Healing Can Be Destabilizing, Too

In the beginning, healing can be so destabilizing. It can exacerbate symptoms, heighten anxiety, make space for big overwhelming emotions.

So if you feel like you’re going backwards, know that this can be part of the process.

It can feel unfair to be met with shaky intensity when we’re trying to recover from a traumatic event that destabilized us. But healing can be cyclical, spiralic, a swirl of beginnings, middles, and ends that aren’t even ends. So the intensity isn’t strictly the stuff of beginnings.

You might periodically feel destabilized, sucker-punched by waves of grief that take the breath from your lungs and drop you to your creaky knees. These dips and rises might not change, but our ability to be with the dips and rises, our ability to be gentle with ourselves, to turn to our tools and ask for support - this might change, and can make a hard process a little easier.

Keep going. Keep resting. You’re doing great and it’s so normal to feel like you’re not.

jess

Childhood, Caretaking, & Feelings

If you were a child who expressed feelings in proportion to those around you. If you contorted your emotions into the shape and size that could be held. If you disappeared and squeezed and repressed what couldn’t.

If your role as a young person was to take care of other people’s feelings, to hold them in your small hands, to weave them into the fabric of your family, to make the unokay acceptable.

You might struggle to believe your feelings are worthy of care. You might struggle to believe there is space for you. You might struggle to believe that your feelings get to exist, regardless of another’s capacity to hold them.

If this is your work, know that it is not yours alone. So many of us are untangling and re-working and weaving these old threads. We are wilting before we remember it’s safe now to bloom. We are foresaking our feelings as a precious survival strategy. We are flashbacking deep in our bones to other times our whole selves weren’t held.

And still. We are showing up in these news ways, trembling. Be gentle in your ferocity: this takes time.

I honor your survival

I honor your survival.
I believe your survival.
I am in awe of your survival.
I support your survival.
⋒
I know that the word “survival” is past tense and sometimes you are still surviving.
I know there aren’t enough strong supports and soft places.
I know it can feel incredibly alone and too fucking hard and painfully endless.
I know it is tiring. So so tiring.
I see you keeping going.
I see you stopping to rest.
I see you itchy and struggling to pause, to receive rest.
⋒
I honor and hold and bow to your experience. To the late nights and bitter resentment and fearful holding. To the adaptive coping mechanisms you needed and wish you didn’t need any longer. To the weariness that pulls on your heartsleeves. To feeling misunderstood and out of place, where is my place, where is my story’s place? To all it takes to survive, to keep surviving - I honor and hold and bow to all of that.

Somatic & Emotional Flashbacks

• You can experience flashbacks even without tangible memories, thoughts, or visuals.

• Flashbacks can be emotional, somatic, and visceral.

• If you experience flashbacks without memories, your experience is valid.

• If you experience flashbacks through body sensations and waves of emotion, your experience is valid.

• Your flashbacks are valid.

• Your sensations are valid.

• Your emotions are valid.

• Your experience is valid.

If you have ever opened a book on trauma, or clicked on an IG post, and read about flashbacks - you might have seen a common narrative that equates flashbacks to memories.

And if you have memories of your traumatic experience/s, perhaps this parallel resonated with you.

But if you are one of many people who remember traumatic experiences somatically, if you don’t have all of the "who, what, when, where" puzzle pieces, you might have felt left out or invalidated. You might have wondered: Is the full-body shaking and the tears that landslide while I’m trying to fall asleep not a flashback? Is the terror that freezes me while sharing intimacy (or encountering a certain smell, or being around a certain person) not a flashback? Perhaps deep in your bones you know you are experiencing flashbacks, but it can be tricky to feel validated when your narrative is more nebulous than tangible.

You’re not alone. For many survivors of trauma, emotional and somatic flashbacks and flooding are a common experience, even if they can be hard to talk about.

Though the body can hold what happens to us, the body can also repress traumatic events. And there is wisdom in that. If you don't remember the details, there is wisdom in that. If your memories are somatic and visceral, there is wisdom in that.

It can feel problematic when other folx and practitioners want these details, request them, require them. But not knowing them doesn't make your experience any less valid. It doesn't.

Your sensations are valid. Your emotions are valid. Your flashbacks are valid. Your experience is valid

There is something deep inside of you that knows, and something deep inside of me that believes you.

If This is Resilience, I Want No Part

IF THIS IS RESILIENCE I WANT NO PART //
🌼
Can we stop glamorizing dandelions growing through concrete and glorifying resilience?

Yes, it’s amazing what humans can survive.

And: there should be less to survive.

Dandelions thrive in earth, not concrete. It might seem incredible when dandelions grow through concrete, but imagine how much more incredible it would be if they could grow in an environment meant for them, with the things they need to flourish?

Dandelions aren’t meant to fight their way through hard rock. It takes a lot of precious time and energy to grow through grit. They deserve soil. Warm sunshine. The right amount of water. They deserve tending, careful hands and the gentle hum of wind to spread their seeds.

They deserve all the things we know they need to survive. And so do you. And so does everyone else. Don’t forget it.

Don’t forget that when someone has survived unbearable circumstances, it’s not just a moment to applaud their triumph and resilience - it’s a moment to look at the unbearable and unjust conditions, and work to change them.

May we do it.

May we really, fucking, actually –- do it.

Touch is a Relationship

it’s not nothing, to receive bodywork. especially from new hands and a new practitioner. especially if we have a history that includes harm and violation via touch. especially if our nervous system is keyed up, our muscles guarded.
✧
for some people, this isn’t a big deal. it’s no thing, to be massaged by someone, anyone. but for a lot of us, it’s the biggest dang deal. because our body and our skin and our nervous system remember things that have happened to us before. we bring those experiences with us into the session, onto the table, on our skin and under the sheets.
✧
often i remind first-time clients that we’re in a new relationship. trust doesn’t need to come right away. clients can decide how much touch (if any - somatic work can happen without touch, and same goes for energetics), what kind of touch, what pressure, all of that. clients might want to remain clothed, or keep more clothing on. this is all okay. accepted. allowed.
✧
often for the first massage we don’t do super deep work. it’s more of a hello. here i am, a therapist who is engaging in a relationship and negotiation with you around touch. i am gentle. i am always gentle (though potent) but especially gentle for the first session.
✧
touch is a relationship and there can be a lot to navigate within that therapeutic relationship. a lot is happening. more than touch is happening, because our physical contact touches deeper layers and because an alchemy exists between the client and practitioner. because, ideally the client and the bodyworker are co-regulating, a safe hum of the nervous systems syncing and connecting. and a safe container needs to be built to hold this hum.
✧
If touch is a lot for you, i see you. i am you. and in my role as a somatic practitioner and trauma-informed bodyworker, i honor the hell out of that.