Our brains store the memories of our experiences, but so do our bodies. Processing the many layers of trauma that remained stuck in my mind and body has been a uniquely physical experience, different from anyone else’s. While there is no right or wrong way to experience emotions or process shame and trauma, if you desire deeper healing, it is important to experience the physical qualities of your emotions. They are unique to you.
It is nearly four years now since I began confiding some of my darkest secrets and trauma memories with a friend after decades of keeping them hidden. She listened with no signs of disgust on her face as I anticipated. She did not put a positive spin on my struggles or point out the endless blessings in my life to prove I should not be so negative…so depressed…so damn stuck! She also didn’t look away when I revealed what I knew as the disgusting, dark, and shameful parts of me. Although my eyes could not meet hers…she did not look away.
I also found a therapist with whom I felt a similar connection. She was attuned to the agony in my body that I couldn’t put into words. With patience and gentleness, she stayed at my side for years, exploring the many dark corners within me. EMDR sessions brought up visions of locked wooden boxes that held secrets…rusty but strong metal containers with bigger secrets…fortress walls around my heart… These sessions also caused a myriad of physical sensations to happen in my body. My jaws often ached. I felt electricity move up my spine. My hands opened and closed, yearning to push and fight. The muscles in my core tightened in a way I saw my body folding inward to guard the deepest parts. My belly ached with all it needed to keep inside.
My therapist never forced my walls down or my locked boxes open, but helped me to be curious about all of these images and physical sensations. She guided me to stay with the internal experiences and to be curious about how life in my 40s was being rigidly ruled by what I insisted on keeping secret.
Emotions are Physical
Using your voice and sharing your story is such an important aspect of healing, but there is so much more.
Knowing what you are feeling is always based on a body sensation.
I never before realized that my knowledge of my feelings stemmed from physical sensations. Years of self-work have taught me to attune to my body. I feel a light bubbly sensation in my face and chest when I am happy. My belly gets knotted and my heart races when I am anxious. My chest puffs out and my arms fill with tense energy when I want to angrily pummel my husband’s chest during a heated argument! When I am in fear, my insides feel like they are twisting and I lose all awareness of my surroundings. My whole body flushes with heat and has an urge to hide when I feel shame. My social anxiety is often so bad I am urgently running to the bathroom with IBS symptoms! Sometimes my stress leaves me with a migraine and I cannot open my eyes to endure light.
Emotions are physical and suppressing them can result in every potential mental health symptom. The suppression felt by the body can also lead to infection, cancer, every type of autoimmune disorder, high blood pressure, heart disease, insomnia, addiction, hormonal imbalances, gastrointestinal illnesses, diabetes, obesity, sexual dysfunction, and premature aging.
If it feels acceptable, try closing your eyes when emotions hit you and let sensations and visuals bubble up – images, colors, shapes, and the many physical qualities of your bodily experiences. Find ways to create the stillness needed that allows you to go deep inside yourself… and then just let this happen. It may take practice, but the body will communicate. The more you practice and the more you experience, the more your tolerance will grow to feel your emotions. The only way to let emotions move through and out of your body is to feel them.
The right hemisphere of the brain stores memories with no language, no words…yet with far more accuracy of what you personally experienced than what you stored in the logic, sequence, and language of your left hemisphere. The right side is physically larger and holds the rawness of your experiences through emotions, images, colors, shapes, and textures.
Brain imaging research has shown that the right brain hemisphere is heavily activated during traumatic experiences while the left hemisphere seems to be deactivated. Yet our tendency is to fixate on the facts, sequence, logic…whatever story we have created. We need both sides of our brains to work together, communicating, in order to understand our body sensations, process our memories, and let go of what remains stuck.
I Keep Showing Up
I managed to keep showing up, both in the friendship and in counseling sessions..and sharing with these two women whom I slowly began to trust – the secrets that felt terribly wrong to bring into the light. Yet despite their consistent empathy, encouragement, and gentleness, these interactions were often agonizing. No matter how slowly they allowed me to move through it all, I felt like my insides were writhing in pain whenever I worked with my trauma secrets.
