My therapy session

I was talking about my mother’s death, and how guilty I felt for not being present during the last two months of her life. I told my therapist that my mother wanted to spend her final months in her own home instead of the nursing facility we had found for her. And that, even though I knew I wouldn’t be as present as I wished – since I lived two hours away, had two very young children – I still wanted to respect her choice. So we drove her back home.

It was the last time I saw my mother. Two months later she was hospitalized. The COVID pandemic had just begun, so we weren’t allowed to travel between counties or visit loved ones in hospitals. And three weeks after she passed away.

At some point, my therapist asked: “So… your mother chose to go back home, and you respected her choice, even though you would have preferred for her to be close to you, in a place where she was properly cared for?” I said “yes”.

Then she asked: “And how do you feel, in your physicality, when you say those words: ‘My mother chose, and I respected her choice” ?”.

I couldn’t feel anything. All I could hear was my mind saying, “Still, you could have done better.” But my therapist kept inviting me back to my physicality: “What does your physicality say?”

She kept bringing me back to my body over and over again, until I noticed something very timid: tension releasing from my shoulders, and my heartbeat becoming gentle, calm, peaceful. I felt my chest open, spacious. There were no signs of guilt in my body. 

The guilt came only from my thoughts, from a lifelong belief that I was never a good enough daughter, which I later learned is a common symptom of developmental trauma.

My mind and body were having two different conversations

It was the first time I understood, in a felt way, the expression I had heard so many times in the context of trauma: the body-mind split. It was the first time I realized that my mind and my body were having two different conversations.

I was surprised to recognize that I wasn’t feeling guilty, I was thinking guilty. It was conditioning. A program. Something I had been taught to believe about myself and my actions. Not something I truly felt.

This made me question whether the same thing was happening in other areas of my life. Could my body feel something entirely different from what my mind believed? Could my mind make me believe I wanted things or goals that my body couldn’t care less about?

During the weeks that followed, I entered a state of peace and fullness. “I guess I’m okay here. I guess all is well now”. For the first time in my life, I felt I wasn’t running anymore.

Joy comes from the ability to feel safe in your body

I became aware that most of my life had been lived in a flight response. I couldn’t feel at peace in the present because my body was wired for fleeing, as if a threat was always present. My flight response was now beginning to deactivate, which allowed me to feel safer in my body and in the present moment. Since that day, I’ve been able to make contact with joy on a daily basis.

I feel joy in the most mundane tasks, things that used to be so difficult for me. Cooking, enjoying a Sunday afternoon on the couch watching a movie and really enjoying it, or even the morning and afternoon school runs, which used to feel unbearable. I was now finding joy in these completely ordinary moments of life. I was making peace with normality, instead of constantly fantasizing about the future.

When the past wasn’t safe enough, the body fears the present and fantasizes about the future.

Our body and feeling hold the truth

I feel I’m still at the beginning of this process of coming home to my body. It truly feels like coming home, returning to myself, meeting myself again, as if a long time had passed since I last encountered who I really am. I feel curious to meet myself again and to discover who I am, not through my head, my thinking brain, but through my body and feelings, because now I know they hold the truth.

I’m taking my first steps into living life differently – living from my body and feelings instead of from what I think I should want or pursue. I didn’t know there was another way to live. I wasn’t aware that even when I changed my career and lifestyle, thinking I was choosing in alignment with my truth, I was still disconnected from a deeper truth my body was holding.

My unconscious, life-long search for safety

That truth was that I didn’t feel safe in my body, and as a consequence, I couldn’t find safety in the present, in any context or relationship. I had been completely unconscious of the threat response I was living in, and all the changes I was making in my life were coming from this place of unsafety.

The concepts of “threat” and “safety” were only theoretical for me – not lived experiences. Because I couldn’t feel the difference between them, I stayed in many dysfunctional intimate relationships, moving from partner to partner, in an unconscious search for safety, which texture, flavor or smell I could barely recognize.

And it wasn’t just partners. I also changed countries, cities, jobs, missions, not because I wasn’t stable, but because I could not find safety, rest, and peace in any of those external places, whether physical or relational.

The safety, rest, and peace I didn’t know I was searching for, could only come from within – from myself, my body, my nervous system. That was what I was unconsciously searching for, in every choice and decision I was making.

The gifts of trauma

I guess this is the gift of trauma: in the same way it disconnects us from our bodies and our true selves, it also brings the opportunity to reconnect with ourselves in a much deeper and authentic way. Without trauma, and without my search for help through somatic therapies, I don’t know if I would ever have become conscious of my unconscious. I don’t know if I would have recognized how disconnected I was from my body and my truth. I don’t know if I would have felt how much I was living from my shoulders up, choosing and deciding from my head, overriding my true desires and needs.

I think I’m beginning to feel some kind of gratitude for the traumas I experienced. Without them, I don’t know if I would ever have come back to myself.

How many people live their entire lives walking away from themselves, never truly meeting who they are? That thought makes me sad, because I believe that was my mother’s story. And I also believe – and this is a brave statement – that this disconnection is what took her life.

I wish all of us could experience a little of what I am experiencing by coming home to my body, to myself. Because the rest, the calmness, the joy, the peace, the love, the freedom, and even the abundance we feel here… that is what we have always longed for.

And it has always been here, within ourselves, never out there.

O conteúdo Coming back to my body aparece primeiro em Sofia de Assunção.