through with trauma memories or body ‘flashbacks.’

Dealing with the invasion too of our beings by the external energies which can remain trapped somatically is something not understood by others who have not endured the shattering of a sense of safety and trust that occurs with certain interpersonal traumas. Its only natural that we seek to retreat or become reactive which served a useful purpose at one time but may be transferred onto new situations where it isn’t necessary.

For myself achieving a dynamic balance between activity and rest, action and movement is important and is taking years. I have to walk through the storm in my body on many mornings and eating seems to trigger the storm at times, I spend hours using grounding and yoga moves to balance the streams of energy in my body I have used tissue salts and some chinese herbs for years to help with problems especially hard now due to the fact i lost several teeth in recent years and now wear a denture.. some nights as soon as my head hits the pillow the storm blows up….and lately I have been having a lot of powerful dreams

Each person’s trauma imprints are unique to us, finding an effective way to manage them and self soothe may take years.. Self compassion can be hard to come by for those of us who may blame ourselves when the abuse or neglect was of a more ‘benign’ variety.. Also some abuse involves the abuser fracturing our reality, or at least trying too. We may have been told we are to blame and that we did something to ‘bring it on ourselves’ when the real truth is far more subtle or complex.. Being able to accept we cannot function as others do in the face of certain traumas is essential and being too hard on ourselves and others may be a part of the problem.

For myself lately, I am beginning to feel stronger, more able to move forward, open up, risk engagement, come out of lock down or paralysis, endure the storms and fears of hurting others that are not my responsibility.. As the youngest child of a family affected my multigenerational addiction trauma the way I survived was often to make myself responsible.. Getting sober when I did at 31 gave an different insight into the genesis of traumas in our family and having access to information from relatives also interested in investigating where certain damaging behavior originated has been useful.. The validation of others outside my immediate family helped when the true causes seemed to lay hidden a way back. Themes I now see of abandonment have repeated in order to be addressed.

Healing from and through trauma to become a more aware person takes time, trauma often invites more trauma to us due to the nature of ‘repetition compulsion’ before we can get to address the root causes that may lay hidden.. In AA it is said all the time that addictions are but a symptom of deeper problems we must uproot or come to an understanding of by doing our inner healing grief and multi-generational trauma work. Many of us are carrying the darkness of generations past and that darkness is the place we must go in terms of inner exploration. The way out is through, though at times we have to learn how to bypass ineffective behaviors and reactions that only continue to embed us more deeply within the tangled up mire of trauma.

Insight often comes through pain, liberation through burning through and enduring the storm until it removes from us what needs to be shed, released or purged in terms of vibrational imprinting. Much work happens at night in our sleep when we are processing, dreams can be important and nocturnal awakenings and noting the times of awakening along with what we may be consuming to cope with our trauma symptoms helps us to balance our body symptoms.. Certain organs of our body store certain emotions… grief is held in the lungs which are paired in Chinese medicine with the large intestines used for processing of foods and emotions as well as extraction and elimination of toxins… Breath work for me in the early hours of waking is very important not only for detoxing but for calming my body mind too, because often I can awaken with a jolt if the day before had any kind of big trigger for me..

A working knowledge of the Chinese organ system may help us work with stored toxins and unprocessed emotions present in trauma. Body work ideally needs to be combined with psychological and emotional work as we engage in the long journey of working through trauma to emerge with more of ourselves available than was available before due to death dealing forces in our developmental trajectory.