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The Relationship of Trials, Cycles, Spirals and the Nervous System

As humans, we are everblooming, works in progress. Children educate their parents, clients mirror their therapists, and we all evolve together. It never ceases to amaze me how connected we are. Multiple client sessions in the same week, speak to the same themes and illuminate our collective consciousness. This blog is a series of client questions and answers woven into my reflections and continued learning this year.

The first four months of this year were similar to a rough medicine journey, full of highly unpleasant, heightened emotions, bizarre, dreamlike incidents, and lessons. My sense of self-worth was reinforced through various trials, including a home invasion that I woke to at 4:30 in the morning in January that reignited childhood C-PTSD. 

It presented me with the opportunity to address dormant layers of unconscious beliefs formed through neglect and abuse. It was like rolling a boulder back and being in awe at the unearthed creepy crawlies living beneath the surface.

As a result of being gripped by fear-based thoughts, I had a physical flare-up of inflammatory-based ailments I hadn’t had to deal with for years. I addressed it with whole food, meditation, and daily movement. The gift of a bone broth detox is gratitude for the small sweetness’s in life, such as apples, sweet potatoes, and a piece of salmon, when you get to eat them again.

Whenever I remove foods from my diet, I’m reminded that restriction breeds creativity. The artist in me gets excited to make new things from the limited ingredients, and every flavor comes alive. Reembodying each taste bud reinvigorates my relationship with nourishment. Rather than resenting the structure and routine, I feel a deepening love for myself when intentionally preparing every meal. Each repetition reminds me that I am worth this attention, time, and money spent.

A client recently asked, “What does ‘Healing happens in a spiral’ mean?”

Healing is not a linear process. When present-moment suffering obscures a despondent client’s ability to see or feel the improvements they’ve made, I draw a spiral for them.

Picture a spiral. Now, move your finger from the outermost edge. You start here. Move along the circle towards the middle and stop when you’ve made one loop in. You begin to feel new feelings, process them, move trauma through your body, and possibly forgive yourself and others. You may have thought you were done processing all that fear, grief, and rage. You are Acing therapy, but you are only one loop in.

Each time the same material comes around for deeper healing, you get closer to the core of the original wound or trauma. The first time this happened, I was in my late 20s, loving life, feeling strong, and embodied after a few years of somatic bodywork and training. I meditated daily and danced six days a week. I felt safe in the world and embraced my desire to date and have sex with men for the first time. 

And then, it started: chronic fatigue and intense sacral, genital, and neck pain. You think you are done, and the universe laughs. No, dear one. Then came the next round of being powerless and in pain. But my body forced me onto a spiritual path, and only time can offer perspective if you’re trying to get away from your experience rather than learning to be with it.

Nervous system dysregulation from the home invasion this year allowed me to address the next spiral of healing related to loving and protecting myself that I’d wished for in childhood.  When the authorities were unresponsive, despite me providing them with an address from a tracking device that had stolen my purse, I metabolized my rage by yelling and throwing literal axes (nothing like hitting a bullseye). I highly recommend it if you haven’t tried it.

As infuriating as it was, I was also grateful for the smack in the face that screamed, “What the fuck, Cassell! You are worth protecting. God damn it. Spend a few thousand dollars and take the time to upgrade locks and install an alarm system.” Once the gripping stress from identity and car theft loosened, I could also enjoy the benefits of my new car. Fury and flashes of powerlessness were replaced by an awareness that life upgrades often come from challenging situations. That doesn’t mean a level of vigilance in me has wholly faded again.

It’s intense to feel so safe in my home for the first time, and then regress and be reminded of how unsafe I felt until my mid 20’s. I had to revisit this vigilant lack of safety to recall that this was my baseline state most of the time. The belief, I am not loved and I am not wanted, that rang through my childhood feels equally dissonant. Intellectually, I believe we are all worthy of love simply because we exist not because of what we produce. But there are conscious beliefs and unconscious beliefs. Feeling unworthy had to be excavated from my unconscious. It insisted I give it my attention.

