Dysregulated Nervous Systems
I have spent (at least) 8+ years living with a severely dysregulated nervous system.
These have been the effects of PTSD brain and C-PTSD from narcissistic abuse. My trauma has imprinted itself on my body. I carry the wounds and so, I am doing the work to engage in somatic healing.
I need it.
Most of us do, I firmly believe that. To varying degree.s
But for me—my traumatized brain and body just got to the point where it would not be ignored. I needed help. To sleep. To function. To believe I wasn’t going to end up like my family members.
I am still working on it. Working through it. I’ll probably never stop.
I think about how I still jump high out of my seat when someone casually greets me in the doorway of my office. My hypervigilant state is still heightened. It is highly sensitive.
Even when in a supposedly relaxed state, I apparently still react, viscerally, bodily, in a flight or fight mode.
Clearly, I am still traumatized. My parasympathetic nervous system is still learning to calm the fuck down.
I hope one day I won’t do this anymore. React this way.
It is rather embarrassing and while my colleagues laugh it off and I make some joke about it, “Oh, I was just so into my work,” it’s a lie.
And I also feel self conscious since my reaction seems so over the top—almost like I wear my badge of “I’m traumatized and show it through jumping out of my skin whenever anyone says hello and I didn’t know see that they were here.”
So, I am working on my trauma and somatic healing.
What this means is that I understand that I will only be able to heal by sitting with and centering on my emotions, my body responses. Tolerating the discomfort.
I have done this over the last few weeks—leaning into the grief, the hurt, the sadness. When I fear the creeping overwhelming sense of despair, abandonment and loneliness.
And I no longer push it aside. I focus on where I feel that emotion and feeling in my body. Then, I usually tear up and feel it, hold some space for it. Then my body will usually allow me to release it and I’ll feel calmer.
I am doing this rather than escaping through a book or socializing or another distraction or a glass of wine. I am intentionally working to increase my tolerance to set with the bodily discomfort. To address residual grief.
I don’t cry a lot when I do. But even that single tear here or there, it helps. It gives my bodily feeling some attention that it is demanding, that it needs to process, to metabolize. It needs a moment to allow it to flow through me.
Sometimes a tear slips out as I feel the deep loss of my beloved mother, my rock; other moments it’s a welling up in my eyes for my two dead babies that never formed and lived in this world; some more blurry vision for my shattered dreams of a life partner who I thought was honest and loyal, and gave more credit than he deserved and abandoned myself. I shed more than a few more from the feelings of abandonment from my father and brother in their suicides. And grief and sadness for their pain and suffering that they were able to do that to themselves.
I realize that I need to take all of this in by little moments…bird by bird, as Anne Lamott says in writing, how true for life.
I do this, these tears here and there, like little sips of air like when you’re hyperventilating or can’t breathe in too much air in a smoke-filled room, because it is all just too much to process all at once.
For me, too much happened in such a short period of time. I’ve got to work through the layers.
I have residual grief and, though it sucks, I have to process all of the feelings.
They don’t just go away. This is why the body keeps score.
But that is only part of the story, the rest of it is that the body also can integrate and the person can grow to regulate the system that has been dysregulated for so long.
Healing and returning to a calmer embodied existence, I want to believe that homeostasis is possible, even when we have to help our body to get there.
And even when we jump a bit here and there, when startled by simple
friendly greetings.