personal trauma

The difference between being triggered and feeling our feelings

May 20, 2019 By gwynn

You’re not the same. You’re not supposed to be the same. You’re supposed to be different. This isn’t something you will ever forget. ~Daisy Whitney, The Rivals

I’ve written about how I view healing compared to processing trauma. It is an important differentiation to make, I believe, and the quote above pretty much sums it up for me.

The reality is that the traumatic events we have each experienced did happen. And they did change us. Molecularly, yes. And more importantly, fundamentally those events in so many ways inform who we have been, who we are currently, and will continue to inform the people we continue to evolve into.

The events happened. There is no changing that. The conscious memories we do have, we will not forget. They are imprinted now in our explicit memory.

And.

The body remembers too. That remembering shows up as anxiety and or depression. It shows up as a low tolerance for sudden and loud sounds. It shows up, for me, in my own yelly-ness.

However, the implicit memory of the body is something that can actually be reset. While the mind will remember forever the things that it does (barring any dementia in the future), the body can release the memories of trauma that lives within it.

This is true for all of us.

This resetting is not done quickly. It usually involves a lot of discomfort and moving out of our own norms and ways of doing and being. Often times things may feel like they are getting worse before they get better. And sometimes we reach a point of wishing we’d never started down this journey of processing the trauma that lives in our bodies and being.

Life can be challenging, even hard. Often there are discussions out in the greater world, as well as in our private lives, that are uncomfortable and even triggering. Add to this the fact that sometimes our anxiety ramps itself up without any obvious cause and well, our daily lives can be challenging at best.

There are times where we forget all we know about how to self-regulate and self-soothe. There are times that we need someone else to help us reset. There are times of lots of tears and actually feeling some pretty intense feelings.

Which is to say, that while we may have processed a lot of the trauma that lives within us, there is (always?) still more work to do. And also, life happens to all of us and sometimes we just have bad days or weeks or months.

And.

While it is true there are times that we can’t access all the things we know about self-soothing and self-regulating, with practice there will be more times that we are able to access at least some of what we know and utilize the tools we have worked so hard to ingrain in our mind and body.

Here’s an important thing to note however: there is a difference between calming our nervous systems and not feeling our feelings.

Stuffing our feelings, not allowing them to be expressed in some way, is not the same as calming, soothing, or resetting our systems.

While it is true that we may be able to calm our anxiety and bring ourselves back from our amygdala, it is also true that we are also able to cry and feel sadness.

We can both feel sad and have our nervous system regulated at the same time, is what I’m trying to say.

Sometimes I think we are sold a bill of goods on what it means to process our trauma, or to heal our brain stems, or to reset our nervous systems. Doing these things does not mean we will not feel intense sadness. It does not mean we will only ever be happy shiny people.

Having a healthy nervous system does not stop us from feeling grief. Or fear.

What it does is allow us to feel those emotions, and the sensations that go with those emotions, and still remain present in our bodies and in the present moment.

In fact, I would argue, that having a healthy nervous system, one that is not in a constant activated state of fight/flight/freeze, may mean we actually feel those emotions more intensely. Because we stay with them in the now. Because we literally are able to feel them in our bodies. Because we are no longer stuffing them down or disassociating from what is happening within us.

I believe this is an important thing to note:

At times, having a healthy nervous system may actually mean we feel worse.

BUT.

That feeling worse, is momentary. It isn’t a constant state. It will pass.

AND.

That sense of feeling “worse” is actually part of the resetting. It is part of learning to actually feel the emotions and sensations that we have been ignoring for so long. It is part of learning that we can feel our feelings and not be flooded or overwhelmed by them, even if they feel overwhelming in the moment.

When we first start to do the work of trauma processing and coming home to our bodies, everything is new. Even the slightest sensations or emotions can feel intense. Not overwhelming, but intense. It is the newness of it all that can feel a bit “too much” even though in actuality our systems are not being activated or flooded in a trauma sense.

We can feel intense emotions and sensations and not be overwhelmed back into an activated state.

Feeling our emotions and the sensations of our body is not the same as being triggered into a trauma state.

Over the last few years there have been more and more times where I have felt all those emotions and sensations. It is not fun. I have cried a lot of tears. AND I was not in a fight/flight/freeze state. It is true at some points I was not verbal, and often being in our emotions is a non-verbal state and so we find other ways to express ourselves (crying, art, cleaning, movement, etc). It is true that when our nervous systems are activated that we can become more flooded when we feel our emotions and sensations.

