Clients often come to me desperate to fix their trauma immediately. I get it—I’ve been there. I was in such a state of emergency that I was shocked when therapists didn't share my sense of urgency and didn’t rush to see me that very day for a miraculous cure.
Once I did find a therapist, I struggled during sessions. Part of me understood that I had to leave after the hour, but another part was terrified at the thought of being sent back into the world in my "dangerously fragile state." I couldn't see my own capabilities because my pain completely consumed my awareness. The pain was so overwhelming that my "firefighter" (using Internal Family Systems language) always felt like the “patient” was bleeding out and needed crisis-level care constantly. Now, I understand that my firefighter is my amygdala, which had been trained to be overly activated by various factors throughout my childhood and adolescence. Inside, I had a drama playing out between my pain and my fear of that pain. The pain needed time and understanding—something it was regularly deprived of when I needed it most. The fear of pain came from the reactions of adults around me who rushed me through my feelings or denied them altogether. We live in a culture that overly fears emotions and instincts. When adults rush kids through their feelings or label them "bad" for expressing natural emotions, kids learn to believe their emotions and instincts are dangerous. It’s as if adults think they must change their plans if they validate a child's emotions. But as Dr. Becky Kennedy says, it’s the child’s job to feel and the adult’s job to validate those feelings while maintaining boundaries. For example, if a child is frustrated because they can’t have a cookie before dinner, an adult can acknowledge the frustration and disappointment while still holding the boundary that cookies are for after dinner. The child's emotions may escalate, but the adult maintains the boundary without denying the feelings or making them wrong. Kids learn what to fear by watching the adults around them. I see adults in my life now denying, dismissing, and urgently trying to soothe their own and others' pain. This sends a message to children that their pain is bad and needs to be eliminated, leading them to believe, "I’m bad and need to be gotten rid of." This core of shame—feeling shunned or exiled—is life-threatening, especially for children, causing their amygdala to go into overdrive. Children in this situation aren’t being abused, but the result of this unconscious behavior undermines their sense of self, making it hard to feel confident. Many of my privileged clients ask, “How can I feel so bad when I’m so privileged, especially when I wasn’t obviously abused in any way?” This is how—being the subject of chronic emotional fixing. 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's pain repeatedly. As adults, these children continue the cycle, abandoning themselves and others whenever an emotion other than happy contentment arises. Henry David Thoreau's quote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," originally applied to rampant materialism. But what drives materialism and addiction? I believe it’s the abandonment of inner pain and the diamonds within that rejected rough. We know ourselves not primarily by what we think but by how we feel and respond to those feelings. Choice requires the accumulation of skills. If all we’ve been shown is abandonment when emotion arises, how can we choose differently? Sadly, the adult child of emotional abandonment must seek help to learn how to handle emotions flexibly. When our emotional pain is rejected, our inner guidance system is scrambled. Emotional pain is the beginning of learning and growth. When these processes are shut down, so is our vitality. I now understand that my pain was partly tied to the emotional learning and growth I was denied as a child—not just by my parents but by all the adults around me. There was nowhere to turn because all those adults had been abandoned too, simply repeating the cycle. My desire to learn and grow emotionally was like a volcano wanting to explode. My fear and confusion turned into urgency and panic whenever I felt an unwelcome emotion. If you resonate with what I’m saying, your urgency might be the fear of denied and rejected childhood emotions. People ready to work on their wounding face a dilemma: they need to address the feelings but are trained to fear them. When you sense urgency, cultivate curiosity to see if the urgency is relevant. Often, it’s a firefighter part wanting to fix the emergency now, believing we can’t handle the pain and must get rid of it quickly. We need to give this part presence, validation, and understanding. To do that, we must stop identifying with the urgency and create enough space to be with it.
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AuthorProsopon Therapy Archives
July 2024
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