The benefit of trauma

From the perspective of survival, traumatic dissociation can play an enormously valuable function: it shuts down the emotions until they can be processed.  We can survive using only our rational minds. We can go on when some part of us has been overwhelmed and shut down, even if it is at the cost of suppressing much of our vital life energy.

I am getting powerful, primary, what I tend to call antique feelings coming up, and at that age trying to keep contact with those feelings and keeping my sanity would have been impossible.  I wonder if some of the people who are driven mad by circumstances perhaps lack or have a substantially muted ability to dissociate.

And what I am realizing as well is that dissociation is like having an emotional vanishing cabinet–a place you can go where no one can find you.

I need to bring those feelings–that part of me–into the flow of my every day life.  The payoff will be vastly increased happiness and energy.  Some part of me wonders, though, if there is some way to keep that, just in case.  I suspect the answer is yes, since the pathway is known.  It is a door I can close, where I don’t visit any more, but which does not disappear.

It is perhaps unwise to step into wellness one foot at a time, but this is unknown territory, and I am taking my best guess.  That is all you can do.  Observe, orient, decide, act.