It is true that being non-verbal is also part of having activated nervous systems and being in a fight/flight/freeze state. It is true that a sense of overwhelm is part of having the trauma living within us triggered and activated.

And.

It is also true that with time and processing, we learn the difference between feeling our feelings and becoming or being flooded or overwhelmed or triggered.

We learn to tolerate uncomfortable sensations and emotions without going into a fight/flight/freeze state. We learn that feeling our emotions and the sensations of our body isn’t dangerous or life threatening.We learn to hold ourselves and allow ourselves to be held.

It takes work and time. In many ways it has taken me years and in others mere months to be where I am now. To be able to feel intense sadness without becoming lost in a forever downward spiral. To be able to feel both the intensely uncomfortable and intensely pleasurable sensations of my body without going into a trauma triggered state.

I now have a sense of freedom and safeness within myself that I had not had for most of my life. And it is amazing, even when feeling some of these emotions and sensations isn’t always pleasant.

This sense of freedom is something I want for everyone. The journey to this place is not easy; it is filled with challenges and discomfort. It is also filled with rewards and peace. And I believe it is all worth it.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly newsletter in January 2018 and has been edited for publication here. To receive my most current essays you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

Desire, pleasure, & trauma

May 16, 2019 By gwynn

The paradox of trauma is that it has both the power to destroy and the power to transform and resurrect. ~Peter A. Levine

If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive. ~Eleonora Duse

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love. ~Washington Irving

Earlier this week was Mother’s Day here in the United States. It’s a day that is mixed with many emotions for me personally, and there are few Mother’s Days I can look back on as 100% good or precious memories. Mother’s Day, for me, is a day of grief, a day of frustration, as well as a day of love.

I know for many this day can be a mixed a bag. Perhaps our mothers weren’t the mothers we needed them to be. Perhaps they have died. Perhaps we longed to be a mother and aren’t. Perhaps we never wanted to be a mother and are. Perhaps we desperately wanted to be mothers, are now, but are filled with frustration or regret. Perhaps this day brings other emotions up for us.

I know without a doubt, that Mother’s Day has never been about pleasure for me. It has historically not been a day just for or about me, as a mother. It has never been a day of rest or doing what I wanted. Last year was a particularly hard Mother’s Day filled with grief, heartbreak, anger, and frustration.

It is funny sometimes how much our lives, how much we, can change in a year. Twelve short months and we look back and wonder at the person we were, are in awe of the changes and shifts we’ve made, are surprised to see where we are now.

A truth is that I didn’t do a very good job of receiving on this day. Another truth is, I rarely spoke up and stated what exactly I wanted. I didn’t do a very good job of advocating for my own pleasure, for my own joy, for my own enjoyment.

I know why this is, of course. There was my own ingrained messages of how asking for what I want isn’t acceptable, that pleasure is bad, and then all the stories about whether or not I “deserved” or was “worth of” doing what pleased me.

The why I didn’t advocate for my own pleasure is a tangled web of complex trauma, fear, and shame. There is also a heavy dose of the narratives about wanting, about desire, about pleasure, saying they are all bad and only “bad people” want or desire any thing beyond what they have. Or more specifically that a woman should want, should desire, should seek pleasure in any form.

Desire, in an of itself, is a complex notion. We are all taught on so many levels to be thankful for what we have and that wanting more or different is not a good or healthy thing. I’ve written in the past about how the whole gratitude movement makes me want to scream, because at its roots can be shame around wanting more than what we have, in wanting different.

We can both appreciate all that we have and want something more, something different. It is possible to hold both, for both to be 1000% true.

Learning to explore our wants, our desires, has so many levels to it. Unraveling the indoctrination by our culture is one level. Looking at the ways our families approached desire and wanting is another. Examining the shame we carry from our childhood traumas is yet another layer.

We have learned from so many places that wanting is bad. That desire is bad. That we aren’t deserving or worthy of pleasure, of peace, of feeling full, nourished, complete.

We learn to strive, yes. To keep reaching for that carrot. But we aren’t taught to examine if that is the carrot we even want. We are sold an idea of what success looks like and if we don’t meet that standard then we are failures and that is even more proof of how unworthy and undeserving we are.

