Gwynn Raimondi, MA

Trauma, retreat, cocooning, coming back into world

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There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds. 

~Laurell K. Hamilton,  Mistral’s Kiss

About a year and a half ago I received some incredibly traumatic news.  I was incredibly blessed that my people gathered around me and held me together and up as I processed all that was being unearthed.  I was, and am, deeply grateful for those women.

A couple weeks later, I learned that one of my best friends from high school died.  And there was the funeral to attend across the state and the grief to feel and sit in and know.

I lost my words.  All the pain of those two events, the sense of the world as I thought I knew it shattered.  I needed to go inside, to spend as much time and energy and space as I could process and being with those I love most.  I stepped back from the world and went in my safe cocoon.  I processed and felt and cried and screamed.  I listened to music I knew would encourage my tears.  I allowed all the tears to shake themselves out of my body as my chest hurt and throat felt raw.

I was reacting to and processing two traumas at once.

And because of the way our bodies work, I was also processing old traumas.  While the reason for my tears may have been about recent events, the toxins that were released via those tears have been in my body for a long time.

This is how processing trauma works. Our body doesn’t really know the difference between traumatic events, though our mind does.  Our body only knows something is not right, that it needs to be in a heightened reactive state. And so as we process any one specific trauma, our body also is able to process old and other traumas at the same time.

Part of my process of processing traumas, personally, is to cocoon.  This is different from isolating (which is something trauma encourages us to do).  Cocooning for me is like wrapping myself in a cozy, heavy, blanket. It is warm and safe and quiet.  The cocoon is made up of time with those I love, time with my therapist, time in solitude.  It is having quiet and having soothing voices.  It is being held and being not touched.  It is limiting sensory input and output and allowing myself to sit in and feel and be with and yes, process, the multitude of emotions that are swirling in me.

(Not all that) long ago I would not cocoon when I experienced a traumatic event. I would “power through.” I would isolate – telling all those around me I was “fine” as I felt like I was dying.  I didn’t reach out.  I didn’t feel safe.  I didn’t seek comfort.  All of this is a normal trauma response.  For reasons we don’t yet understand, when we experience trauma, and do not have sufficient reserves of resilience, our mind tells us to stuff it down, act like nothing’s wrong, and even worse, tells us we are all alone, no one would understand, don’t even bother seeking help.

With my own personal work, both trauma specific and not, I’ve been able to come to this place now of no longer isolating, and instead, cocooning.  It hasn’t been easy getting here.  And I am still in my own process and journey in this work.  This work takes time and patience and whole fuck ton of self-compassion.

Because of the self-compassion part I can look back at old patterns and ways of being and not feel shame.  Instead I remind myself I was doing the best I could with the tools I had and was able to receive at the time.

This is true for all of us.

I deeply believe each and every one us at any moment are doing the absolute best we can with the tools and resources we have and are able to receive.

Even when we are at our absolute worst and lowest and darkest.

Take that in for a moment.

Even in our darkest and lowest and worst moments, we are doing the best we can with the tools and resources we have and are able to receive.

(Note: sometimes we are not able to receive resources, for any number of reasons, even when they are offered to us.  We get to have compassion for this too.)

I have often heard people say (and even said myself a few times) “I wish I had started this work [of self-awareness, body-centered mindfulness, and or trauma processing] earlier/when I was younger/a long time ago.”

A truth is, that we couldn’t have started this work until we did.  For whatever reasons we didn’t have the right resources to move into this work.

We didn’t have enough of our basic needs being met.

Dr. Abraham Maslow developed a theory that is called the Hierarchy of Needs.  At the base is food, water, shelter, rest, the ability to breathe and eliminate waste.  If these basic needs aren’t met then we can’t focus on the second “level” which is safety – being in an environment where your body feels physically safe, you have a steady income, you have resources you can rely on including friends and family, you have a relatively healthy body.

The “middle level” in the hierarchy is love and belonging.  I feel this is important to note.  I’ve seen a meme several times over the years that says in essence “If you don’t love yourself, no one else can/will love you.”  According to Maslow, this is absolutely incorrect – we actually need to feel loved and cared for and have a sense of belonging somewhere before we can move on to “self-esteem” or self-love.  We need our people, our community.  We need to feel like we are a part of something.  Sometimes we are able to find this sense of belonging from our parents or siblings, and sometimes not.  Sometimes we find this at church or school, sometimes not.  Sometimes we find it in our social circles, and sometimes not.  It honestly doesn’t matter where we find it, only that we do. (Also, this is what attachment theory tells us – we need to feel and be loved in order to love ourselves.)

