Clients often come into my practice wanting their trauma to be fixed yesterday. Fair enough, I went through this, too. I was in such a state of emergency that I was shocked when therapists I reached out to weren't as alarmed as I was and didn't rush to get me in to see them that very day for an intake and a miracle cure.
Once I had landed a therapist, part of me during sessions understood that I had to leave the office at the end of the hour, but part of me was confused and terrified that the therapist would make me “go back out there” to the real world in my “dangerously fragile state.” I could not see how capable I was because my pain-part totally consumed my awareness. The pain was so great that my “firefighter” (to borrow Internal Family Systems language) always felt like the “patient” was bleeding out and needed crisis-level care ALL THE TIME. I now understand that my firefighter is my amygdala and that it got trained to be overly activated through a variety of factors throughout my childhood and adolescence. I had a drama going on inside. The major players were the pain part on the one hand and, on the other, the part that feared the pain. The pain part really needed time and understanding. Time and understanding is what it was regularly deprived of when it needed it the most. The part that feared the pain is an internalized part that I had absorbed from the reactions of the adults around me growing up who rushed me through my feelings or denied them all together. MANY OF US LIVE IN A CULTURE THAT OVERLY FEARS EMOTIONS AND INSTINCTS. The result of responding to kids by rushing them through their feelings and calling the "bad kids" for doing kid stuff like testing boundaries results in people learning to believe that their emotions and instincts are essentially dangerous for existing at all. It is as though many adults believe that they must change their planned course of action if a child's emotional state is validated. However, as Dr Becky Kennedy says, it is the job of the child to feel and the job of the adult to validate feelings and maintain the boundary. For example, a child is disappointed and frustrated because they can’t have the cookie before dinner. An adult can name that the child feels frustrated and disappointed, and that anyone would feel that way, but also maintain that cookies are for after dinner. The child’s emotions can escalate and the adult will maintain the boundary without denying the feelings or making them wrong. Kids learn what to fear through modeling by the adults around them. I watch adults in my life now deny, dismiss, and urgently try to soothe pain in their and other children. That sends a message to children that their pain is bad and needs to be gotten rid of. Kids interpret this as “I’m bad and will be gotten rid of.” This is the core of shame, the emotion associated with being shunned or exiled. For anyone to be exiled is life-threatening, but especially for children. That means that shame is a life-threatening emotion for children. That means that their amygdala goes into overdrive when they feel too much shame. Children in this situation are not being abused, but the result of this unconscious behavior undermines the child’s sense of self, making it hard to feel confident. I so frequently have privileged clients ask me, “How can I feel so bad when I am so privileged? Especially when I wasn’t obviously abused in any way?” This is how—being the subject of chronic emotional fixing. The reality is that pain is a part of life and cannot be eliminated. Most children learn to abandon themselves when they feel pain because the adults around them abandoned the child and their pain over and over again, every day, all day, for years and decades. As adults, these children start the cycle over because it's all they know. They continue to abandon themselves and the children around them anytime an emotion other than happy contentment is present. Henry David Thoreau meant the quote “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” to be applied to rampant materialism. But what is it that drives materialism and addiction? I believe its the abandonment of inner pain along with the diamonds inside that rejected rough. We know ourselves not primarily by what we think but rather how we feel and choose to respond to those feelings. Choice requires the accumulation of skills. If all that has been modeled to me is abandonment when emotion arises, how can I choose something different? Sadly, the adult child of emotional abandonment must seek help to learn how to handle emotions in a flexible way. When our emotional pain is rejected and abandoned, our inner guidance system is scrambled. Emotional pain is the beginning of a learning and expanding process. When those processes are shut down, so is our vitality. I now understand that the pain I felt was at least partially tied to the emotional learning and growth I was denied as a child, not just by my parents but by all of the adults around me. There was NOWHERE to turn because all of those adults had been abandoned too. They were simply repeating the cycle to no fault of their own. My desire to learn and grow emotionally was pushing against my heart like a volcano wanting to explode. My fear and confusion became a sense of urgency and panic anytime I felt an unwelcome, misunderstood emotion. The fear and urgency were conditioned in me and in you too, if you resonate with what I’m saying. That urgency is often the fear of the painful emotions that were denied and rejected as children. People who are finally ready to work on their wounding face a dilemma. They know they need to address the feelings associated with the wounding but are trained to be afraid of those very feelings. When you sense urgency, cultivate curiosity to assess whether the urgency is relevant. That urgency is often a firefighter part that wants to fix the emergency now. The firefighter thinks that we can’t handle the pain and must get around it as quickly as possible. Like any part, we must give it presence, validation, and understanding. We can only do that if we stop identifying with the urgency and have enough space to be with it.
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AuthorProsopon Therapy Archives
April 2024
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