Slowing down and taking the time to unravel, explore, examine, and experiment with what we actually want, what we truly desire, what brings us undeniable pleasure is no easy feat in and of itself. Learning to allow ourselves to experience pleasure, joy, fun – takes practice, time, intention. And yes, coming home into our bodies.

Learning to be at home in our own skin, to tolerate both discomfort and pleasure, is an important part of the work. And it is not the whole of it all. We also need to consciously examine the stories we hold in our minds (and yes bodies), and practicing new ways of thinking, to do the work of growing new neuropaths and allow the old ones, where all these old stories live, to atrophy.

It is not easy work. And, as I have said many times before, I do believe it is deeply worth it.

/../

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My response to “not all men”

May 13, 2019 By gwynn

Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.
~Leonardo da Vinci

Domination is a relationship, not a condition; it depends on the participation of both parties. Hierarchical power is not just the gun in the policeman’s hand; it is just as much the obedience of the ones who act as if it is always pointed at them. It is not just the government and the executives and the armed forces; it extends through society from top to bottom, an interlocking web of control and compliance. Sometimes all it takes to be complicit in the oppression of millions is to die of natural causes.
~CrimethInc.,Contradictionary

I’m a member of several different online groups related to trauma. In general I basically quietly observe because at this point in my life I don’t have a lot of time to have hours and days long discussions online about anything, not even one of my most favorite topics ever (trauma). Even so, I am observing and reading, and sometimes learning, and sometimes nodding along, and sometimes shaking my head and needing to walk away.

One thing that has me shaking my head vehemently and wanting to shake people is this particular reaction that certain “leaders” in the trauma processing (or “healing”) world have about sexual trauma and what is and isn’t okay to say in reference to these topics.

Specifically what I have seen happen is a women or femme makes a post about her own experience of sexual abuse or harassment or trauma. Other women jump in to support. Eventually someone says something along the lines of “Men are pigs”. And then the “leader”/facilitator of the group will jump in, always also a women, and tell folks to “tone it down” and “not all men” and “all people, regardless of gender, have trauma and deserve to heal it”and “remember there are men in this group and we don’t want to offend them,” and perhaps my all-time favorite, “my husband and the men I work with are all Good Guys™ so we can’t talk about men like that.”

As you can guess, I have a bit of an issue with this.

First, it’s silencing and shaming at best and exacerbates trauma at worst. Not allowing women and femmes to express their outrage, frustration, fear, anxiety, or sadness about the state of the world, that women are unsafe in this world, is gaslighting. These types of statements are saying that an individual woman’s experience is invalid because “not all men” are bad. (More on this “not all men” crap in a few). It is saying that our anxiety of being unsafe in the world is “all in our heads.”

A truth is, the world IS unsafe for women and femmes. A truth is that actually, yes all men. No, not all men rape, not all men assault. But I’d be hard pressed to say that “not all men” harass women (though they might not call it harassment). And absolutely all men benefit from the privilege bestowed upon them simply because they were born with a penis (and that privilege includes women being fearful for their lives around men and therefore being compliant and docile and “supportive” of “their” men in an attempt to survive).

Do I believe there are good men in the world? Yes, absolutely. AND my definition of a good man is one who acknowledges his privilege and utilizes it to bring about change for women. A good man calls out other men. A good man notes when he screws up, apologizes, and then does the inner work he needs to in order to do different the next time. A good man doesn’t silence women or say “not me” or “not all men”. A good man listens and creates spaces for women’s voices to be heard and respected.

A good man doesn’t need a woman to silence other women on his behalf.

Which brings me to the second part of my issue: women defending “innocent” men at the expense of other women.

A truth is, men don’t need us defending their “honor.” Their actions in the world defend their honor. The ways they speak up and out against rape culture defends their honor. Every time they call out another man on some misogynist “joke” or comment they defend their honor. Every time they listen to a woman and don’t interrupt or “mansplain” they defend their honor.

They do not need us defending them. Or making statements like “not all men” or “my partner/colleague/friend” is a Good Guy™.

They, as the cultural oppressor and ones with the upper hands, can defend themselves just fine.

What women need to be doing instead of making statements like “not all men” is standing in solidarity with other women. We need to not be silencing women who are sharing their story and pain and trauma. We need to not gaslight each other. We need to to not throw each other under the bus so we can maintain our own status as “good” (and by “good” I mean obedient, complicit, and compliant) women in the eyes of men.

