Much of our wounding occurs prior to the acquisition of language and is not able to be healed through questioning and reorganizing patterns of thinking. We can’t think our way out of trauma. A more tactile, sensual, sensitive alchemy is required.
When our capacity to process psychic states of terror, panic, shame, and rage is overwhelmed, unmetabolized material (pieces of soul) are relocated into underground storage (shadow) and held in subcortical and bodily circuitry – in our muscles, cell tissue, belly, throat, heart, breath.
From here, the disowned ones long to come out of their crystallized state and return home.
Encouragement to “just get over it, you can’t really believe that; you know that’s not true, come back to the present moment, that’s ‘just’ your story,” is experienced by an inflamed nervous system as profoundly misattuned, aggressive, even violent.
In response, the orphans retreat deeper into the subtle body. Of course they do. This is the activity of intelligence.
This “advice” – even if well-intentioned – is experienced as an autonomic form of gaslighting and reflects a deep misunderstanding of traumatic organization and the workings of implicit memory.
In addition to the terrifying and shattering emotional pain is a profound sense of aloneness. No one can understand; no companionship into the dark night.
As relational beings, this core experience of aloneness is equated with death, especially in the heart and fragile psyche of a little one.
That one is here now.
Though it may appear they are a remnant of the past, from time to time they move through the veil and appear. Not as an obstacle on the path, but as a radiant manifestation of the path itself.
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