Trauma. Addiction. Processing. Healing.

Belonging. 

I have asked myself this question lately as I find myself going through one transition after another. Some of them are visible to an outer observer and some of them are really only palpable to me. Those are the rumbling of crumbling structures in my consciousness that are so linked to my own physical and relational expression as to feel like tectonic plates moving in my head at times.

Processing, as I would define it, is the mental, emotional and psychic clearing of internal constructs that effect an individuals well being from the psychological, to the somatic and even relational level of how they interact both, intra-personally and trans-personally, with themselves and others. It involves a good amount of accountability taking and emotional labor. As a person begins to investigate their own psyche it can reveal layers of trauma, adaptation, addiction and ultimately buried pain which can take them not only through their own stuff but through layers of their familial, ancestral and even collective trauma.

Most people are run by their trauma and they do not even know it. Incidences that may or may not stand out from our childhood shape the way that we interact with the world, create dissociation and definition in our personalities to the degree that we form trances around what it is ok to remember, to feel, to express. This dictates how we need to behave in situations and relationships in order to feel safe and win approval. These trances form our interface in how we interact with the world and others.

In a healthy world processing would be the natural result of having an emotion or a big experience as a child then having a stable, mature adult by our side to help us feel, navigate and express any emotion or physical release, then to help put into context the experience that was just had. Regrettably this far too rare. So what typically leads to processing? Processing usually follows a state of discomfort in which we find that previously preferred methods of distracting, avoiding or even addiction, no longer work. We find due to some change in our external circumstances or some profound psychological shift, we are no longer capable of, or interested in, distracting ourselves from our pain in the way we could before. Often it is the breaking of an established way of being that leads to a more authentic one.

People process in different ways. In order for process to move beyond mere mental reorganization feelings must be allowed to pass through the body. Somatic process is simply the tuning into the sensations that the body is giving us, the emotions that are present in the moment and the expression of those states. The goal of processing is to move the stagnant energy and emotions, shift the neurological and biochemical loops by feeling witnessing and being with the body through its state of transition. In order for this to be effective and actually generate a state of resolution, a shift in mind, body and consciousness must be achieved. If this state is not achieved, the emotion alchemized, so to speak, the mind-body can get stuck in the loop using the same thoughts and feelings to continue to trigger the same habituated biochemical responses in an intra-personal biochemical feedback loop. In layman terms that means you get jacked around by your own thoughts and feelings and generate the hormones that will keep you in that loop.

Emotional triggering is when a thought or a perceived external condition, event or even person, reactivates old emotional wounds. The point of this triggering is to ultimately bring healing and resolution to the original wound. Trigger point therapy is done on a physical body, placing pressure on a neuromuscular point until the tension is released. Pressure is applied as the body is encouraged to breathe through the sensations and find the state of release. This can be applied in a psychological model as well or the same process can keep us in a hypersensitive state in which healing becomes impeded. If a wound is trying to heal and a person keeps bumping or scraping it, then it will continue to be re-injured and will not fully mend. If a person finds themselves, repeatedly, in situations in which they are consistently re-traumatized their psyches will not be able to form new responses to situations and those people will find themselves habitually living out scenarios that perpetuate the state of their original wounding.

Attraction has nothing to do with it. This is a state of inter-being through which the primary interface is trauma. This can be through various dynamics: victim/perpetrator, empath/narcissist or co-dependent modes of connection as the conjoining factor in any of these relational dynamics is trauma. One might say that for most of us our covalent bond is predicated on trauma. That is not to say that there is not genuine love and connection also present. That is one of the reasons that sorting out this trauma bonding is so confusing. As children we were fed both love and trauma, often in the same day and sometimes even in the same sentence. When tools like shame, blame, bullying and guilt are applied to shape our behaviors and the responses that we give based on our need for approval and the effectiveness of the use of those tools, it's not that hard to see how the majority of us have subtly and often, without real malice, been manipulated into vacating our own interiors and adapting masks and modes of being that we perceived would get us the validation, safety and acceptance that as children, we needed.

These strategies that help us to survive and fit in, then become automated. We cease to choose how we show up in these scenarios and we learn to numb, modify and stunt our own organic, authentic responses. Over time we may even see these modifications as values or even as who we are. A workaholic does not know that they are attempting to soothe a deep ache for connection and belonging by trying to prove their worth through how busy they can be all the time. This is a common one in our society. Busyness is highly prized but this does not necessarily indicate any level of personal satisfaction nor is it indicative of true creative living, something that our psyche and soma crave. An alcoholic does not typically, openly acknowledge that they drink to soothe a feeling of emptiness, boredom, apathy or pain. They typically think they like the buzz and the same goes for other intoxicants, food, electronics, other peoples approval and even sex.