Our nervous systems know no difference between physical pain and emotional pain. It only makes sense that we would react in ways that may be perceived as “dramatic” and seek a myriad of strategies to avoid emotional pain just as we avoid physical pain. However, we live in a culture that shows a great understanding of pain resulting from a physical ailment while whispering to each other about the shameful secrets of someone’s depression or emotional pain. The shame of being unable to “fix” our emotional dysregulation is exacerbated.
After many hard conversations or therapy sessions, I grappled with the difficult internal experience of processing my shame and trauma secrets. The only words that came close to describing the raw pain I was always left in were:
“I feel like my soul is being ripped open.”
Over time, I learned the pacing of what my body could handle. I learned to differentiate my “raw aching” feelings that come with processing trauma at a gentle, manageable pace from the state of “despair and overwhelm” from working through trauma too fast. It took years before I could attune to the qualities of each state so that I would know the difference. Now I understand that the overwhelming pain felt from moving too quickly shifts me into days or weeks of depression, whereas my aching and raw pain of processing gently will transform within a day or two into feeling lighter and happier.
Giving Language to My Body Sensations Aids Processing
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.“
Ludwig Wittgenstein
This was one of those weeks where I had an EMDR therapy session that was so filled with physical sensations that I knew a lot was being processed inside me, yet I had no clarity yet around what was being rewired in my brain…or even much clarity around the memories that I was working with. It is never necessary to remember traumatic experiences in order to process them as this can lead to retraumatization. However, if something is already stuck in my head…ruminating or racing thoughts…being in a state of post-therapy confusion…or having no words for the physical sensations in my body, finding language helps me tremendously.
“Language is our portal to meaning-making, connection, healing, learning, and self-awareness. Having access to the right words can open up entire universes. When we don’t have the language to talk about what we’re experiencing, our ability to make sense of what’s happening and share it with others is severely limited. Without accurate language, we struggle to get the help we need, we don’t always regulate or manage our emotions and experiences in a way that allows us to move through them productively, and our self-awareness is diminished. Language shows us that naming an experience doesn’t give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding and meaning.”
Brene Brown, Atlas of the Heart
I needed language for the confusion inside me. My friend asked if we could get coffee and talk about the session. Over the years, I have learned these conversations after therapy help me continue the processing, the rewiring, and the integration of new beliefs in my body.
Conversations with my friend after therapy always give me incredible insight and awareness into myself – they give me language. I release more of the weight, the heaviness inside. I am left feeling lighter. Within the next few days, I begin feeling joy and freedom. I see memories and myself differently, with less shame and more compassion.
The most beautiful part of all is that this new learning is not temporary, it actually sticks! In psychology, this is called memory reconsolidation.
The Pain of Letting Light Into My Darkest Places
I am not implying that confiding in my friend ever comes easy. I continue wanting to back out of these conversations…in the same, way that it is still hard to show up for therapy. Our bodies develop protective strategies to guard against emotional pain…even if the end result is freedom and joy. So when my friend asked for coffee, I said yes and felt grateful, but my body felt anxious and wanted to cancel.
Sometimes I don’t show up…the guarding and protectiveness in me are too strong to overcome. But each time I fail to show up out of shame, my depression worsens. I have learned to be compassionate to myself for wanting to hide and to stop beating myself up.
So this week when I had the overwhelming urge to NOT talk about hard shit with my close friend, I paused to give love to all the scared and hurting parts of me. Through my own gentleness and compassion, I could assure myself that I am strong enough and deserve to feel better – even if it’s hard and painful work!
I showed up for coffee with my friend. I told her about the hard therapy session and I talked about my memories and what I experienced many years ago. I admitted the heavy shame I still felt around all of it and how badly I wished I had made different choices and fewer mistakes.
I explained the images and body sensations that arose in EMDR. I talked about what still felt confusing, what felt shocking, what hurt, and what felt good. I talked. I trusted. I was vulnerable.
