Trauma is full of pain and unbearable feelings. It is a natural response to not want to feel that.
So we numb our emotions, disconnect from the awareness of our bodies and avoid the memories. This is a very useful strategy to get through the trauma without having to experience all of it. But it leaves its traces in our bodies and minds. The results will later be diagnosed as PTSD and dissociation.
One of the tasks we need to accomplish in our healing journey from PTSD is to learn how to stay with ourselves instead of „going away“ through dissociation.
Staying with our feelings
We might be scared of our feelings. They seem to be overwhelming, destructive, bottomless or too painful. But the price for numbing them altogether is high. It might mean not feeling positive feelings as well, losing our ability for empathy and living with a deep sense of estrangement and not belonging in this world, sometimes even not feeling alive at all.
Learning to stay with your feelings takes time and you don’t have to do it all at once. You can start with allowing yourself to feel a drop, a pinch, a teaspoon full. Limit the time of staying with your feeling, you can start with a moment. Over time you can expand your tolerance for feeling things.
Be careful not to linger with feelings like guilt and shame. They are usually not the ones we dissociate and don’t need special attention. Instead, staying with your anger, sadness and even anxiety can help you to heal and manage life without dissociating so much.
Start with staying with your feelings that are related to your regular life, not trauma. It will help you to lose your fear of your emotions. They might feel uncomfortable, but they are not dangerous. While firmly grounded, you can practice how to manage them.
Later, when you have found some security in your ability to stay with feelings and regulate them, you can look at the more intense feelings connected to trauma.
Trauma work usually leads into a phase of mourning, which means staying with your sadness until your wound slowly heals.
Staying with our body
When trauma happened, our body was right there in the front line. It is a natural response to remove ourselves from sensing the body that has been hurt and dissociate it. Feeling the body can be unpleasant. There might be pain, certain areas of the body or certain postures might remind us of trauma, there are sensations like hunger or thirst that can be uncomfortable. On the other hand, it is impossible to feel pleasure of any kind without using our senses. To create safe and positive experiences today, we need to be with our bodies. PTSD research shows that the practice of being with our body is a huge part of trauma healing and it doesn’t even need exposure therapy to do it.
Mindfulness: At the core of mindfulness is guided attention that leads to an increase in our awareness of things. Start with creating pleasurable moments for yourself and experiencing them mindfully. Be with your body as you drink your coffee, eat your ice cream, take a refreshing shower or smell your flowers. That way you can teach yourself that today it is safe to sense your body again.
When you move on to staying with your body, even when it is an unpleasant experience, remember the principle of mindfulness: don’t judge. Our own evaluation e.g. „this is terrible“ increases the sense of suffering. Instead of judging we can describe how things feel and stay neutral. This way you can learn that even when it is not pleasant, it is still safe.
Yoga: In yoga we combine mindfulness for our body and breath while we move around, taking different poses. These poses can be comfortable or uncomfortable and the practice of yoga can teach you to stay with yourself through that. It can also increase your awareness of the whole body. Mindfulness practice often just focusses on a part of the body or a certain sense. Many yoga poses need you to be aware of where every part of your body is at a given time. In that, it counters the fragmentation in our awareness that is part of dissociation. With a mindfulness practice that is connected to movement (that could also be Qi Gong or mindful walking etc.) you can also train yourself to stay with your body in your every day activities and live a more embodied life.
Staying with our memory
Did you know that our brain isn’t able to create memories while we are in a dissociated state of consciousness? That is why we seem to forget huge chunks of our day, even though we have been active and not just staring into space. It is not stored in our memory properly. Staying with ourselves means giving us a chance to have different memories than those imprinted through trauma. If you want to remember an important moment, make sure to be mindful while it happens. It increases your chance that it will be stored properly and become a lasting memory.
Trauma memories seem to be too painful to remember. It is a natural response to avoid them, repress them and often also dissociate them, so that we experience amnesia for what happened.
To avoid being reminded of our memories, we also limit our lives, don’t go to certain places, don’t wear certain clothes, don’t talk to certain people, the possibilities of avoidance are endless. But they lead to impossibilities in our life and limit our freedom.
No amount of avoidance is enough: sooner or later memories will be triggered and we will be flooded; we experience a flashback.
Trauma memories are stored different than usual memories. They were not processed properly when the trauma happened. It means that just being with the memory (re-experiencing) is not enough, we need a therapist and special techniques to reprocess them, so that they can become integrated in our memory. Only then can we be with the memory and not get overwhelmed.
Trauma work needs you to be with yourself on several levels.
You need to stay with your memory of what happened while you also stay connected to the present.
Stay with the memory of your feelings and also stay connected to your present feelings.
Stay with the memory of the body sensation while you also stay connected to your current experience of your body.
This is at the heart of every technique of reprocessing trauma memories.
That is why it is invaluable to practice staying with ourselves. It does not just increase the quality of our life today, it is also the foundation of reprocessing the trauma of the past, which will again increase our capacity to experience happiness for the rest of our life.
Dissociating from ourselves belongs to the past. To create a better future we need to learn how to be with ourselves again.
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