We can’t think our way out of trauma, attachment, and narcissistic violation.
When our capacity to process unbearable terror, panic, shame, and rage is overwhelmed, unmetabolized pieces of soul are held subcortically and in cellular circuitry, unreachable by thinking which is a layer removed from the fires of the alchemical body.
Instead, they seek refuge in the belly, heart, and throat, and in underground shadow storage regions. Thought is too dense to reach them here. From here, they burn and ache and long for safety and shelter, for permission to be.
Encouragement to “just get over it, it’s just your ego, just be in the present, it isn’t who you really are” is experienced by an inflamed nervous system as the activity of empathic failure, aggression, and psychic violence.
It’s like a neural form of gaslighting and reflects a deep misunderstanding of relational wounding and implicit memory, and only contributes to the intergenerational transmission of trauma.
In addition to shattering and unendurable experience – which is painful and terrifying enough – there is a profound sense of aloneness that goes with this, the disorganizing reality of the missing Friend, and no accompaniment into the dark night. “I am alone in this.”
This is devastating to the soul.
When the lost orphans of psyche and soma come surging in a moment of activation, they express their longing to return home.
To come out of their frozen, crystallized state, and into the warmth of the inner temple.
Where they can dream a new dream, play again, and become an alive, joyful vessel through which the Divine can live and move and breathe.
