The one coping mechanism we’re all born w when it comes to our trauma & our pain is to “move it to the back.”
When we do our SameHere visits, we show this w an animated slide that has our brain as a balloon filling up w two colors of air: blue & red. Blue air (yes, overly simplistic – represents our positive experiences & events) fills the front of the balloon, & red fills the back of the balloon w our negative experiences & events.
When we’re young, & we haven’t had many life experiences, there’s room TO “move it to the back.” As humans we avoid pain & suffering. That’s why moving it & trying to forget it, is what we turn to most often – especially as little kids when we aren’t taught tools to mange it all. Then we hear things from adults (& yes we’ve discussed this here before but it’s worth repeating), like: “time heals all wounds.”
Sadly time does not heal all wounds. And perhaps most importantly, when we let that red air fester – it just sits in the back…& then it accumulates even more as we find vices to numb it. The red flows into the blue, bc we can only hold it back for so long…& we get purple – MH symptoms, & even disorder.
Just think back to childhood, what you experienced that your mind created a blurry haze over, or where you told yourself a diff story than what actually happened, so you could cope & survive in the moment.
Our brain/body connection is like a video camera w no easy delete button. We can’t & don’t unsee what we’ve lived thru. But we will TELL ourselves a new story to try to gloss over the pain of that red air & keep it at bay.
“That uncle who did those things to me…maybe it wasn’t as bad as I remember…I was young.” Or…”The way I was picked on in that school, maybe I was just being super sensitive & that person wasn’t really that mean to me.”
These are all misrepresentations of the truth. And while we don’t need to be psycho-analyzed to the point of re-engraining the trauma over & over, we do need to acknowledge that it DID happen, it WAS painful, & that diving in to then “release & rewire” it is gonna be a bit (or a lot) painful. But it’s needed to heal.