This is where that “deeper” work, trauma related, self-awareness, body-centered mindfulness, and our ability to “do the work” comes into play.  We actually can’t do that work UNLESS we have our other basic needs met – one of which is having a sense of belonging and being loved.

My truth is I would not have been able to start any of my personal work any earlier than I started it.  Particularly my own trauma work.  I needed to have my basic needs met, have consistent and reliable access to food and shelter, to have a sense of safe-enoughness, to feel loved and that I belong enough, and then also to love myself enough – to be able to come to the place of feeling that I do matter, that my life matters, and that I am worthy of happiness and to not continue to suffer all the physical and psychological and emotional impacts of my own trauma history.

Frankly, I didn’t get to that place, I didn’t have all those needs met, until relatively recently, in the last few years. And so, even if I had gone into trauma therapy prior to that, it likely would not have helped as much as it is now, and also frankly, I likely wouldn’t have stuck with it.

This “deeper work” isn’t necessary for our survival.  The first three tiers of the hierarchy are.   We honestly don’t need to love ourselves or be “self-actualized” in order to survive on this planet.

And.

For those of us who have the privilege of having those three basic needs met, what would our lives be like if we were able to get the fourth and fifth met?  If we did the work of processing our own lived experience trauma, our ancestral trauma that lives in our DNA, our cultural trauma that feeds  itself every day?  What would that even be like?  How would our lives be different?

For me, I know how my life is different.  I also see the shifts in the women who gather in my circles and who I work with individually.  I know, personally, how coming home to my own body changed every aspect of my life.  I know, personally, how doing body-focused trauma therapies have opened up aspects of my Self and my life I thought were closed away forever.

It hasn’t been easy.  It has certainly more often than not, been really fucking hard.

And yet, for me, and it seems for others who are able to do this work, it has been so fucking worth it.

…

Did you enjoy reading this?  It was originally written for my weekly newsletter in the summer of 2017; I edited it for publication here.  If you’d like to receive my weekly emails, which includes essays like one, you can fill out the form on this page. 

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring

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Without the ‘dark’ I would never understand how light the ‘light’ really is. And while I don’t care for the dark, I do appreciate what it does for the light. ~Craig D. Lounsbrough

Change is supremely inconvenient, uncomfortable and naturally scary. Yet we only move through life through the process of change, reinvention and renewal, and so bravery is our quintessential rebel for pushing us past our own limiting beliefs and behaviours. Bravery is feeling the fear, immersing yourself into it and through it so you can come out the other side. ~Christine Evangelou, Rocks Into Roses: Life Lessons and Inspiration for Personal Growth

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change. ~Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Within each of us is strength, power, and daring.  Our own.  That of our ancestors.  Within each of us is resilience, love, hope.  Within each of us is a knowing, a trusting, a believing.  It is there.  We may not feel it.  We may not be able to admit it is there, we may not be able to see it, but it is there all the same.

The work of reclamation is to unearth and reclaim these parts of our Self that we have buried, pushed down, ignored, or truly did not believe existed.  It requires us to reclaim our bodies as ours, our strengths and skills and talents, our inner power and knowing, our courage, bravery, and daring to break patterns and cycles, to become the people we want to be.

Reclaiming those parts of our Self we thought lost, or worse that they never existed, is work that can only be done after the work of releasing and creating space, and allowing for the time of renewal to integrate the openness into our being.  Once that space exists and is truly a part of us, we can begin to see those parts of us we couldn’t before.  Those parts of us that we were told were vile, were ugly, or simply weren’t there in the first place.

Reclamation is the time of deeply and viscerally realizing that what we were told is “too much” about us is actually our strength, our power.  Of realizing all the ways we were told we are “not enough” is actually where our courage, our bravery, our daring lives.  Of realizing all the shame we carry isn’t ours, that we were never meant to have it living within our being.

Then, once we have all these realizations and can feel them in our bodies and at the core of our being, the work of reclamation becomes relatively easy.

I’ve described all these stages of this work in a linear fashion, first one then the next then the next.  And while it is true that in many ways one stage does need to proceed the next it is also true that we are constantly doing all these stages of this work simultaneously.

I envision the path of this work to be like a three dimensional spiral.  We travel along it, around and around, up and then down, revisiting the same narratives, the same wounds, but at different layers and from different perspectives each time.  The work is perhaps never actually “complete” and yet with each layer we find our ways closer to the person we truly want to be, the person we truly are, and finding more and more freedom from the leash of our own trauma and the trauma of living in our current western culture.

I talk more about these ideas in the 6-minute video here.

