In the present moment, and the fear of life in trauma, some thoughts

I fell back into a deep sleep sometime before 9 am it was so strange it must have been a microsleep even if it lasted 40 minutes.. The cleaner was due this morning so I woke with a bit of a start and had to get moving.. There was the waking into the void of the alone and then thoughts came of the isolation I took myself into over the years 2006 until I met my ex partner in 2007. During that year I lived at the coast and saw no one much apart from people at my Al Anon meeting, I wrote and wrote and wrote and was in a very dark and indescribable place. As I look back now I wonder why I didnt consent to move back to a more connected place but then it occurs to me that the isolation I felt was something deeply ancestral that I came out of almost like a wall of water holding me back from.life and difficult emotionally traumatising relationships or threatening to drown me under its heavy weight.

And in that year 2006 I had yet another accident around the anniversary of my husband leaving a year after the second one where I bust my head open on an iron foundry.. I think I was in a very dissociated state following that, as it occurs to me the ongoing battles I have to pull mysellf into the present and out of the trauma zone with all my early attachment wounding and loss of the solid ground of my true self were and are still ongoing!

There is a word, liminal that perhaps describes where I have lived since 2001, it is a place of not being fully alive, or with parts dead, of in fact, feeling terrified on one level to be alive, filled with fear and with a sense of threat. This is not uncommon to PTSD and Complex PTSD survivors but there is also a transcendent world that can accompany this one and keeps us engages on other levels, Pete Walker sees this as a trauma response but it may keep us alive in a creative state of partial animation, to an observer not much may be going in but for us deep inner work and alchemy may be occurring. .

In fact trauma therapist Peter Levine says that often our traumas function to open us up to the spiritual dimension on some level.. It may on one level be because humans fail us and in so doing we find ourselves in the words of the AA BIG Book ‘beyond human aid’ so we look to nature, animals, spirit guides or other forces and we also dialogue with demons.

For me, as I look back, after the second accident I was so alone and even rejected for being traumatized.. So if I shame myself now for things it really is not fair on me at all considering all I lived through.

I listened to a powerful short interview with shame specialist Brene Brown last night which is shared to You Tube where ABC reporter Leigh Sales asks her about emotions in relation to what Brene has written about in her latest book Atlas of the Heart.. According to Brene we all suffer from a lack of emotional literacy, something she did not name as alexithymia but something that comes out of emotional neglect and dissociation that I share a lot about on my blog. This emotional illiteracy makes it difficult for us to name our emotions and then the most dangerous thing Brene Brown finds that is toxic in relationships is the expression of contempt as a result and shaming too as a defense. This is something that Alice Miller also talks about in her book The Drama of the Gifted Child describing how narcissistic parents can show it towards a small and vulnerable child as well as towards their needs and longings as well as emotions.. When that child’s expression or needs are met with contempt they have very few places to go to deal with that.. And the most likely outcome can be that we then turn upon ourselves in similar ways.

Brene talked in that interview too about our tendency to shame and be unkind to ourselves and/or others and this in some way is not allowing ourselves or them to be fully present and alive in our own skin in a complete way.. When we have to exile parts of ourselves its almost like having our emotional and spiritual limbs cut off, we then become not a holistic person but one who only operates on perhaps a limited mental dimension. I also equated this back to the myth of Ivan who becomes pinned through the neck by a tutor and how this is explained by the psychotherapist Marion Woodman to be a kind of stunting and atrophy that comes to affect us as humans especially as Saturnian limiting forces of socialisation shape and stunt or disfigure us.

Taking refuge in our minds, and ideas and even memories of trauma may mean often that we forsake the body because as Bessel Van Der Kolk says it becomes too scary but what we are scared of and learned to turn against is our fully embodied life with all emotions. So we go into a cocoon as some stage when the pain of being so split off becomes overwhelming and life seems to be full of threat, but fear of threat allows little place for the joyful expansion of love and open hearted connection. So we wear our mask to protect ourselves all along becoming more and more isolated if we cannot learn to dig deeper and express as well as embrace the vulnerable parts of ourselves and others. This is the gateway back to connection but first we must embrace ourselves in all our splintered aspects as we come also to understand at ever deeper levels how our collective and personal evolutionary journeys interweave and interface.