We need to stand in solidarity with each other.
We need to support each other.
We need to believe each other.
We need to encourage each other to speak up and out (when we are ready).

Looking at the Senate race in Alabama in December 2017, I was frustrated at see again how much work we have to do. That 63% of white women voted for Roy Moore is disgusting to me. That 63% of white women threw the safety of their own daughters out the window to maintain the patriarchal status quo (and their own place in the hierarchy in doing so) is nauseating to me. (There have been multiple similar examples since then, including most recently Jill Biden jumping to the defense of her husband Joe around the Anita Hill hearings.)

Our daughters deserve better.

Our daughters deserve to live in a world where men in power don’t have the right to sexually, physically, emotionally, or psychologically abuse or assault them. A world where there are real and dire consequences to harming women.

Our daughters deserve us to stand up and protect them.
Our sisters deserve the same.
Our women and femme friends deserve the same.
Women and femmes we have never met deserve the same.
WE deserve the same.

When we, as women, make statements like “not all men” or try to defend men from the atrocities they as a collective have and continue to commit, we are only being complicit and compliant players in our oppressive, misogynist, patriarchal culture.

Because a truth is, yes all men.

Even your husband. Even my (ex)husband. Even your son. Even my son. All men have their own work to do. And us loving them isn’t going to change the reality that they were raised and conditioned and trained in a misogynist culture and that, through no fault of their own, they internalized these messages.

There is not a totally innocent man out there. And unless they are actively and intentionally doing their own inner and outer work to tear this shit down and atone for their own wrong doing and the that of other men, they are that much more of the problem.

Men don’t need us making excuses for them. They don’t need us defending them. They don’t need us say “Well, not MY man.”

Men need to do their own work.

And we, as women, need to do our own too.

Which includes taking a deep look inside to explore why we may feel a compulsion to defend the “innocent” men of the world. Why we feel a compulsion to make statements like “not all men.” Why we feel a compulsion to disregard and discredit the experiences of other women in favor of the “reputation” of a man.

Yes, we are all in this together. Yes, we cannot change rape culture into consent/nuturance culture without men. Yes, men are also harmed by our oppressive, misogynist, patriarchal culture.

And we need to stop coddling them and instead begin pushing them to prove to us that they are indeed one of the Good Guys ™ through their actions, not just their in-actions.

Not being a rapist doesn’t automatically make one a good man. It takes a lot of intentional internal and external work to get that title.

We all need to remember that.

This essay was originally written for my weekly newsletter in December 2017 and has been edited for publication here.

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Grief, trauma, resilience

April 29, 2019 By gwynn

No one ever told me how sorrow traumatizes your heart, making you think it will never beat exactly the same way again. No one ever told me how grief feels like a wet sock in my mouth. One I’m forced to breathe through, thinking that with each breath I’ll come up short and suffocate. ~Sarah Noffke, Awoken

Grief is its own beast. It comes and goes in waves, in blasts, in trickles. In the early days of a loss or trauma, the grief can be erratic, unpredictable, and seemingly constant all at once. With time, and processing, the sensations of grief become less pronounced; in some cases and ways we can predict when it will crop up. And even with the growing ability to predict, it will still come out of nowhere, shocking us, and sometimes bringing us back down to our knees.

We can grieve many things. The obvious death of someone we love(d). The death of a relationship, be it a sexually intimate one or a friendship. The endings that come with changing jobs, or moving homes, or starting or graduating from school. The endings that are also associated with beginnings – marriage, birth of a child.

We often don’t acknowledge all the things we need to grieve. Especially when we are told that we should be happy all. the. time. Especially when perhaps we are actually happy about the change. Like the birth of a child.

And yet, beginnings mean endings. And those endings, even if joyous, carry some amount of grief.

When we start to look at the ways trauma affects us, and our grieving process, things can become even more complex. Our grief can be around a mixture of events. A new traumatic event can trigger any or all of our old ones. Loss can also trigger those older traumatic experiences, whether the loss itself could be classified as traumatic or not.

Our nervous systems get hijacked. Our emotions seem to run rampant. We can’t find a sense of ground or stability or perhaps even reality.

