a dreamlike response
When we encounter trauma, time slows down. Discrete details come into sharp focus. We stop feeling, stop processing, and just endure. This experience is known as dissociation, and it happens when our systems are overwhelmed. It’s a dreamlike response that allows us to survive the moment.
Those who experience repeated trauma over a period of time grow accustomed to dissociation and begin to know the world from this limited, siloed, disembodied self. It becomes our reality. We feel like we’re living under water, locked in an invisible closet, stuck in glue. We don’t feel emotions exactly—not like other people—because we don’t inhabit our bodies. Our thoughts tend to float around. We live like ghosts inside ourselves, haunted by memories we don’t understand.
This disintegrated existence fragments the self inside us, leaving some parts of us in the body, others in confused emotional states, while still others in streams of daydreaming that fill in for what would otherwise be ordered thought processes. We begin to crave kinetic, visceral, often risky experiences because they bring us closer to the traumatic moments that formed us. Fighting, sex, dangerous sports, drugs, and other substances wake us up, pull us back into our bodies, help us feel more normal—for a little while. But they don’t last. None of it is ever enough.
like someone else’s story
The problem with dissociation is that it creates its own space-time continuum. What that means is that the you who was there during the traumatic moment exists only there, in that space, in that singular time. Because you shut down, the body that had to endure that experience wasn’t able to feel what it meant, so you weren’t able to understand what it meant either. You didn’t process your linear reality as a singular being.
I’ve referred to this as “going thin.” Only a slice of me remains present while the rest of me disappears. And often that thin layer of myself begins to drift out of my body and hover above, separated from the pain of the moment. I can sometimes remember what happened, but it’s more like remembering a scene from a movie, as an outsider viewing from a safe and detached distance. The memory doesn’t belong to me, to my whole self, so I can’t identify with it as my personal narrative. It lives inside me like someone else’s story, not mine.
After decades of therapy, of reading, experimenting and trying any tool, idea, or method that might help make me feel more whole, only one technique has offered deep, positive, and lasting change. And that’s storytelling. Reentering and re-experiencing difficult moments and memories as if they’re happening to me in the present, but doing so with all of me, not just a thin piece of myself.
you’re bending time itself
I write about the experience so that it becomes an object on the page that I can work with further, returning to it again and again to add in new layers of myself. Then I share my story with someone else, or with a few close people. Or other times with an audience of dozens of people at a storytelling event.
It’s hard, hard work that feels like you’re bending time itself. Because you are. You’re recreating the neuronal networks in your brain. Trauma writing allows you to play the part of the detective and revisit the scene of the crime as a different version of yourself. Not the victim. Not the hurt, suffering you. But the smart, observant, curious, and thoughtful you.
There are parts of you that are bigger, more powerful, more loving, and more beautiful than you can possibly imagine. But they’re locked out. Because trauma builds a wall of resistance that forces you to re-experience your pain over and over again. Distinct parts of you remain locked in the experience.
Trauma writing picks that lock and lets the rest of you inside the wall. Your love and tenderness and joy bring you understanding, forgiveness, and acceptance so that the trapped, traumatized parts of yourself are no longer alone and suffering.
fluid, integrated, functioning
And you will encounter your traumatized parts too. Because they’re angry, sad, disgusted, lonely, withdrawn, judgmental, sadistic, self-loathing, hateful, bitter, mean, lost, crying, hopeless, and on and on and on. But they just want to be seen and heard and understood. They need to tell their story too, and trauma writing allows that to happen.
Storytelling is integral to humans. So much so that I’ve come to think of it as our operating system. It’s how we integrate experiences, understand reality, build our identity, and find meaning. Over many millennia, we have used story to narrate our experiences, communicate what works and doesn’t work, teach others what we value and hold dear, and build the collective wisdom among our tribes.
Trauma writing taps into that operating system and restores you to a more fluid, integrated, functioning self.
When you’re ready to give it a try, drop me a note: chris@theempathycurve.com.