THE BRIDGES HAVE BEEN BURNED
In the past couple of years, we've heard kind of ad nauseum about trauma work and this trauma response of being in fight, flight, freeze or fawn, and we can continue hearing about that and have an awareness that it exists without having an awareness that it is what we are stuck in when we are stuck in it. Until we get to a point where we can begin to shift and integrate the tools that will help pop us out of those loops.
I spent decades in therapy not knowing, and without having therapists point out, that I was stuck in a near continual looping of trauma response in some form or another. And this isn't to blame, it's that the times were different. We have different awareness and different tools now, but I could continue doing the work on a mental level (and I know that all of that work was cumulative to get me to a certain point), but it wasn't until I had built up the reservoir of trust that I could begin to be able to step outside of those looping trauma responses for long enough to incorporate tools to shift them in the moment.
I know, for everyone, getting to that point is different and the thing that pushes us over the edge into the possibility of stepping out of this is very different. For me, it happened in listening to Bessel Van Der Kolk’s book, “The Body Keeps the Score”. For some reason, that book and hearing all of the case studies and the stories, and understanding that - when trauma is experienced before the age of seven - it actually rewires the brain. It wasn't until I heard those things that I was able to begin to separate myself from that experience. And even as I'm speaking this now, what I'm recognizing is that there was such a deep layer of shame and blame around my seeming inability to change my circumstances, that until I heard that it wasn't my fault - in a way that I could truly hear that and take it in - nothing seemingly shifted.
And that experience for me only happened a year ago. I'm 64 now and have been doing therapy and 12 step work and all the things because I thought I was so broken since my late twenties.
Fortunately now we have so much more awareness. We have so many more tools. We have so many more practitioners who are schooled and skilled in recognizing this, that the possibilities of shifting it are so much greater, so much faster, and so much simpler, even though it's very not easy.
One of my mentors who does very high level work in terms of frequency and expansion just addressed this piece saying, “if you are stuck in a trauma response”, (these are not her words), but that - if you have trauma and need to do the trauma work - you need to do that first before you can do the work that she does.
Until she acknowledged that piece, I still was carrying blame for myself, shaming myself for my inability to get what she was talking about.
The challenge again becomes being able to recognize when you are stuck in those responses, when you are stuck in those responses.
But know that with the awareness, with the continued hearing, seeing and increasingly embodying work and the willingness to do it, to get to another place, there are breakthroughs to be had. There is a new freedom and a new happiness that we have never known before from the side of being in those old loops.
Normally when you hear the phrase, I've burned bridges, people often think of that in terms of not going back, not being able to go back - in terms of it being a bad thing.
And in this case, for me, burning the bridges of the past to that other side of helplessness and hopelessness is something that now, with the tools and the awareness I have, I know that I will never go there in the same way again.
One of the many, many, many gifts in all of this is in having burned those bridges, I now get to see the gold in the ashes, the jewels that were always there that could never be burned away, but that I didn't have the tools, the capacity or the capability of seeing, know that they're there as best you can. Trust the path and keep f*****g going.
