First, for any of this to make any sense you need to realize that your mind and body function together. The mind is responsible for our calculations and for our understanding of linear time. The body holds our emotions and exists in timelessness encompassing the past, present, and the future. If the brain imagines something it can be felt in the body – it does not matter that it is not happening to us in real time. This is brought to light by simply asking you to imagine eating a juicy orange. If you truly put your mind to it (and like oranges) your mouth will start to water.
Many of us have had traumatic experiences. And what is considered traumatic to people is not the same. And what is considered traumatic to a young child, is again, completely different. And that is where I am going to focus because I believe that is what many people are experiencing right now. This is also a great place for Somatic Experiencing to be used as a tool because trauma experienced as a child is very hard for the calculative mind to put into perspective.
This has been brought forth in a theory known as The Wounded Child. In spirituality this theory states that there were situations that arose in childhood that caused chaos to your system. Maybe an adult yelled at you, maybe it was way worse than that. Maybe the adult did not give you the love that you needed. Maybe it was a completely different scenario altogether but what happens is that your nervous system goes into overdrive and many different stress hormones are secreted and this completely overwhelms your tiny little nervous system.
As a small child we have almost zero understanding or coping mechanisms and so our body takes this all in for us – storing our stress response in our body because we cannot comprehend any of it with our mind. The energy has to go somewhere. Once our mind is fully formed, it can help us to process this energy, and this is why talk therapy works, but as a small child our mind does not comprehend any of this. The pain becomes imprinted in our tissues and in order to properly address the pain and get to the root of it you need to take the same pathway - through the body.
Somatic Experiencing can help you to bypass the thinking brain and the thoughts around the hurt and pain which were never properly formed when the pain was initially created. The pain exists in the body out of linear time. Thinking our way out of the problem will not help us to understand or overcome it entirely. Understanding the sensation; however, will.
Somatic experiencing is a methodology that helps you to track the sensation in your body back to the root cause in order to alleviate the energy stored in the trauma charge from when the situation initially happened. In a sense it's like time traveling through the tissues of your body back to the initial exposure and then releasing the somatic memory.
It is important to get to the root of this stored energy in your body because this is the foundation that many of your behaviors and responses will be built off of. And when a small, scared child is building our foundations for how we interact with the world it leads to instability. It leads to self-worth issues, relationship struggles, and addiction. When we build our world view based on the reactions and responses we had as a young child simply trying to survive, we continually end up in survival mode. When we are in survival we are not thriving.
Everyone deserves to thrive. Everyone’s inner child deserves to be loved and accepted and made to feel safe.
It can be so hard to accept that we were not loved properly as children or that people were not nice to us. This hurts our ego and what hurts our ego gets suppressed and hidden away from us in our subconscious. Many of us have a very hurt little boy or girl inside that needs our attention and love more than anything. Self-love starts here.
Please remember that everyone is doing their best with the tools that they had at the time. In order to rise out of pain you cannot place the blame on anyone else. When you forfeit control of your own life you disempower yourself. This will not lead to the true growth and freedom that could be attained by doing the hard inner work of accepting that you have control of your reality and that you have the power within you to heal and rise and to thrive.
Comments