In a single Facebook post, I understood his nervous system far better than I ever had before. He wrote about how he was overwhelmed with some big things in his reality and how he had missed a couple of important events. He then went on to shame himself about missing those events. In one sense, he was taking accountability for missing the events, but on the other hand, he was shaming himself publicly, which played into his internal pattern of suffering and being “wrong.”
As I read his post, I felt energy hitting my body. My body understood what my mind couldn’t yet grasp. A long time ago, I learned to work with this pattern inside of myself. I knew I didn’t need to chase the thought. My mind was trying to understand what my body already knew, and if I just allowed myself to tune into my body and the wisdom that it had, eventually my mind would catch up to my body. As I sat in a state of openness and felt the sensation in my body, my mind got it.
He was overwhelmed and going into a state of freeze of his nervous system, which is why he was forgetting or missing things that were important to him. It wasn’t purposeful, and it wasn’t something that he was picking. It was a classic example of a freeze response. He would then shame himself because he had a deep relationship with shame, and the shame would push him further into a freeze response of his nervous system.
There were additional layers to the situation, almost like a beautiful lasagna. You see, the thing that was feeling so overwhelming to him was connected directly to his deepest desires for himself in this life. The reason that he was pressing against his maximum capacity for exploring the topic is because there is a subconscious part of him that is in resistance to his deepest desire. There was a part of him desperately saying, “No, please no,” which is why he had the freeze response to begin with. If he could sit with this part of himself and realize that this part of himself was actually trying to love and protect him, and if he were able to communicate and compassionately love this part of himself and lovingly challenge this part of himself, then he would avoid the freeze response altogether. And, if we look at the layer of the lasagna called “shame,” we can understand that this was also a part of him that loved and was trying to protect him. He had lived in suffering for so long that it was all that his nervous system knew; it was his homeostasis. His nervous system doesn’t know ease. His nervous system is uncomfortable with ease despite the fact that his conscious mind wants ease. And, the part of him that is uncomfortable with ease (and comfortable with suffering) is using shame as a way to stay in suffering.
I opened my eyes as the information landed, and I smiled because I knew that I could explain this information to him and give him the opportunity to work with his nervous system differently to create a different dynamic with himself and with the outside world.