EWR : 10. Setting down our hurts & breaking patterns & cycles
Embodied Writing : Relating, Relationships, & Trauma series
This week we look at a deeper layer of the ways we protect ourselves, the ways we try to protect our heart. I think all of us try to protect ourselves from broken heartedness as a response to our own old heartaches in our adult years and to the traumatic experiences we had in childhood.
Protecting ourselves is a natural response to pain. Think of wild animals who are wounded and then hide away, and if someone tries to approach them they snarl, hiss, or even try to attack the "invader."
Those of us with trauma, and being betrayed by someone we love(d) and trust(ed) is a type of trauma on its own and is also a part of all trauma, tend to have a response similar to a wild animal when people get too close to our sensitive, tender, and vulnerable parts, our walls go up and sometimes we go on attack to try to protect ourselves.
In the attachment theory world this "protecting ourselves" is our insecure attachment style (anxious, avoidant, or fearful). In life it really shows up when we are in conflict with someone we are emotionally intimate with. It shows up in the ways we worry about why the other person is in relationship with us. It shows up in the ways we may think we are undeserving or unworthy of the love of the other person.
It also shows up in the ways we compare present relationships with past relationships. It is true that there are patterns and cycles to our relationships, both within the individual relationships and in the meta context of certain things that we seem to experience over and over with different people.
And.
Our present relationships are not our past relationships. We do not need to continue repeating the patterns and cycles of the past. We can break and disrupt our old ways of being. It is challenging. It is scary. It feels weird and strange and even "wrong" in the beginning. And we can do it.
This week, I invite us to look at some of those old wounds, those old heartbreaks and heartaches, to acknowledge them, and to make the intention to begin to set them down, to allow them heal, to soften our breast plates a bit. I also invite us to look at the patterns and cycles we notice in our relationships and to explore where there are ways to move in and disrupt and break them, to take those first steps in doing different.
EMBODIMENT EXERCISE
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