I understand what it’s like to be disconnected from my body.

 

Following a childhood trauma, I became terrified of the dark and retraumatised by my experiences each night. And I’ve since learnt, if you’re paralysed by fear, your mind can’t store the experience and it’s typical to lose all mental memories of the event in question. Our bodies do store the trauma though. They store the emotions (e.g. fear, anger, shame) or images, physical sensations and sounds experienced at the time. However, these are stored like individual puzzle pieces in the body, they aren’t linked together or connected.

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Without this understanding, aged 10, I couldn’t explain to the people around me why I kept being flooded by fear, anger and shame, and eventually those emotions became too much for me, so I disconnected from what I was holding in my body, as it was the only way to cope.

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By this I mean I tried to live in my head as much as possible. The emotions I didn’t understand, and felt like I couldn’t trust, felt like a tightly wound ball in the pit of my stomach and to stay away from them, I trained myself not to think about (i.e. numb) my body.

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This numbing of my body then became a default, unconscious habit for me. And something in me that kept becoming more and more ingrained. For example, fast forward 15 years later, I was in a high-pressured work environment, with demanding expectations, long hours, and work-life imbalances. And in an attempt to numb the high levels of stress, overwhelm and exhaustion I was feeling there, I disconnected from my body even further.

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Eventually though, I just couldn’t seem to get to where I wanted to be with just my mind. I felt stuck, but like I couldn’t "logically" or rationally explain what was keeping me stuck, and I got to a place where I really felt like I was struggling. And it was only through becoming conscious of how the trauma patterns, stress, overwhelm, exhaustion and emotional tension I was holding in my body were affecting me, and keeping me stuck, that everything changed.

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Releasing what I was holding in my body, not only gave me an increased confidence in my ability to heal and change my situations, it also profoundly shifted my mental state, enabled me to learn radical self-care and sustainable living, my immune system started to strengthen, I started sleeping better, my mind AND body are now aligned in working towards the future I want, and my life is now infused with more vitality, aliveness, freedom, and satisfaction than it ever has been.