What also often happens with loss and traumatic events is a deep wanting for things to be different. A resistance if you will to what now is. This wanting different, this wanting events beyond our control (or even within our control) to not have happened, can be helpful. It can be information for how to move forward.

It also has the potential of keeping us stuck in that wanting and not finding ways to, slowly, gently, delicately, take those next steps in moving forward.

I don’t like the word “acceptance.” There is much that is implied in that word, that our culture has put on that word, that I do not like, that I believe is actually harmful.

In our current culture the idea of “acceptance” is used to silence. If we would just accept that life is the way it is, then we’d shut the hell up about it. We’d just accept and become compliant. We’d just accept and stop feeling about it and going on about it already.

That’s not really what acceptance, in mindfulness terms, is supposed to be about. And it’s definitely not what it is about for me.

Acceptance is about perhaps wanting things to be different, and also acknowledging that they aren’t. It is wishing we would have done something different, or someone hadn’t done something to us, and also knowing that those events did in fact happen. In this acknowledging and knowing, we can make decisions on how to proceed instead of remaining stuck in the wishing and wanting only.

Perhaps that means offering an apology and doing the work of repair and making amends. Perhaps that means going into therapy. Perhaps that means unraveling some of our own story and moving forward. Perhaps that means setting boundaries.

Regardless of how we proceed, there is a moving forward. A letting go in some ways, an embracing in others. An acknowledgement that things are not what we may want them to be, and even so we will find a way to move forth.

This is what we also call resilience.

Those of us with any type of trauma history, and perhaps especially those with complex trauma, have often had our resilience taken from us. That is part of the definition of trauma in fact, that inability to let go and move forward. That stuckness.

This is not to say that those of us with trauma histories should just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and get over it already. Because we all know that doesn’t work.

Instead, to develop our resilience, we need to process our trauma. We need to find ways to help release it from our bodies. To soothe our nervous systems. To connect to our boundaries and reclaim our bodies as our own. To find ground and our sense of center. To acknowledge and utilize our resources. To come into our bodies and listen, deeply, to the stories they have to share and to allow them move out in such a way that while the story is never truly gone from our memory, it is no longer living in our body.

As we process the trauma that lives in our bodies, we build our resilience. As we build resilience we are able to respond to new traumatic events in a different way, so that they do not impact us in the same, often debilitating, ways of past traumas. As we process old trauma, we learn how to process new events.

Grief is part of this process. Both the process of grief that these things have happened, as well as the grief of change, of letting go and setting down old ways of being and creating space for new.

Grief, like trauma, lives in our bodies. When we experience the death of a relationship, be that the other person actually died or we are no longer in contact with them, our bodies respond. We physically miss them, whether we were sexually intimate or not. (There is science behind this).

So like trauma, the ways to process grief involves coming into our bodies, listening to them, finding ways to soothe them, learning where we end and another begins (i.e. boundaries and body reclaiming), connecting to ground and center and the present moment.

This process is not easy. It is often not fun. It is also often incredibly uncomfortable. And in my personal opinion, it is so deeply worth it.

/../

This essay was originally written for my weekly newsletter in October 2017 and has been edited for publication here. If you’d like to read my most recent essays, you can subscribe here.

If you are interested in working with me individually, you can learn more here and request a free 30-minute consultation here.

Slowing into the pause & breaking harmful patterns

April 18, 2019 By gwynn

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. ~Rollo May, The Courage to Create

she learned to walk away
from everything
that didn’t inspire her
toward greater things
~Mark Anthony

a successful life is created
with two words: yes and no
have the courage to say yes
only when it feels right
and no to the old patterns
that do not serve you
~yung pueblo

One way that complex trauma impacts us in our adult lives is in our relationships, be they with friends, family, or intimate partners. Many of us with complex trauma are not good at tolerating painful emotions, like sadness, frustration, or disappointment.

In fact, most of us don’t have a lot of tolerance for the more “positive” emotions like happiness, joy, and pleasure either.

Any feeling – sensation and emotion – can feel too much and can trigger our fight/flight/freeze/fawn response. The feelings can be overwhelming and so we need a way to release them, to get them out of us, because actually feeling them is intolerable.

So, we start fights. Or turn away and cut people out of our lives. In the moment we may freeze and feel stuck or placate and people please and then later move into the space of either wanting to fight or flee. Depending on the situation we do one or the other of these or we do some in rapid succession.

