its true that we can develop habitual ways of reacting out of our wounded self.. it is an issue I have thought a great deal about after watching a number of talks given by Eckhart Tolle over past days.. I notice with my self certain triggers of old wounds may cause me to clench or tighten somehow, as well as over react. Then it is’nt long before I reacting to my reaction!!
Today I also was more mindful of the way my mind was relating to the usual cascade of trauma symptoms in my body and I worked on diverting myself.. Digesting food is usually a huge issue for for some reason, lately I have been taking supplemental magnesium that seems to help as well as my Dr Schuessler’s calcium and indigestion tissue salts.. I also notice my connection to my dog Jasper in terms of how our mutual energies get bound up.. For me resistance to getting out and walking doesn’t help me to build my energy up, I can get a lot of energy from a walk at the right time of day and today I managed to get to a funeral despite anxiety and having to walk Jasper shortly before it.. I just allowed myself to be a little late, as it was an hour long Catholic service with a full mass.
Eckhart talks about habitual reactors, you know the person! (I am one!) We had a lot of genuinely hard things happen in childhood but now the slightest trigger makes us angry and it does us not a lot of good reacting to a trigger without tracing it back and stopping our reaction so we don’t blow even more energy or wind our body up into a twisted frenzy we then have to uncoil from. One of the deepest woundings of not being responded to in empathy in childhood or being forceably prevented from moving and protesting bad treatment comes to be this habitual squeeze or twist of frustration or vibrational charge that gets locked inside the body’s muscles and CNS that then becomes some kind of pattern.. I noticed this particularly after yesterdays’ therapy session in which we concentrated on the events of negation and lack of holding and attunement that happened with both my Mum and sister after Jonathan left.. On the back of this things happened concerning our coast house after Mum’s death that really hurt me and I was not really allowed to protest at the time and so a lot of this -upset, frustration and banked up vibrational charge ended up getting stored up inside of me, to the point of me feeling LITERALLY CRUSHED on the left hand side of my body around the shoulder and the site of my 2016 cancer surgery….
Our bodies truly are amazing and the traumatized body does go through so many changes in terms of energy as well as sites of both shut down and freezing or chronic tightening, arresting or holding.. Being allowed to protest is important for the child but they also need containment of protest.. too much expression being denied us leads us to lose power, not being contained well means we never get to develop good boundaries or delay of gratification when it may be needed or necessary. for us to be able to relate effectively with other people in the world.
I am grateful to those talks by Eckhart Tolle, he does not address the traumatized body but more the reactive ego when it turns destructive.. being able to get handle on this may help some of us more than we know.. lately I watch someone trapped in a story or prison of childhood he just cannot seem to break free of due to the fact he is not getting the right kind of physical and deep psychological therapy support… getting angry at the medicos who will not ‘fix’his condition is pretty useless, as so few of them truly understand the embedded damage of childhood trauma, abuse or punishment.. its such a sad thing to see someone so locked up in the past.. your heart aches for the person but you also see their reaction patterns not only are no longer working instead they are just starting to become an even bigger part of the problem.
Emerging From The Dark Night 