05/12/2022
From Matt Licatta .. just so good:
“Trauma occurs when our capacity to process emotional and somatic experience is overwhelmed.
One of the things we’ve learned about trauma over the last couple of decades is that it’s not so much what happens that causes an experience to be embodied as trauma, but how it comes to be organized in the nervous system.
What is most impactful is whether there is an empathic other who can help us to hold and metabolize what would otherwise be fragmenting. The nature of this “other” is of the mystery and can take inner and outer forms.
The journey is inside the neural network which is holding the unprocessed soul-material, and to infuse it with qualities and experiences not previously available: trust, courage, companionship, validation, love.
But more than anything, the network is updated by way of an embodied, felt sense of safety.
We might see trauma as involving two core components: overwhelming experience, on the one hand, and the felt experience of aloneness on the other. Not only do we have these very unworkable, terrifying flooding images, feelings, and sensations, but at some very basic level we’re alone with all that.
Perhaps it is the aloneness, in the end, that is so devastating to us as sensitive, relational human beings.
As an act of mercy and compassion, we are asked to take care of that frozen, confused one who has become stuck in the time machine of trauma and implicit memory, to ensure that he or she is not alone.
That we’ll listen to them, be there for them, and hold them so they’re able to feel felt and understood, and more than anything to know that they are safe now, perhaps for the first time ever. To invite the shattered one into a safe field where he or she can be seen and known.
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 no longer alone. You are safe now.”
It’s important to remember that much of our core wounding occurs prior to the acquisition of language and is not able to be healed through the questioning and reorganization of patterns of thinking. In other words, we can’t think our way out of trauma.
When our capacity to process unbearable terror, panic, shame, and rage is overwhelmed, undigested pieces of experience are held subcortically and in our cellular circuitry, unreachable by thinking which is a layer removed from the fires of the alchemical body.
Encouragement to “just get over it, that’s totally irrational, you can’t really believe that, you know that’s not true” and so forth is experienced by an inflamed nervous system as the activity of violence and aggression.
It’s like an autonomic form of gaslighting and reflects a deep misunderstanding of trauma and the workings of implicit memory, and only contributes to re-traumatization, in personal, cultural, and collective networks.
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 sense that no one can understand, that there is no companionship into the dark night. I am alone in this. This is devastating to the soul.
When that raging alive little boy or aching little girl cries out longing to be held, to be known, to be felt, to be heard, to be remembered… peeking their little heads out as if to say, “Is it safe now? How about now? I’ve been waiting for so long for a companion and friend. How about now?”, they’re really not all that interested in our clear cognitive analysis, rational inquiry, powerful spiritual insight, and thoughts on the matter.
They’re yearning for something else… for you, for your heart, for your holding. To know that you will stay near, that you will not abandon or shame them, that you will do your best to provide sanctuary and safe passage for them to come Home, to be allowed to come out of that frozen state and live once again.
In this way they don’t even want or need to be healed, but to be held. And to feel safe.”
