Slowly Melting

There are places inside each of us that are dark and cold. Places we don’t want to see, so we don’t bring our light to shine upon it often. These are the places where we store our past hurts, wounds we either know about and fear or possibly just aren’t aware of.

Some of these dark places came from events in our personal past. Some of them have been inherited – from our families, our communities, whatever groups we identify with.

Whatever their origin, they are ours to heal.

I really like Thomas Hubl’s metaphor that trauma sits within us like bricks of ice in the foundation of ourselves. Each brick was put in place at a specific time and contains a survival pattern that once was necessary and the best we could do. But now, that behavior, thought pattern or worldview is no longer adaptive. Until we find the bricks of ice and start to thaw them out, we carry that trauma around with us. I like this metaphor because I see these large bricks melting one little drop of water at a time, and it reminds me that even as we thaw there is much work to do.

Today I bumped into one of these bricks. It holds a story about not fitting in. Not belonging.

When I was quite young, I liked to play sports and superhero games. My mom liked to put dresses on me when she sent me to school. Dresses meant saddle shoes – which I just LOVED. Until the boys who I played soccer with said, “you can’t play in those shoes.” I tried to wear sneakers with the dresses. That didn’t fly with Mom. I stopped wearing dresses to school and played as much as I wanted… until my mom said I had to wear the dresses she bought for me. By second grade, I wore what I wanted Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and dresses with saddle shoes Tuesday and Thursday. The same boys who were happy to have me play with them three days a week, treated me like a pariah those other two days.

I never really thought about it as traumatic before. They were just dumb kids. And I got pretty good at hopscotch with the girls on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It didn’t strike me as being a big deal.

But somewhere, I filed that experience under “I don’t fit in” and “they don’t really want me here.” I didn’t really think about this brick much.

Looking back, I can see more examples of feeling like I didn’t quite fit in anywhere. I decided I was shy. Around new people, I expected them to not accept me and got very quiet. What really came from shyness looked to new people like I was stuck up because I was so different around my friends. I never really thought of that as trauma at the time, but looking back through the lens of a lifetime, I recognize it was a defense mechanism.

Defense mechanisms are designed to keep us safe. They are good things. Using a defense mechanism when we already ARE safe is indicative that something is off. There’s a brick somewhere.

Last night I realized that everyone in my class had formed small groups without me. I woke up anxious about it because we have these small group exercises to pass the class. The adult me sent an email to everyone and said, “hey, I’m the odd one out. Would anyone be willing to do 1 or 2 extra things and help me out.” I sent the email with full expectation that people would help, and of course, I got responses from people who were quite happy to work with me. Because that is the truth about this situation. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t a big deal.

At the same time, there was this other voice in my head that sounded like this,

“Maybe I should quit.”

“They all hate me.”

“Nobody reached out to me when they formed their groups. What did I do wrong?”

“Maybe I talk too much in class. Maybe I offended someone. Maybe I just shouldn’t say anything in class anymore.”

And on and on…

This morning I woke up anxious and feeling disconnected. Not because the feeling was big – it really wasn’t. It was much more like background noise. In fact, the noise was so quiet yesterday that all I knew was I was a little anxious. I didn’t even attribute the anxiety to the right cause.

This morning, I am connecting dots. And that frozen brick from elementary school is starting to drip a little bit. Recognizing what is really going on helped my energy reset and helped me feel like an adult again.

A lot of people think that you only need to work with trauma when you’ve survived something drastic – a war, an accident, an attack. We all have trauma. We all have these frozen spaces where we still react as if we aren’t safe, even if we can logically tell ourselves we are. It’s like being in two places at once … or maybe in neither.

This is the energy that gets in our way when we are leveling up or starting something new. This is the energy that holds us back. Recognizing these patterns and starting the thawing process is how we grow and move forward.