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We want our clients to heal their hearts. We want them to feel safe and grounded, but we also know that it may not be that simple.
We map our internal and external worlds in similar ways, as did my client in her traumatization. One can consider that our current mapping may be based on old data, old, outdated maps, and unprocessed traumatic material.
As a result, our capacity to fully express who we truly are, underneath it all, gets withheld, and we can find ourselves feeling lost, but primarily to ourselves. We forget that we are what we are looking for.
As therapists, we too can have a parallel process when working with clients. We might find ourselves grabbing for an anchor, trying to pull ourselves up from the weight of the work. Therapists sometimes need a soft space to land - to just be seen, heard, and felt in the work.
What causes our systems to use dissociation as a strategy? The fact is, it’s all about attachment and trying to preserve it, but also managing the distress and conflict about that very safe drive to attach. There’s conflict.
Feeling that our internal state, our emotions, were “held” by others, and processed, was a foundational need in childhood. To process it, as children, we needed the presence of an attuning other in the outside world, our caregiver to “hold” that distress to help us regulate, settle, calm, and let it move through.
When we grow up, our brain has a greater capacity to hold our emotional distress, a larger capacity for processing, and a deeper neuro-network of resources. Essentially, instead of an “espresso” size cup, our brain capacity is of a larger cup that is sturdier, can hold more, and can contain it all. And, while the emotions from our childhoods may seem bigger than we are, and the cup may seem unable to hold it, we can.
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