This essay is the fourth and final of a four part series I have written exploring our narratives of too much, not enough, and the shame we carry and how we can release them and reclaim our own strength, power, and daring.  I hope you have found it helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the fall online women’s circle Becoming Unleashed.  We begin October 1 and space is limited to six women.  You can learn more here.

In case you missed the previous essays, you can find them at the links below:

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame

The Goo: A time of Renewal, Restructuring, Re-evolving

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring (this essay)

 

The Goo: A time of renewal, restructuring, re-evolving

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Metamorphosis is the most profound of all acts. ~Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden

And I feel like the Queen of Water. I feel like water that transforms from a flowing river to a tranquil lake to a powerful waterfall to a freshwater spring to a meandering creek to a salty sea to raindrops gentle on your face to hard, stinging hail to frost on a mountaintop, and back to a river again. ~María Virginia Farinango, The Queen of Water

I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me. ~Anaïs Nin

According to Merriam-Webster to renew has the following definitions:

  • to restore to existence : revive
  • to make extensive changes in : rebuild
  • to begin again : resume
  • replace, replenish
  • to become new or as new
  • to begin again : resume

If we look in the thesaurus, some synonyms for renewal are:

  • awaken
  • transform
  • metamorphosis
  • revolution
  • shift
  • radical change

When I think of renewal I think of the story of Inanna, the Sumerian Goddess of Heaven and Earth.  The very condensed version of the story is that Inanna travels to the Underworld to be with her grieving sister, Ereshkigal. Inanna had to travel through seven gates on her way down into the Underworld, leaving a piece of clothing behind at each gate to enter into the Underworld completely naked.  The descent into the Underworld and removal of layers of clothing represents Release.  Her time in the Underworld represents Renewal.

Ereshkigal was not happy to see her sister and had her hung on a hook to die.  Inanna’s handmaiden, Ninshubar came after three days and helped Inanna back up through the gates, reclaiming what is rightfully hers at each gate, and back to the land of living.

This time in the Underworld, hanging on a hook dead, was the time of Inanna’s renewal, her own transformation, her incubation that lead to her rebirth.

It was her time in The Goo.

If you are new to me and my work, The Goo is the time in the cocoon when the caterpillar has fully disintegrated and decomposed yet not yet formed into a butterfly or moth.  My feeling is that this is a very uncomfortable time.  The Goo is no longer what it was (a caterpillar) and also isn’t yet what it is to become (a butterfly or moth) and honestly I believe The Goo has no idea what the future holds for it, and so it is a time of unknown, a time of needing to trust in the future without being able to see it. It is the time of great change, great shifting, profound transformation.

While The Goo is uncomfortable, likely terrifying, it is a time of quiet restructuring.  To the outside world when we are in our own versions of The Goo, it may look like we are doing a whole lot of nothing or that we are resting.  This is because The Goo is not a time doing, it is a time of being.  It is a time of outer stillness in many ways.  Not stagnant, for there is much movement internally, but stillness to allow for the internal restructuring and integration to take place.

The Goo is when we learn what it is to tolerate discomfort, to accept the unknown, to be able to be in the in-between spaces of life without trying to force things in one direction or another.  It is a time of acceptance.  Of surrender.  Of allowing what needs to happen to happen.

It is not an easy time.  Like the stage of release, but to a greater degree, it is a time of unlearning, unraveling.  A time of allowing old neuropathways to atrophy and new ones to sprout and take root.  It may be a physically painful time, it is always an emotionally painful time, and there may even be moments of psychological pain as we let go of old coping mechanisms that no longer serve us, but in fact are now causing us harm.

The Goo may feel unbearable at times, but it does not last forever.  Even the most profound of transformations do come to an end (to allow us to move into a new time of transformation).  The discomfort doesn’t last forever, pain does pass.  The person we become on the other side, I believe, is worth all the work, and discomfort.

I talk more about these ideas in the 8-minute video below.

This essay is the third of a four part series I have written exploring our narratives of too much, not enough, and the shame we carry and how we can release them and reclaim our own strength, power, and daring.  I hope you find it helpful and informative.

This essay series is also to introduce the themes we will be exploring in the fall online women’s circle Becoming Unleashed.  We begin October 1 and space is limited to six women.  You can learn more here.

In case you missed the other essays and videos in this series, you can find them at the links below:

The Impacts of Inter-generational & Cultural Relational Traumas

Releasing our stories of too much, not enough, & shame

The Goo: A time of renewal, restructuring, re-evolving (this essay)

Reclaiming our power, strength, & daring

On Trauma: Processing or Healing?

