Freezing

No, not the weather in England, at least not yet. I’ve talked about rage – fight, and running away – flight as defence mechanisms, but I haven’t talked about freezing. When we talk about fight and flight, we don’t often talk about freeze, which is another form of defence – also known as playing dead, or playing possum. Yes, animals do it. And so do humans. In fact, it’s the reptilian part of your brain that all three defences come from. They’re instinctive.

When you are confronted with overwhelming threat, real or perceived, even from your own feelings, you become paralysed, you withdraw into yourself, especially if fight or flight would cause even more danger, or aren’t options anyway. This is the basis of shock. Shock becomes trauma, from which you continue to suffer, when the overwhelming feelings you felt are not expressed after the threat is over. Shock from childhood can be carried into adult life in this way. You are less alive. You probably underachieve. You do not express your full potential.

When an animal plays dead, it does it to avert unwelcome attention. When a child does it, it is for the same reason. You don’t move, you don’t express anything; you make yourself as small and still as possible. For animals that do this it reduces the threat. Many predators only want live prey. For humans, it may or may not reduce the threat. But animals express the held feelings when the threat is over. They shake. Humans do not always do this. It may not be safe to, especially if the child is not held or contained or if the threat is ongoing. So these feelings are trapped in your body as body memories and carried into adult life. You also learn to freeze habitually, even when you don’t need to.

These trapped, unexpressed feelings from childhood reduce your vitality and possibly your physical movement. They can create illness. Or they can surface when something triggers your reptilian memory. What is important is how they are treated when they do surface. You can approach them as a threat and attempt to fight or control them or you can welcome them as a chance to learn and grow; to release and heal and move on; to gain more freedom. You can listen to the messages from your body and try to understand what they are telling you. You can let yourself remember, slowly, but without trying to force or analyse.

To learn more, start here.

Ways of Running Away

It’s natural to run away from uncomfortable feelings, especially pain. You believe these feelings will overwhelm you. When you were a baby you were unable to interpret the messages from your nervous system; in fact you were all exposed nervous system, extremely sensitive and raw. You may have been over stimulated; more stimulated by external circumstances than you could tolerate. Your body could not hold these feelings or safely express them, especially if you didn’t feel contained. As you got older, you lost some of this sensitivity, which is a double edged sword.

Hopefully, you have learned how to deal with intense feelings adequately, without being overly sensitive but also without becoming numb. What was primitive in you has become more sophisticated and rational. Or you may still be using the ingenious coping mechanisms you learned/adopted as a baby to prevent yourself being overwhelmed, and in order to survive. Who wants to feel pain anyway? But if you don’t, how will you know you are hurt? Feeling pain is part of being alive, truly alive. It also drives you to make changes – in positive ways, for the better.

These coping mechanisms are ways of running away, avoiding. (They are not defects of character). When you were a baby you couldn’t run away, so you adopted primitive survival mechanisms, the same way that animals do. These also rob you of important experiences, and the chance to grow. If you can feel the pain now, the anger, the guilt, the fear, the shame, the murderous rage, you can also heal it. You can stop reacting as if you were still a baby and as if the threats are the same as they were then. If you can allow yourself to feel, little by little, and in amounts that you can handle, you will gradually let go of those avoidance techniques that hold you back now and probably cause a great nuisance in your life.

You will have more than one way of avoiding uncomfortable feelings. Some examples are spacing out, sleeping a lot, drugging them with food or chemicals, TV, excessive exercise, getting ill – going shopping! You may dumb yourself down and be less alive than you could be. In which ways do you run away? And how much could you tolerate if you sat still and listened to yourself for a while, especially to the feelings in your body? How could you use those feelings?

Misery Loves Company

On the theme of containment, I’ve been thinking how misery can be a habit – a life long habit. If you were born into, and lived with, depression, that’s what you will be used to. Misery became familiar to you. Joy, being unfamiliar, will be more threatening. It is unknown and you are less likely to trust it. That's why fear comes along with excitement. You don't know how to contain your excitement.

“Change is always for the worse,” someone said to me recently. What a negative attitude! This was a person who shunned change, never grew and reached her eighties with a whole lot of unfulfilled potential and regrets. Have a look at your negativity. What do you feel more comfortable with? What have you got used to?

If your family was miserable they would not have been able to cope with a healthy, joyful, vivacious, spontaneous and powerful child. They could have been miserable for any number of reasons, depression, bereavement, general unhappiness with their situation. Their negativity could be understandable, but the effect on you, the child, was devastating. You grew up believing your happiness would inconvenience other people. You probably learned to keep quiet, dumb yourself down, minimise your power. You became limited by the limitations of your environment. You will have grown up being less than who you really are and can be – not fulfilling your potential. Children are ingenious at adapting to their environment. Think how you have adapted to your early environment and how you still use those same coping mechanisms habitually, even though you no longer need to. Think about how you coped with the limitations of your early environment. What have you adapted to and what do you put up with now that is less than you could really have.

