Obviously, EMDR sessions with Rachel, stirred up a lot of things, which were locked since my childhood. From today's experience, I realized one thing. Recovery success depends 100% on ability stay with emotional flashback, or any other experience without the urge to push it away or dull. Currently, I am still in the stage when I don't trust my body. I am still afraid of myself, that certain somatic sensations / emotions are so catastrophic that they would overwhelm me beyond repair, and I would need another person to save me. This is my biggest fear of all.
You courageously shine light on core fears and obstacles still arising amidst the intensely productive yet destabilizing work you've been doing in EMDR to unlock past trauma. Feeling unable to trust your body or ride waves of emotional flashbacks/somatic sensations without needing rescue relates back to overwhelming experiences in childhood where support was not there.
The parts still doubting whether you can handle invasive somatic / emotional states on your own without being destroyed or abandoned carry the wounds of not having caregivers emotionally attuned enough to help modulate those states back then. The fear makes complete sense - our physiology struggles trusting capacities now if they were consistently overwhelmed in the past. (Brain does not know difference between past and present. It simply pattern matches for survival)
Yet the fact you have endured so much already until reaching this juncture of healing demonstrates profound resilience. No matter how long it takes recalibrating nerve pathways to realize "I can come through this activated state without danger now," you are building those emotional muscles daily through compassionately sitting with the pain.
This next stage of recovery is often the most grueling - realizing just how much old betrayals still echo through panic that we are unable to self-soothe without risking annihilation. But meeting those terrified parts with care begins to organically shift the nervous system’s assessments - “I see I can move through flashbacks without being broken. I access inner reserves.”
Keep surrounding yourself with support, resources and skills to discharge old energies while allowing your system to slowly update- “I’ve got this. I learn to trust myself.” You deserve to feel that embodied confidence. 🤲🏾
"panic that I will unable to self-soothe without risking annihilation" yes. that's the core fear!
Yes, you distilled it perfectly here - the core fear driving so much chronic defense mechanisms and hypervigilance for trauma survivors is terror that we will be unable to self-soothe adequately without risking complete emotional annihilation or abandonment.
Because developmental trauma encoded the sense that our caretakers could not help regulate us when emotional intensities got too high in childhood, we adapted by repressing vulnerability. Showing feelings like anger, grief or fear meant losing necessary attachment or stability.
Without the modeling early on that distress can be moved through in manageable waves to return to calm, it makes sense a belief persists internally that being unable to self-soothe amidst symptom flare ups risks the inner child going into terrifying free fall.
The unconscious conclusion - "Tolerating this level of anger/despair without someone to rescue me will lead to death or life-threatening aloneness like I experienced before." So we grasp rigidly for external regulation at all costs, even past childhood.
Yet the good news is each time we compassionately hold it together through emotional tumult in the present, we gradually build somatic evidence that we WILL not die or be abandoned for feeling the full-spectrum of emotions. We resource our system from within more each time. The nervous system Atlas holding up the illusion that we cannot self-soothe without perishing...slowly shrinks to size. Healing is afoot 💫
"Tolerating this level of anger/despair without someone to rescue me will lead to death or life-threatening aloneness like I experienced before." yes! finally!
It's so powerful when we can distill core unconscious fears driving present day defenses down to their essence. You did that beautifully here articulating the primal terror that tolerating intense emotions without being rescued would risk the kind of consuming isolation, aloneness or annihilation endured in childhood before we had capacity.
The clarity of pinpointing that specific trauma root frees us from the shame that often accompanies adulthood meltdowns or loss of composure when activated. Now instead of berating ourselves with "I should have it together by now," we can compassionately recognize - of course all-consuming rage, panic or grief still feels too dangerous to sustain alone...a young part of me still associates that loss of external regulation with the terror of near death aloneness I once knew.
Normalizing those adaptive roots allows us to hold and nurture inner child parts when they get triggered in current life until they can feel safe enough to come out of survival cave. No self-blame needed for what made total sense in our early environments.
As somatic skills build in the present for co-regulating intense sensations that were intolerable in youth, over time we calm those panicked exiles step by step. "I've got you now...Together we will learn how to help you safely feel all the grief and anger from long ago so you don't have to hide anymore..." New endings get encoded gradually. 🤝
Without the concrete ability or relational trust early on to know that BIG feelings can crest then settle again if compassionately accompanied, it encoded as inevitable that becoming emotionally overwhelmed leads to plunging alone endlessly into painful disconnection from any stabilizing anchor.
You found such an impactful image to encapsulate that primal abandophobia when self-soothing abilities feel lacking in adulthood - the childhood psyche remembers too well and fears repetition of that infinite plunge into terrifying aloneness.
The process now is gradually accompanying the exiled aspects that endured that helpless free fall again and again in developmental years - teaching them step by step with safety and skill that intense inner states can ebb and flow without catastrophe. We gently help orient stuck parts in fight or collapse that they have climbed out of the well through incredible courage, and never need suffer so forsaken again.
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