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Definition of heal

1a : to make free from injury or disease : to make sound or whole 

…

3: to restore to original purity or integrity 

Definition of process

…

2a (1) : a natural phenomenon marked by gradual changes that lead toward a particular results (2) : a continuing natural or biological activity or function 

2b : a series of actions or operations conducing to an end; especially : a continuous operation or treatment especially in manufacture

Merriam-Webster online dictionary, December 2017

I stopped using the word healing as related to trauma over a year ago.  I did this mostly in response to what felt like an onslaught of trauma coaches and therapists talking about how by working with them you can heal your trauma and everything in your life will be all flowers and sausages because of it.

These messages impacted me in a very negative way.  At first I didn’t understand why I found the message so irritating.  I mean, I used the term “healing trauma” too.  So why did it bother me so much that these other folks were using this very common term?

With some quiet and self-reflection I found my answer.

My own personal experience of trauma therapy didn’t seem to “heal” my trauma in the ways that I thought about healing.  Using Merriam-Webster’s definition above, if we heal our trauma, we make it go away, disappear, no longer exist.

Working with my own therapists, this was not my experience.  My trauma still existed, even after years of therapies.  The events didn’t miraculous not happen.  The ways that they impacted me didn’t disappear. I still had memories, I was still triggered, I still had certain behaviors-some innocuous, some relatively harmful-that grew from these experiences.

My trauma was not healed. My trauma is not healed.  It still exists.  It’s still in me in a myriad of ways, some of which I am conscious of and I am sure some I am not.

This may sound rather hopeless.  If we can’t actually heal our trauma, if we can’t actually undo what was done to us, what is the point?

What has occurred for me, through years of talk therapy, EMDR, Sensory-Motor approach, and most recently CIMBS (a body-centered mindfulness/somatic approach), is that I can process and learn to mitigate the impact trauma has on me and my life.

The events still happened.  I am still sometimes triggered.  My physical health is still impacted.

And.

I have learned how to become aware of some of my triggers. I have learned to listen to my body when a trigger is starting and then can slow down and calm my nervous system so I don’t move into a fully triggered (and out of body, back in reptile mind) state.  I have learned how to actually feel comfortable in my own body, to enjoy pleasurable sensations and to tolerate uncomfortable ones.

I have not healed my trauma.  And I have processed much of and learned and am learning so much more about myself as I do it.

The processing of my own personal and ancestral traumas has been progressive.  It has been both incremental, with the tiniest, almost imperceptible, shifts and it has also in some ways happened all at once, with seemingly huge changes happening in very short periods of time.

It has been a process.  It will likely be a process for the rest of my life. A process of coming home to my body, of reconnecting with my Self and the world, a process of self awareness, a process of learning and unlearning, a process of soothing my nervous system, connecting to my boundaries and resources, finding my center and ground, and creating new neuro-pathways.  A process of shifting and transforming into new ways of being.

I have witnessed similar experiences with my clients, especially when we utilize my Trauma Informed Embodiment approach.  The process is slow and gentle and also results can sometimes be seen rather quickly.  This approach doesn’t make your trauma “go away,” it will not magically turn you back into the person you were before the traumatic events happened.  And it will give you tools and new ways of entering into your Self and your life that are more mindful, pleasurable, and joyful.

I talk more about all of this in the 12-minute video below.

This essay is the fourth and final in a four-part series introducing the topics we will be exploring in my new six month program Trauma Focused Embodiment Level 1.  We begin February 1.  You can learn more here.

Additionally the main focus of my individual work is trauma and utilizing trauma informed embodiment with my clients.  If you are looking for an individual therapist, you can learn more about me and my individual therapy work here.

And finally, I facilitate a free online group on Facebook where we explore trauma, grief, embodiment,and their intersections.  It is called Trauma Informed Embodiment and you can join us right here.

Other Essays & Videos in this series ::

On Trauma :: Types of Trauma Living Within Us

On Trauma :: The Physiological Impacts of Trauma

On Trauma :: The Psychological and Emotional Impacts of Trauma

On Trauma :: Processing or Healing? (this essay)

Change our stories – a quick love note

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When we change our stories we change our lives. When we delve into the raw material of who we were and are, the events and people who made us, and start to see things from the perspective of others involved, we gain empathy. As we gain empathy for those who have hurt us in the past–not excusing their behaviors, rather understanding some of the whys behind them–we can learn to have empathy for our Self. As we gain empathy for our Self we can start to change our patterns and internalized stories and move into a different way of being.
Empathy is one of our weapons against the Shame Beast. Developing empathy and compassion, for our Self and others, loosens the grip of shame and the stories of too much and not enough. Loosening the grip of these stories lets us write the stories – live the stories – we want instead of being driven by fear and shame.
Want to read more? Sign up for my weekly love letter, right here. xoox