Journal Date: Wednesday, December 9th, 2020
Today I’m moving on to reading about the first group of exercises in the Somatic Experiencing program.
“When you have been traumatized, you’re often unable to feel your own physical boundaries, because of disconnection from your body. This can have an impact in other areas of your life, such as setting boundaries in relationships, because it’s impossible to set limits if you have no sense of your own boundaries.
Rebuilding connection is really the key to all of these exercises, because trauma is about a loss of connection, first to the body and self, and second to others and the environment.”
I’ve never heard trauma defined that way before, but I like this definition, and I agree.
There are many other trauma symptoms I’ve suffered from (not to mention all the diagnoses I’ve accumulated over the years), but I think that this disconnection is what is at the root of all of them.
There is nothing like being disconnected from your own self.
It is the strangest pain; a blunt force that destroys without direction; a vast field of emptiness; an abyss where a soul should be.
To feel “lonely” or “alone” does not even begin to describe it.
Alone implies one— a unity which stands apart.
I was less than one—a nothing, a void whose only meaning was in what was missing.
Sometimes, when I imagined my own death, I would picture my grave, and the epitaph which would read:
| Here lies E.R. —was never loved and died a stranger to herself. 1988 — 20xx |