Our reaction is generally immediate and coming directly from our back (or reptile) brain. There is no thought that is going into it. We don’t slow down to engage our front brain and are fully in our survival instinct. Because feeling our feelings feels like our actual lives are in danger. It feels like they might consume us. It feels like we won’t survive the sensations and emotions that are swirling within us.

I know for me a go to reaction was always to flee. And by flee I mean turn my back and cut people out of my life. One disappointment, one time of feeling rejected or abandoned, and it was “proof” that the person wasn’t trustworthy and therefore I needed to shut them out of my life. My armor would go up and if need be I would start fights if they wouldn’t “let” me leave.

It has taken a lot of time, therapy, practice, patience, and self compassion to find my way to pause between the action of an emotion being activated and responding.

Because for most of my life I reacted, immediately, and without thought. What I want for my life, for my relationships, is for me to be able to thoughtfully respond, to slow down and evaluate the facts of the situation and previous situations so that I can respond intentionally and mindfully.

This has meant coming into my body. This has meant learning to tolerate all those intolerable sensations and emotions. This has meant practicing keeping my front brain (where logic, reasoning, creativity, problem solving, and compassion live) online while also experiencing the sensations and emotions that live in my back brain.

It hasn’t meant stuffing my feelings down.

It has meant allowing myself to experience them and learning to know they won’t actually kill me. They will be uncomfortable, I may not like it, but I certainly won’t die.

When we are able to engage our front brain while also experiencing our feelings, we can begin to look at situations more objectively. We can look for patterns, for habits, for cycles. We slow down not to make excuses for the other person, but to see if our own pain is actually stemming fully from something they did or said or if it also stems from a long ago wound that never healed.

And then we can decide how we want to respond to the person. We can intentionally decide if this is an opportunity for our own personal growth and processing. We can decide if it is an opportunity for us to communicate our needs, to repair in relationship and to stay. Or to communicate our needs, set a boundary, and possibly leave.

It is true that when another person triggers our feelings of disappointment, frustration, abandonment, and or betrayal that it was indeed their action or words that did this. It is true that our hurt is in part due to the what the other person did or said.

And.

They don’t deserve the full force of our fury or rage or pain, most of which comes from past hurts from others we trusted.

Sometimes when another person triggers our painful feelings it isn’t intentional, or may be a matter of circumstance or what they did or said is actually a perfectly reasonable or normal thing, but it sets off our alarms anyhow. Sometimes these triggers are not an indication of who they are as a person.

And honestly, sometimes it is.

Which is why we need the pause. So we can slow ourselves down and determine what we actually know about the other person. What we actually know about ourselves. What patterns we have seen. What other actions and words we have witnessed or not.

We need the pause so we can engage our frontal lobe and respond in a way that lets us stand in our own integrity and authenticity. Without needing to cause another pain. Without lashing out. Without cutting people out because in that moment we are hurting and find it unbearable.

The pause requires us to be in our bodies, to be able to tolerate uncomfortable even painful emotions and sensations. It also allows us to enjoy the fun and pleasurable emotions and sensations that can also a part of living as a human.

Learning to live embodied, to tolerate, experience, and sometimes even enjoy the sensations and emotions of our fully human lives is a life long process. There are not five easy steps and then you are done. It is not a one time thing we can check off. It is a constant practice that will have its own ebbs and flows.

The pause will not come to us quickly. It will take time. At first you will notice while you are reacting that you are indeed having an immediate response. With time you will be able to “bring yourself down” more smoothly and quickly. Then, you will begin to notice that you are about to lash out and eventually stop it. In more time, with more practice, you will be able to catch yourself at the very beginning of being triggered. You will be able to feel the sensations and emotions and also be able to explore them, analyze them and the situation logically. And then intentionally decide how we want to respond.

Having patience and compassion for ourselves during this process, while learning to come into our body and to tolerate all the different, varied, and nuanced sensations and feelings and learning how to find that breath, that pause, when some or all our old wounds are triggered is vital and part of the process.

It is true that what was done to us by others is not our fault, we are not to blame for their actions. And we are responsible to learn to respond to new hurts in ways that hold us in our own integrity, in a way that does not continue to pass on harmful patterns, in ways that allow us to break painful cycles for ourselves and the generations to come.

/…/

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