IN THIS SESSION
Developmental Trauma and Language Development.
When we're triggered by our surroundings and enter a mode of loss of control, we often respond to our emotional wounds by withholding, suppressing, or expressing unresolved feelings. These stressful, disruptive reactions can make us uncomfortable and lead to endless discussions, impacting our emotional and physical well-being and relationships.
Developmental trauma during pregnancy, early childhood, and also later in life hinders our emotional processing, causing us to rely heavily on our analytical brain to anticipate danger and be in control by repressing and suppressing our difficult emotions. We will explore this internal shift from “witnessing” to a cognitive “observing,” and how this disconnects us from other internal points of view, namely, “appreciating” from open attention, and “embodying,” in which we physically experience observing and appreciating. The latter ways of experiencing, when experienced consciously, cohere with our body’s nervous system activity (respectively, with sympathetic and para-sympathetic activity).
This shift away from integration, which constitutes an imbalance at an essential level within us, can become semi-permanent as a focused, selective attentional mode that anticipates danger. At this time, the shift becomes a blind spot that anchors survival mechanisms, cognitive biases, beliefs, personality traits, and social behaviors mirrored in our relationship with the world around us. It divides our experience into an unconscious (Shadow, as C.G. Jung termed it) and conscious, which keeps us trapped in repeating patterns.
In this learning journey, we will experientially explore conscious experience and in what specific ways developmental and other forms of trauma have disintegrated the multiple dimensions of experience within us, disrupting our language use and how we engage with life. We learn to use HEAL's comprehensive framework and process to discover what themes, sounds, words, and meanings resonate with trauma’s reactive expressions in our minds and bodies. These expressions often produce physical and mental health complaints and accompanying overwhelming feelings; they influence how we observe, think, speak, and socially interact.
Once we recognize what no longer works, we can explore these patterns more carefully, opening the path toward conscious and healthy resolution. This results in harmonious social connection and synchronous collaboration.
Recognizing this process, we can also realize the depth of understanding needed to experientially understand the famous quotes like the ones from the poet Rumi: ‘Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.’
Experience:
In this third session, we will use HEAL’s Brain Matrix and Body Matrix tools to discover the linguistic expression of our experiences as physical sensations, complaints, and accompanying overwhelming feelings.
We will also experientially explore how these complaints, which initially seem random and fragmented, start forming recognizable and discernible patterns.
Discernment expands us beyond the problem, clearly showing us what is possible.
