Trauma occurs when our capacity to process emotional, psychic, and somatic experience is overwhelmed.
In addition to this shattering of information processing, there is the lived reality of the missing Friend, resulting in an unendurable sense of aloneness.
Not only do we experience a flooding of unbearable images, feelings, and sensations, but at some basic level we’re alone with all that.
In my experience, it is this aloneness, in the end, that is so devastating to us as sensitive, relational human beings, with a nervous system that has been crafted for companionship.
As an act of mercy and compassion, we make the journey inside the neural network holding our unmetabolized shame, rage, terror, and grief. For it is within the center of that mandala where we will find the frozen, confused, and scared one who has become stuck in the time machine of trauma and lost in the disorganizing fields of implicit memory.
To behold the lost orphans of psyche and soma and listen, hold, feed, surround, and love them, so that they feel felt and understood, and more than anything help them to know that they are safe now, perhaps for the first time ever.
To bear witness to their untold story as it unfolds across verbal, somatic, and autonomic narratives:
“Yes, I hear you, I see you, I want to know you, hold you, care for you, listen to you. I will not forget you. I will not forsake you. You are allowed to be. You are no longer alone. It is okay now. You are safe. Even if you continue to shatter, I will collect the pieces within a holy vase.”
It is a reparative neural experience that unveils that sacred soothing, where the unmetabolized images, feelings, and sensations are taken into the sanctuary and placed on the altar in front of us. This holding allows the secret nutrients to be disclosed and for the scattered pieces to return to their rightful place within the larger ecology of being.
While understanding and insight can be supportive, it is right-brain immersion in fields of safety which fosters cellular restructuring.
The psyche will reassemble when it feels safe.
The body will reorganize when it feels safe.