My parents’ personal limitations and inability to be present or protect me are separate from the fact that I deserved protection. But just because something is easy to comprehend conceptually doesn’t mean all young parts of me believe it on a cellular level. Kids blame themselves and decide their value based on their parents’ actions or lack of action. It’s a funny liminal place to live in: to hold spiritual truths and have faith in people but know the darkness of humanity. To have high standards and clear boundaries, but not expect people to meet them.

A few years ago, on my birthday, I was guided on a psilocybin journey focused on healing my relationship with the masculine, specifically with my father and a man I’d recently broken up with. My father and ex were absent (pun intended). The trip ended up being all about sexual assault on preverbal, powerless beings. I cried, fought, and raged for them for seven hours. I felt responsible for being the voice and protector for all of them.

This material revealed the compulsive responsibility I have always felt to protect everyone, even those who should have protected me. I remember sobbing in therapy in my 20s about not being able to protect all of the children in the world from sexual abuse and my therapist at the time said, “You couldn’t protect yourself.” And while that is true, that it did relate to being powerless to protect myself, the bigger responsibility for humanity weighed on me even as a child. The protector archetype has been ever-present.

I chose a career that allows me to stand and defend clients in trauma reenactments, but I’ve never had the visceral satisfaction of actually physically defending myself apart from mixed martial arts drills. While I have felt my body heat up, shake, and get tense and nauseous when angry, I do not lash out physically.

My friend, Christian Branscombe, served twenty-five years of a life sentence in prison for murder (You can listen to an interview with him on LaidOPEN Podcast later this month). He and one of the men he shot, who is now one of his best friends, work together to do reparations with victims and offenders of violent crimes. After being released from prison, Christian became a coach who does shame, trauma and shadow work with people.

He said to me, “Many people cope with not being protected or getting their needs met in destructive ways. You coped with trauma in unintrusive ways.” I thought about how my strategies for ensuring I am loved are palatable and rewarded by society… overproducing and defensive compassion, compassion, and forgiveness that is often premature rather than earned, sometimes verging on spiritual bypass.

Anger is a boundary. I used to be proud of my ability to have conscious, loving endings during breakups, but there’s also value in rageful eruptions that establish boundaries. To be clear, I’m not suggesting rageful eruptions at others, but the ability to externalize and move those intense bursts of energy that want to be expressed and need to be moved supports health. Repressing and absorbing it can show up as depression, chronic inflammation, and illness.

After a series of challenging conversations with her partner, who came across as mean and condescending, a client asked, “Is yelling ever ok in a relationship?”

Your hurt feelings are valid. At the same time, keep in mind that how you communicate them and the words you use are significant. When you justify and defend how much you escalated and are unable to hear how it landed on the person you are in a conversation with, that is problematic. 

While there is a difference between raising your voice and being verbally abusive, your willingness to take responsibility for your impact or the harm you caused is essential.

You could speak to two different people and say the same thing in the same way. How they each receive it is not all on you. Answer these questions. Do you want to create more connection or distance? Is being connected more important than being right? What do you hope to achieve through this conversation? What do you really want them to know? 

Beyond the volume of your voice, your tone, facial expression, and body language also matter in what is being communicated. Are you rolling your eyes in contempt? Does your upper lip curl in disdain and disgust? Is your tone condescending and righteous? Some people track everything when tensions are high, while others get foggier and more dissociated depending on their personal history and sense of safety in their bodies.

It’s important to know about the person you are speaking to. Cultural communication style is real and relevant. What is the cultural as well as familial communication style of the person you are speaking to and want to be heard by? If you override this important piece of information, you are less likely to be heard.

My teacher Stan Tatkin said he had a couple that were brutal to one another, but since their nervous systems could meet one another and both had the same communication style, he let them speak to each other in ways that he would interrupt otherwise.

  One person grows up in a family where voices are loud, and that’s the norm, while someone else never hears raised voices in their family and feels immediately overwhelmed. Maybe they grew up with lots of screaming and now, by default, goes into Charlie Brown listening to an adult mode.” Wah wah wah wah” is all that is heard.

