I woke up this morning feeling like I fell into Alices-looking glass. Hectic dreams have been haunting me over the past few days, with one, in particular, being especially triggering and traumatic. I won’t go too much into the details albeit to say that it is not a reality I would choose.
I dreamt that my son passed away whilst he was on holiday. He is currently in the US with his fiance, they have returned there to see her family and organize their wedding. The first time they have been home since the Pandemic started so not too surprising that somewhere I would feel a little nervous about them traveling.
Dreams can be such an interesting stream of insight allowing us to look at information, trauma, and experiences from a totally unique perceptual lens. They are filled with metaphors and archetypal characters playing a role in our drama to guide us to insights and deeper understandings to complete our thought loops so that we can bring trauma and stressors from our unconscious mind into the conscious to process and release and in turn our body is able to return to a homeostatic state.
As a little girl, I lost my father in a car accident, my mother lost her husband and my grandmother lost her son. I could only experience the loss through the eyes of the little girl losing her father, observing the others in their loss. As a little girl, I was looking to my mother and the adults to understand how to move through that loss. As a three-year-old, my nervous system is still connected to my mother’s nervous system. So the dysregulation that was being experienced in my mother was also being experienced in me. If she was feeling grief, sadness, and fear. I was feeling grief, sadness, and fear but without the filter of perceptual understanding. I was three and therefore unable to process this level of information so my body is just feeling and my world is becoming more and more unsafe.
As a three-year-old, I was also in a state where my basic needs of nurture and survival were either not being met or were being directly threatened. This in turn established a set of beliefs and behavioral patterns that became defense mechanisms or protective mechanisms that were developed to keep me alive. The three-year-old remained stuck in a holding pattern of undigested emotions, expectations, beliefs, protective programs, survival mechanisms, and behavioral patterns that were controlled by the nervous system and the unconscious mind.
When we look at trauma in its simplest terms there is a set of responses that happen in the body. We feel that we are in a situation where we are in danger in some way. Remember trauma is subjective to the individual. What one person perceives as traumatic another person may not. What is important to note is trauma is recognized by the body as the response to a perceived threat which stimulates the HPA axis into dysregulation (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis). This releases adrenaline, cortisol, and/or norepinephrine into the system, known as the survival response of fight/flight/freeze/fawn. When this system has been triggered the autonomic nervous system reacts moving blood from the brain to the limbs activating the body into a hyper-alert state to either fight, run, freeze or befriend. Once the threat has subsided the body shakes it off, you may have a sense of relief, burst into tears, collapse, and feel exhausted, this is when the adrenaline leaves the body and the body returns to its normal homeostatic state. Unless it doesn’t.
When the FFFF response has not completed its cycle we can become stuck in the FFFF response. In acute cases, this can present as anxiety or other disorders. In more chronic cases it can become developmental trauma where it affects our behavior, choices, relationships, work, and life in general.
On an energetic level trauma resides in the body as a feeling of an unsafe overwhelmed system, unprocessed emotions, a survival system that is out of control and a deficiency story like the world is not safe in some way. In my case as a three-year-old that lost her father and then her mother, my belief was that everybody leaves. So my developmental trauma resided around the fear of loss. My defense mechanism was to intellectualize my situation, I was able to remove all the emotion from my situation and mentally and logically look at it, and talk about ALL my traumas without any real feeling, whilst beneath the surface not recognizing the shit storm of emotions that were happening on an unconscious level and what damage was occurring in a dysregulated nervous system.
So what does all this have to do with my dream? In my dream, I was able to observe the perspective of the other, who lost her son, and feel the pain of that loss as it was my son in the dream. I observed the wife losing her husband, in my dream my daughter-in-law was pregnant so there was also the potential of the child. I observed the three women as an adult in my dream, the mother, the wife, and the daughter from an adult’s perspective. My dream allowed me to work through my trauma as a three-year-old linking my son’s birthday to my father. My father was killed when he was 26. I had the dream on the eve of my son’s 26th birthday.
There is the fear of loss residing on an unconscious level, my nervous system has been reacting with anxiety for the days leading up to the dream I was just not able to quite put my finger on what the problem was. As a three-year-old, I did not have the words necessary to bring the trauma up, but my body was definitely aware and responsive. My unconscious mind allowed me to process the information in my dream state where it was safer to observe and move through the experience and to complete the loop by allowing the grief and the tears, the crying and the screaming to all happen in the container of my dream. I did not experience just one aspect, I experienced them all.
Even though this was all in a dream, my body does not recognize the difference between real and imagined. Our reality is part imagined and part real. We overlay each experience of our reality with the experiential biases of our own perceptual reality. Our reality is subjective to our experiences. In all of our experiences, if we do not have the opportunity to complete the cycle, we become stuck in the cycle, doomed to keep repeating it over and over again. When the cycle is complete we return to safety, we look around and we can say I am safe. When the cycle is incomplete we remain in a state of hypervigilance and our world feels scary and threatening. We will do anything to survive, after all this is what our survival mechanism is designed to do. More on this soon.
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