Containment

If you weren’t held as a child, you won’t know how to hold yourself now. If your emotions and your physical energy were not contained, you will feel overwhelmed by them, even now. If you were not allowed, or it wasn’t safe, for you to express love and joy, anger and fear, as a child, you will not know how to contain and express these emotions appropriately now. Consequently, you will not be able to feel, contain and express the full extent of your power and potential. You will have grown up stunted and underachieving in so many ways – and fearful.

If you did not have the opportunity to experience the full extent of your emotions and energy, as a child, you would have imagined all sorts of things; that your power was destructive, to yourself and others; that your rage could kill; even that you might suffer punishment and retribution if you dared to be happy. That’s why you feel fear when you feel excited now. Probably nobody ever explained to you why things were the way they were, why your environment felt limiting or restrictive; and you probably blamed yourself for that too, and even do now. You probably thought there was something wrong with you. Nor were you taught how to contain your own energy and emotions without necessarily acting out on them; how to get what you wanted without emoting, by articulating; and, most importantly, how to delay gratification and make choices from probably limited possibilities. All of this would add to your sense of not being OK.

In this way you may have gown up being afraid to fully feel, to be fully alive, to live your life fully and spontaneously. You may have a nagging doubt that there is more but not know how to reach it. I’ll write some more specifically on how to contain various emotions and what choices you have now that you didn’t have as a child.

I’m Back

Sorry folks, I’ve been away for a long time doing some personal research. I’m back, armed with some more ideas to share with you.

Attack and Blame

Twice this week somebody, who wanted something from me, has rung up and asked, ‘How are you?’ Then, when I was telling them, they didn’t seem to be listening. Eventually they attacked me. ‘You didn’t ask how I was.’ They hadn’t given me a chance. One said she felt ‘crap’ but refused to discuss it. In both cases I felt attacked. I also had a call from a friend whose partner is going through a rough time. Her complaint – he keeps attacking and blaming her.

So what happens?

This is narcissistic rage: the rage of a baby. An adult would say what they wanted, why they are calling. A baby can’t articulate. If they can’t ask for what you want or create it as an appropriate response to their crying, they rage. It may not be safe for the baby to express this rage, so they turn it inwards and feel attacked by their own feelings. These become paranoid fantasies because a child lives in a world of fantasy. When you grow up, you carry this unexpressed rage with you. You feel attacked and you attack.

Narcissistic behaviour lacks empathy and therefore compassion. So asking someone how they are doesn’t mean you can empathise, or that you really want to know. All you want is relief from your own pain and frustration. And if you don’t get this, you attack. You blame the other person. If your cries were not heard and responded to appropriately, when you were a baby, then you were not contained. It is hard now for you to contain your own emotions because you still feel like that baby. You have not grown up and learned to manage pain and frustration. You have not learned to respect time, to wait. For a baby, time is endless and they cannot wait. As an adult you know that change comes slowly, over time. Nothing lasts for ever. You learn this from experience, if you are patient.

Challenges and Control

If only you could plan your days, life, wake up in the morning and it would go just that way. If only. You live with the illusion that you can control your life. You can’t. There are too many external influences, and also unconscious internal influences, for you to be able to control them all.

However, you can take control of your life, as it presents itself to you. You can accept life’s challenges, accept every day and everything that comes to you, as a challenge and respond to it. Or you can react against it.

If you respond, you will learn and grow. Your potential will be stretched. This is constructive. If you react, rage against what you cannot control or change, you regress, become a helpless victim. You do not learn or grow. This is destructive, especially to yourself.

You have a choice to accept life’s challenges, on a daily basis, and work with them. You have a choice to use your resources and stretch yourself. This also means talking risks, feeling the fear and not always getting it right.

Rejection

This is a painful one. Probably the most painful experience I know. That’s why you avoid it and deny it. You set up all sorts of defences to pretend it hasn’t happened.

Behaviour can be rejected as undesirable, inappropriate. When this happens to you as a child, and depending how it happens, when you have offered that behaviour with love, you feel like all of you is being rejected. Because we are all born to love, it’s hard to separate that love from your ‘self’. It’s who you are. If you don’t know why your love isn’t received, or your behaviour isn’t appropriate, if you’re not told, you lose your sense of that self. After all, children can be awkward, naive. So you blame yourself. You believe you are intrinsically flawed. We are all born to love, albeit in different ways.

The love of a child is so delicate; it needs to be handled with care. Children are easily hurt and rejected – by the insensitive. If you don’t know how much you were hurt as a child, how much you felt rejected, you will go on to hurt others in relationships. You may damage young and vulnerable lives, still in the process of developing, as you were damaged. The same applies to relationships. These also need to develop and grow in a healthy way.

Rejection, including shaming, causes deep pain that is hard to face and therefore hard to heal. Children who have been rejected clamour for love as adults, often from rejecting people and especially in codependent relationships. (Don’t forget that withdrawing, counter-dependency, is also a form of codependency. If you are proud and aloof, you are likely to have been rejected too. You reject other people by not being emotionally available now). Children who have been rejected grow up learning to reject themselves, and to reject others, not letting them in. They then feel lost and empty and turn to codependency and other addictions as adults to fill themselves up. This doesn’t heal the pain or fill the emptiness.