After a particularly hard few weeks of miscommunication and ping-ponging triggers back and forth with his partner, another client asked “Why do we have relationships? What’s the point?”

I see our lives like a game of Connect Four, you know that plastic grid where you drop red or black checkers from the top to make tic tac toe? The checkers stack on top of one another. Think of each hole the checker drops into as a lifetime…. all these lifetimes are happening simultaneously. 

If our learning isn’t fully received and remains incomplete in a different timeline, experiences in the form of physical symptoms or even relationship dynamics from those other timelines can drop through into this hole, aka present day, to be processed. Those people you have an immediate, unexplainable intense chemistry with may be people you have a full history with in a different timeline. Your body knows and craves them or despises them for no conscious reason.

This client questioned whether his partner even cares about him given what he said to him after he shared something really vulnerable.

I asked him to imagine a string that weaves from birth to the present, threading through all the moments you felt fear or powerlessness. Now imagine the same is true for your partner.

People come into our lives, and we pull each other’s strings, activating painful memories in history. Nothing is personal, even if your parents beat you and call you worthless. This is not about you or your worthiness. To make sense of it as kids, we blame ourselves. Your presence evokes their dysregulation, pain, and fear. Some may say we are put into each other’s paths to summon the good and the bad to help our souls evolve.

Ideally, when you get activated (as long as it is not abusive), your partner is able to hold ground and perspective for you. Once you are comforted, assured, and feel heard and seen, your nervous system settles and you return to a resourced adult version of yourself. A day goes by and now your partner gets activated. This time you see the scared, overwhelmed, kid inside them, you remember who they are, and hold them while they feel unsafe and don’t take their reaction personally.

It goes very differently if, as soon as your partner is activated, it instantly pulls on your string, pulling all the wounds from the past into the present moment. Depending on the level of consciousness of the triggered person, they will likely blame you for how they feel.

Picture a hand behind your head. You can’t see it. Even as it moves to the side of your head out of peripheral vision, you still can’t see it but you have a sense something is there. This is your unconscious material becoming subconscious. You may get good enough at deciphering your somatic tells, what your bodily sensations are when unconscious material is being pulled to the surface, that you realize, wait something is out of my consciousness and I know I am triggered right now. The emotions and sensations may be very intense.

For me, it’s a particular way my heart rate speeds up out of nowhere. When that occurs, I know that what I am feeling is about the past. I then ask my spirit to help me become conscious. I ask myself, what do you want me to know? With practice, the material comes into consciousness within minutes or hours, and the anxiety, grief, and rage will begin to subside.

It took decades of somatic and mindfulness work to have this level of access. It’s different for everyone because we have different degrees of trauma and the more your material is preverbal the harder it is to put language to it and make sense of it. You have to trust the impressions you have.

I don’t believe it was a coincidence that there was trial after trial, with escalating experiences of invasion and powerlessness in my present-day life, as I prepared to usher the course I’m launching, Pathways to Peace: Mindful Practices for Transformative and Vibrant Living, into the world. It insisted that I apply all the resources I’ve cultivated over the past thirty years.

I call periods like this self-awareness /self-care boot camp. When camping in the wilderness, you have your checklist and spread out all your tools and gear. Challenging life events demand the same level of mindfulness.

I value any new humanizing experience because it deepens my awareness and compassion for others going through something similar. It’s humbling and valuable to be reminded that this human experience doesn’t stop. Yes, we can develop more tools for nonattachment, equanimity, and groundedness, but like cycles in nature, it is constant. We have endless opportunities to practice and be with our responses.

Pathways to Peace is a labor of love that uses foundational practices and ways of reflecting to help participants move towards embodied wisdom and consciousness around their reactions and habits so they can have more choices about how they respond in relationships and hard situations. 

Of course, I got to revisit this material and apply it daily to feel confident in its essential nature. It has been gestating for years, so it’s a Big Baby. I look forward to sharing more about how you can join Pathways to Peace as we approach the launch date.

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© 2022 By Charna Cassell, LMFT. Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. MFC 51238.

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