None of these things that people do to soothe themselves are evil and many of them, taken with consciousness, are quite pleasurable and can be tools or can even be a part of our deep inherent desire for connection and belonging. When they are used as the substitute for connection is when they are functions of dissociation and deeper trance. When, for whatever reason, this trance starts to break and we can once again feel the pain that we had tried so hard to out run, is when processing comes into play. When processing itself, can become its own addiction is when we get stuck in telling the same story to continue to habituate the same feelings keeping us, in effect, addicted to our own hormonal responses.

Adrenaline, for example, has a highly addictive quality to it as does dopamine. You have maybe heard the term, adrenaline junkie, to describe someone who gets off on taking risks. This can be physically putting their bodies in situations that foster a sense of danger or adventure or it could look like playing the stock market, making risky investments, cheating on a spouse, gambling, porn, lying or any other number of risky behaviors. This can also be observed in the intensity that is so common to many modern action, horror and suspense tv shows and movies. They get your adrenaline pumping! There is an element of risk and an element of reward in these behaviors that's where the dopamine comes in. Over long term, the body's biochemical receptors change so that more dopamine is needed in order to sustain the feeling of reward and more adrenaline is needed to amp the feeling of risk. Eventually, the endocrine system burns out. This is unsustainable. These are also the same chemical responses that were generated in childhood.

Children are often in highly aroused states. They are open, their psyches undeveloped and permeable. They are often in a state of excitement and joy and it is most often, that in that state, something happens that is traumatic. Usually the trauma or violation comes from someone that they share a bond with and the so the trauma bond is forged. It is usually a parent but could also be a sibling, neighbor or teacher. In a heightened state of arousal if something disruptive or even violent occurs, that highly attuned nervous system picks up and stores those vibrations, mapping the biochemical responses together and fusing them in a neurotic bond within the body. As the body matures, those states stay fused and only partially matured so that the childlike state of dependency gets attached to the feeling of being traumatized as a means of establishing and maintaining connection. This is why it is so hard for abused people to break up with their perpetrators be that in a spousal arrangement or even between family members. The loss of trauma is also perceived as the loss of connection.

Let that sink in. People have a hard time extricating themselves from volatile, unhealthy situations because they are so deeply bonded to the feeling of connection and trauma as a unit. If you live with a person who is abusive or at the very least subversive to your authentic character and that is the same person that feeds and shelters you, that is a very confusing situation.

The real reason why people will habitually align with people who do not appreciate or may even abuse them has nothing to do with attraction, at least non in a law of attraction kind of way. Attraction as in a body's ability to sense out pheromones that are compatible to its own internal environment, maybe. What it boils down to is this attraction is really all about an inability to regulate your own biochemical responses and a familiarity to the states and relationships that encourage the internal states for those feelings to flourish.

It's not even really about the other person, it really boils down to your own biochemistry. Now, should you attempt to to learn to regulate yourself when you are in a current entanglement with a person who continues to propagate destabilizing behavior? NO. This is just as absurd and immature as believing if you just heal yourself enough their behavior will change. Then again, there is the argument that you will always benefit from learning how to regulate your own hormones and internal sate no matter what other people do. To truly heal though, we need a cease and desist from those volatile interactions to form new references, neurological loops and to emotionally and hormonally learn to regulate.

The first step to creating a new interface within any abusive dynamic, internal or external, is boundaries. We need to be willing to look at activity that we find toxic, abusive or addictive, in both ourselves and others and decide how much energy we want that activity to drain from our life-force.

Everything that I am postulating to you here is shared from hard won experience not theory. I grew up in a rather volatile household. My father was both a perpetrator and a healer. My mother was possibly a borderline personality, both could be unpredictable and a ton of fun. I am an oldest child. A lot of my value was won in taking care of my two younger brothers. I developed a psychic sensor to help me be aware of the energetic and emotional environment. The fun, the care and the volatile behavior all got mixed together like a cocktail in my developing system. At one point in my life I developed a form of OCD, a clear coping mechanism to feeling unsafe in an insecure environment.

