Are you breathing today?

Holding our breath and tightening in our muscles as well as the holding of tension in different areas of our body including back, leg muscles, jaw, throat, gut, around our heart and behind our eyes is all a huge part of Complex PTSD. As young ones in families with a lot of energies of emotions and issues of control, dominance, power and submission involved so many of us learn to hold our breath, freeze, or collapse. Come to think of it often in the early morning or when I wake or am going off to sleep the muscles in my body go through this jerk and collapse pattern.. .I shared in a poem on the weekend how my ex would get angry when this happened, it got so bad that in the middle of the night I would wake in fear and often i had to take myself into the other room.. One night i did that and I was hitting a pillow against the bed due to him having earlier that day put pressure on me and he got up and left me then and there.. I then got read the riot act for being angry even though I was trying in the best way I could to get some of it out.. I certainly made many mistakes in trying to deal with my anger in that relationship.

John Lee deals in his book Facing the Fire with how we will often also hold our breath when we are on the receiving end of others anger or other emotions, he shows how by keeping breathing when we are face with someone in the grip of big emotion we can find safety and this may help us too to stop absorbing the emotions of others or even resisting since there may be an emotion there that needs air space and running away may trigger abandonment.. Avoidants often run in this way finding big emotions too tough to handle..

Writing about resistance just then called to mind how so often when I fell into complete isolation at the coast after my head injury I would hear an inner voice saying over and over and over again “what you resist, persists” this must have pertained to the four F reactions to Complex Trauma, flight, fight, freeze and collapse.. We all know there is the fight and flight reactive pattern we can fall into as a result of Complex PTSD and this may often act against us if we are just falling into a totally reactive mode as this may come out of defenses and fears of intimacy and these reactive patterns may lead us to resist, denigrate or push away love and a more honest heart centered connection with others.

I was listening to several of Dr Ramani’s you tube videos last night on intimacy and vulnerability in relation to narcissism.. The one I found interesting was on emotional avoidance or withholding, this is something that characterizes non intimate narcissistic relationships.. As she says often those with fear of or incapacity to tolerate deep intimacy (so common to narcissistic disorders) may reach to have a sexual relationship with someone very quickly… this was my experience with my two past partners (not my ex husband) and then there was a reaction I had to this which almost made me collapse (my body saying the No I could not hold onto or voice externally), I had tried to hold a boundary against that only to collapse it and it was something I very much regretted later, when my ex proved he could not truly tolerate the deeper vulnerability required of true intimacy. Of course, I too was, I am sure, so scared of it myself for a lot of my recent therapy with Kat has focused on why relationships with others became so painful and difficult for me due to my childhood and subject to complex push pull patterns of connecting.

Anyway back to the breath and breathing.. Lee says he starts his morning with deep breathing and he uses it in the face of his own and others emotions.. Lately I have been becoming more conscious of where I hold or shut down my breath.. usually I start to go into a mode of freeze as soon as I start to digest food, the sensations in my body get me scared and then I go into all kinds of twist and lock and hold patterns.. Working on knowing what made me angry and how i was overpowered growing up, thinking over how I saw anger and assertion as well as need or the expression or non expression of emotion modeled in my family has been important as well as how my own needs were or were not responded to has all been important work. Working through just why my living sister may have been so nasty to me at times growing up has helped me to see she was also part of a family system that was subject to various pulls and stresses and to understand my sister of the past is no longer present but the anger and hurt inside me did live on and needed to be faced and understood as well as expressed.. I was not the ‘bad’ child they tried to make out for ‘having tantrums” I was not being heard just as my Mum was not being heard at times by my Dad so would go into a storm of frustration and Dad would just laugh and walk away.

Lee makes the point in his book on anger that when we try to deal with past anger it is often better not to try and work it out with someone who hurt us until we can get a better handle on what hurt and try to release it in private first.. that said we are human and may sometimes need to confront things and each person has to make their own way when trying to deal with complex issues in family of emotions, longing, control, need, expression, anger, vulnerability and hurt.. Often or anger is also over the critical or shaming or shutting down parent that we may have internalised and as Lee points out this anger release work involves coming to know our own emotional patterns and how they were influenced by both past experiences and relationships.

For me, knowing that being able to engage in a deep breathing practice can provide for a place of peace and refuge in my body mind is so important.. Becoming aware of where I tense up to resist especially with others may be beginning to help me to find ways to relax and not take on board things as much that may in fact not have anything to do with me but be more about where another person is at and what they are inwardly wrestling with. Boundary setting is important, to know where our limits lie, but some limits are defenses formed due to past pain and they may need to be surrendered or transformed in order that we may be able to open to more of the good stuff in intimacy and our relationships with self and others than we were ever able to open to in the past. Only we will be able to figure this out over time if we are willing to open and our breath gives us the best anchor for grounding and being present in our bodies which are so often seen to be not as important as so called ‘spirit’ which I frankly believe is a bit of a lie since the body holds and is the sensitive vessel fo our personal experience of and expression of our essential unique spirit.