Bodily awareness of past trauma only grows slowly when we have had a childhood of early emotional neglect where a parent in being unable to mirror and contain us forced us to carry (sometimes) unspeakable things or huge energy storms of pent up emotion and feeling. In The Myth of Normal Gabor Mate highlights how babies and children absorb the climate around then and how they have an intrinsic and organic response to events, these can only be made accesible to ego conscious ness if the parents holds and contains the body and soul and being of the child otherwise all of that information gets buried only to manifest later in misunderstood symptoms as the therapist Alice Miller so often noted.
This came to mind as a good friend shared about being raped as a young boy with me this morning, it made sense of why he so often throws up because the memories of all of this occurring before the age of 9 were not accessible to him before.. There is a natural kind of anesthetic that not being able to remember provides us with, a form of dissociation from the true meaning of the actions and affects upon our young selves and its in the tummy that the inner child of our past lives and where much of this is stored.. The tummy is the second brain that is the later brain development is influenced by and I believe this is a complex issue as the little one carries the experiences too of the ancestors deep in its cells.
This week I felt that kind of churning highly discomforting nausea in me sharing about the dichotomy of feelings I experience around my mother.. In so many ways my mother abandoned me and pushed me away. I recognize now it was not her fault as she had no loving containment at all. As I shared recently I feel that this is why both my sister and I struggle and my brother is a workaholic. Mum was the adult great grandchild of an alcoholic who was struggling to survive and like a lot of men of the time drank to contain all of the emotions of this, something highlighted earlier this year by an Irish writer whose name I cannot remember who wrote about this issue. Just think about what the First World War soldiers endured for a minute.. seeing mates being obliterated on fields of blood, flesh and body parts flying everywhere.. what terror, what horror, what unspeakable sadness and then coming home with no way to tell of it at all and often being shocked out of it by fucking doctors. Fuck that enrages me, but they knew no better.
Imagine how different it might have been for those shocked survivors to be craddled, loved, sung to, soothed and helped to get out of their systems all of the terror they needed to contain, but they could not and so they drank or raged or suicided.
On that issue last Sunday I watched the movie Land directed and acted in by Robin Wright in which a trauma survivor of terrible loss takes herself off into the Wilderness because she effectively knows no one could fully understand and may actually medicalize it.. She ends up in the movie nearly dying until a hunter comes to find her starving and frozen in the little cabin after nearly being attacked by a bear (stored up pain and emotion). He brings a nurse but the woman pleads not to be taken to hospital and is slowly helped to lay by a fire and fed warm soup until she becomes upright again, the Hunter, Miguel, respecting her need to do it her way offers to come back and teach her to hunt and they slowly connect but never once does the woman open up to him about the truth of what happened to her. He does, he admits he lost both his wife and son in an accident. I will not spoil the movie for you but it is the most gripping portrayal of where heavy trauma takes as and was a kind of modern version too of the Handless Maiden tale in which the woman goes into the woods to grow back her hands and come into a relationship with her divine feminine and masculine. Deep in he heart this woman knew it was only nature that could contain her but the sad fact of how trauma also isolates us so in an unseeing world really made me cry.
In trauma we become lost, alienated, our feelings buried and hidden, the world seems foreign and often will reject us not knowing the truth or full depth of what we struggled with and so we run and hide, I now see that that response is only natural and, in actual fact, in this modern toxic culture, it may be the one thing to keep us alive or stop our real truth being even more obliterated or fragmented. Just look at what has happened to my living sister? And to my beautiful older sister who died in 2014.
In some way we have to find a way to make the Unspeakable, Spoken and its apt that somatic trauma specialist Peter Levine named his one of this later books on healing and working through trauma In An Unspoken Voice. The body will speak to us in affects and symptoms, in sensations of heat or cold, prickling, anxiety, apprehension, in feelings of confusion, rage, elation, or nausea. And as multigenerational trauma expert Mark Wolynn points our even in our body movements of contraction and expansion. All of these energetic patterns and messages will speak about or bear testament to a truth that may have been completely terrorising at one time, far, far too much for a little one to bear.
As Kat said to me on Thursday the trauma and anxiety I experienced in my past and family’s collective past are now are working their way out of my body and as they do joy fills my heart. Like today, even typing this my body has been feeling the depth of it all, the breadth, the awesome and mysterious magical complexity of it all. Sometimes the weeping and the rage seems global and I fear it will destroy me. But as much as I can and do fear the rage, it really does not destroy me if I can contain it in some ways, in fact the opposite is true, it restores me to my soul and birth destiny.
For trauma survivors we must be there, we must stay open, our attention and focus need to be unconditional because sadly as a novel I am reading currently highlights a sad grieving (or traumatized) person is often more acceptable than an angry grieving (and traumatized) person. For the traumatized body/mind we must find ways to care and most of all to hold and attune and listen in,knowing when to vent and finding ways to release what remains stored in or pent up. The alternative is we pass it all on or act it out on others, often innocent children.
Like the shamans who sang to Gabor Mate over those five days of a recent retreat he led into the Canadian wilderness with a group of other doctors, we must also find ways to cradled what is in most critical need of being held in full consciousness and everr so tenderly, cradling our suffering and the suffering of others like a precious baby. For as a collective we are all now undoubtedly carrying so so many generations of both terror and trauma trying to work their way out of our bodies and as we resonate with the weather I know this to be true.
If, instead, we fail to do this, nature will begin to turn against us to get our trauma addressed… And as the movie Land shows the embrace of the natural can, be more beneficial to us, far far better than being left to the mercy of medicalization or the ignorance of those so at odds with a more holistic and soul embracing model, would not or could not ever fully understand..
Emerging From The Dark Night 