Later in life I tangled with addiction and a proclivity to engage in relationships that had a violent streak to them. My first marriage was passionate and toxic to the degree that we were both engaged in violent behavior and substance abuse. The pain and trauma that I experienced as a child set the stage for this, as I had become habituated to a certain level of adrenaline and needed to continue to up the risk factor to produce the effects that had come to comprise my hormonal foundation. It was easy to bond with violent, unpredictable people as that was what was familiar to me. Adding the extra element of intoxicants that served as both numbing and stimulating agents, kept me moving faster than my pain, as I descended into methamphetamine addiction. Alcohol, a nervous system depressant, never worked quite as well for me as it was the adrenaline that I truly craved.

It's been over fourteen years since I quit meth. Since then I have been slowly unraveling my own addiction to drama from my system. I have gone up and down with using alcohol. I have been in and out of relationships that vary in health, toxicity and dysfunction to greater and lesser degrees. It's been about a year since I ended the last one I was in for nearly a decade. Upon ending that one, I got really clear that not only did I not want to go on in that relationship, I wanted to get to the bottom of why I was willing to participate in the dynamics in the first place, not to blame him or myself but really investigate how I function in relationship. That has been a very uncomfortable exploration that has involved lots of processing leading me to ask the question.. Am I addicted to processing?

Through periods of feeling absolutely, wonderfully stable and through periods of feeling like an absolute awkward, unravelling mess, I have come to this so far. An addiction to processing looks and feels like a need to enact behaviors, thoughts and feeling as a means of keeping those chemicals active. In my world, this looks like a lot of activity, impulsivity and ruminating in regrets. I have done a fair amount of this in the last few months to be sure. I tend to move toward connection and then pull away. I tend to blow up with behaviors that are not grounded to see what will happen, keeping those hormones in a sate of flux. I also am tending very deeply to my own somatic process as I go through these transitions internally and externally.

I have found that one of the most insidious addictions that I can entertain is actually an addiction to regret, wishing I had said, done, or even texted something different. I have come to understand this form of regret to be a state of regression, in which I am dissociating from what's in front of me and letting my energy and even aspects of me drift to near or distant past, fixating in a reality in which I did the thing differently.

Recently, I had a massive shadow chunk move up out of my head from deep in my brain and actually move between myself and a person who I have been doing a lot this pattern with. It's not really about them, although I can sense that we have certain markers for shared familial trauma. It was really all about me and my own internal trance in relation to my own behaviors and perception of them. I have watched how my own trauma, insecure attachment and subsequent need to act it out through both clingy, pushy and erratic behavior, form this layer between myself and others. What was fascinating was to actually watch it move out and occupy the space between us to the degree where I had to go completely internal with the process, as I physically could not see or hear the other person in that moment. This was one of the weirdest phenomenons I have ever experienced.

That experience actually created a fever in my physical body in which I was unable to do much of anything except dream, sweat and try to stay hydrated for about thirty six hours. In that process I would go down into dream space, wake up and hear a voice very kindly but firmly say to me, "You cannot change the past, all you can do is be with what is within and in front of you. Move forward"

I teach people about playing with what is within and around them for a living. I laid in bed for a couple of days, limiting my interactions with the outside world until I felt stable enough in my own energetic frequency to slowly begin to interact once again. My inner exploration brought me into places internally in my body, where I felt chewed up, torn and in other ways, simply super sore and exhausted.

This entire process was catalyzed by a growing state of arousal, a wakening of my own vitality that is occurring as a result of my desire to feel, to cease to numb, intoxicate and to get clear about who I am, what I want and how I genuinely function in this world, in myself and in relationship to others. To sum it up, I want to know who I am without my actions being colored by trauma, avoidance, hypersensitivity and the subsequent adaptations and masks that have arisen as a result of how I move around those energies in myself and others.

For me, the distinction that arises in response to my own vital energy seeking out new horizons, relations and adventures is in how I am landing in my own body. Every trigger that I have either accidentally or deliberately exacerbated is bringing me into a deeper state of resilience and embodiment.

I ask myself, when was the last time I felt like this and the answer I got.
NEVER...

I have never been able to feel at this capacity. I have never had the skills to hold myself or all the fragments that are seeking to home themselves in me right now. I have never had this level of discernment in my body, emotionally. I have never felt this level of raw, primal energy flowing through my veins, thumping through my internal organs, waking my creative energy. I have never given myself the chance to try connection in this way and it is a messy often extremely awkward endeavor but it is real.

There is less and less artifice in the way I am relating both to myself and others and that is the gift of processing. As I look less for others to fill the places in me that truly need my own care and attention I become more free to truly be myself. That is the place where we all find true belonging.