Like many of the earlier conversations with my friend, this one was just as hard as a therapy session. I couldn’t look at her eyes most of the time. I couldn’t find the right words. But there are so many differences in me now too! I make eye contact now…not consistently, but I am making some eye contact while talking about shameful secrets. My body can face her more easily now, as I sit across the table. For years I tried to choose a chair that was at an angle to her so that my body felt somewhat protected. When I couldn’t easily do so, I constantly fought against my body which wanted to turn away from her while I talked. There was always a raging war inside.
These battles that I physically felt within my body, I never used to admit to anyone. I pretended to be as “normal” as I possibly could. But ignoring the internal physical sensations caused my body to continue distrusting me. Eventually…with enough safety in my relationships, and enough attunement to know when my body felt unsafe, I began to admit my discomfort to these two trusted people. I also learned to find ways to increase the sense of safety in my body, even if that means sitting at an angle, keeping a greater proximity between us, or grabbing a pillow to keep on my belly. I learned to admit when I don’t want a hug…and admit when I do.
As silly as all of this may sound, it is how my body is beginning to trust me. I feel connected to myself, embodied. I let the words spill out, whether they sound appropriate, silly, or childish…or they expose more details than I ever imagined would be acceptable. Love and trust allowed me to stop filtering much of my inner experience. As wrong as it once felt, this is precisely where I am finding great freedom each time I show up. Now I want a hug almost always! I even want a hug to last longer than 0.25 seconds! That’s big!
How Accessing Trauma is Physically Felt in My Body
The entire day after this coffee date I ached in all the deepest parts inside me. I felt the familiar raw pain. Hurt. Exposed. My shame was shared with my friend after decades of keeping it hidden. But it was not my familiar depression. There was no wave after wave of sadness, grief, and despair. This felt raw yet tolerable.
It is the same feeling as the days I talk about or process shame and trauma in therapy. Whether it is somatic work, EMDR, IFS, the body-work of Bioenergetics, etc., I remain in this state of raw exposure with an urge to curl up in a ball with lots of warm blankets. The best thing I can do for myself is exactly that. Find endless little ways to give myself comfort. Calling in sick to work. Hot cups of coffee and tea…a movie I wouldn’t normally “waste” time watching during the day…sitting on my front porch doing nothing…sitting in the grass with my back against a tree…a hot bath…a slow walk in nature.
At the end of this particular night, I reflected on all the hurt I was still feeling and asked myself if this is worthwhile? Much of this journey has felt brutal at times, yet I instantly knew how to answer my question – it is worth it. I could never go backward to the shame that comes with burying trauma secrets. Despite this aching, I also feel great burdens gently lifting out of me. I feel lighter.
I paused after brushing my teeth to feel this lightness, even amidst the hurt. Then I crawled into bed and wrapped my arms in a hug – loving me. I touched my face. Felt my skin. Allowed myself to be hurt for all my experiences.
My Wounds and Scars Still Hurt
I am recovering from my 12th surgery right now. I know the wounds and scars left behind after the body heals. I have scars that continue to hurt when touched. I have scars that are numb without any nerve sensations at all. I have scars that are ugly and I try to hide them from the sight of others.
The body’s healing of emotional pain is not so different from the physical scars on my body. Just because I have processed much of my trauma, does not mean I will never again feel its wounds, the numbness, the need for soothing, and the waves of grief. This is part of my human experience.
The difference is that what was once unprocessed called all the shots in my life. I behaved, made choices, and missed out on experiencing life to align my shame and protective strategies around my trauma…believing I was incapable of tolerating the pain of my buried trauma secrets or the shame of my mistakes.
I know now that I can tolerate the raw pain of life’s experiences. I am not broken or defective. This is what has been released with processing trauma. I see my past differently. I am now making choices because of the feelings, values, and beliefs held in the deepest parts of myself, in my soul.
This was a place still beautiful, perfect, and unbroken, yet too buried to access before now.
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