If in childhood we experienced our caregivers not supporting our emotional lives, abandoning supporting us when we were feeling big feelings, it created a big and deep primal response of being isolated and separated. To a child this feels like death.
We will begin to seek any feeling that will block or override feeling that isolation, that feeling of death in our body.
We need our caregivers to co-regulate us when we are young because we don't have the capacity in our nervous system to regulate ourselves AND we don't have the emotional maturity to contextualise our experience. We just know we are overwhelmed and flooded with feelings.
We are hardwired for connection and being with others. It is in community that we most often feel safe and have a greater chance of survival. We enjoy that feeling of togetherness.
When we are in this pattern of avoiding our big emotions and feelings, of overriding feeling the isolation we experienced as little ones, we disconnect from from our bodies. This brings with it anxiety, auto immune issues and chronic illness.
Many of us also develop a nervous system strategy of fawn, also known as appeasement or people pleasing. We disconnect from our emotions because we are afraid that if we express them, we will be abandoned. That old story of death if we are abandoned is wired into our nervous system.
When we are under threat, the old story is playing out in the present all the time. Like a broken record that keeps returning to the scratch.
Healing happens in the presence of a compassionate witness that can hold space for you to connect with your body somatically.
Trauma happens in the absence of a compassionate witness or community so it makes sense that healing happens with a compassionate witness and within community.
image stockcake.com - mother embracing child, AI generated.
