It seems to me that a key element in developing self acceptance (in quieting the fight or flight responses I will discuss momentarily) is realizing that EVERYTHING you do has a reason. You may hate yourself for always winding up with the same sort of romantic partner, or for oversleeping, or for being a workaholic, or for abusing drugs and alcohol and sex, or whatever. EVERYTHING you do has a reason. It is emotionally logical. It is intended to save you pain, even if of course in the long or even short run it increases it. You are substituting a conscious pain to avoid dealing with an unconscious one.
And what is interesting to me is that as I slow down, I am realizing that every day, countless times a day, people go through sequences which have a middle part that they are unaware of. You see a person, and a series of events trigger in your brain, and a reaction issues forth.
Let me reframe that a bit. Emotionally healthy people are likely aware of why they do things, but most people are not emotionally healthy, not by a long shot. You find yourself saying “I don’t know why I said or did or felt that”. There is an answer, but the part of you which ACTUALLY made the decision did so in a split second, in an altered state of consciousness that may have endured no more than a tenth of a second.
Healing, become healthy, consists in being able to touch this place, to speak with it, to give it room to express itself, to feel it, to make contact with it. Invariably, it is where things are hidden which make you uncomfortable at best–and invoke deep feelings of horror and violation at worst–which is why they are hidden. Some part of you is protecting you from things it can’t make go away, and doesn’t yet know how to process. Suppression enables you to function, even if suboptimally. This is a truism of course, but old truths are sometimes worth saying again with new words.
What I realized this morning is that I cycle between fight and flight. If you pin a bird to a board with a nail, it will alternate fighting and passivity. But if you look at this metaphor–and it is a bit gruesome, but suitable for my purpose since it evokes the actual feelings involved–the fighting and flighting are the same motion. The feeling of wanting to escape and wanting to attack are quite similar.
There are two cycles involved in people dealing with trauma. There is a cycle between depersonalization–passivity–and fight and flight. And there is a cycle between fight and flight. Fight is when the traumatized person gets enraged and angry in an inappropriate proportion. Flight is when they become lost in daydreams. It is not the same as numbness. It has motion to it.
And what I saw this morning is that fight and flight cycle back and forth, but they go through a dark zone which evokes fear, but which is really the latent possibility of calm and peace, of relaxation. The traumatized person fears relaxation, because it feels like it increases risk. Certainly, I do, on some level.
There is a lot to ponder and feel here.