Your Emotions are Not always Valid.
We usually hear the idea that your Responses to a situation might not be valid, but your Emotions in the moment always are, so ingesting the concept of your emotions being invalid can be, to understate it, difficult. Especially when it comes to trauma.
Your emotions, their effects, just feel so damn real!
Which they are. Emotions are energetic frequencies, psychically processed, physically tethered in the body through hormones, peptides, and neuronal connections. They exist in 4D. How they come into being - via truth or lie - is irrelevant in terms of their actual matter.
Your emotions are even reasonable. They and the responses they illicit are your body reacting to your definition of your current circumstances as if those definitions are true. It is the same way that we feel scared, jump, and scream watching a horror movie; a suspension of disbelief.
Real is not synonymous with valid. And reasonable does not always mean true.
Truth requires the premises upon which a conclusion is built be valid.
We get it when it comes to logical thinking, yet we discount that knowing when assessing emotional responses. And because we have invested so much time reinforcing the validity of our feelings, shifting positions to dematerialize trauma emotions becomes challenging and even unsound if we are to maintain integrity of the “truth” of our emotions.
So we slip into retelling our trauma stories looking for validation. Validation that it is normal to feel broken and powerless and afraid. Validation that what happened wasn’t your fault. Commiseration and reassurance that, one day, with enough retelling, with enough acceptance, you’ll somehow get over the worst of the symptoms and manage the rest with some tools and techniques.
Wonderfully, it is the very act of obsessive retelling - out loud to others, or in your own mind - that reveals the invalidity of pain story emotions, both their state of being untrue and their weakness as energies.
What is true holds its shape and moves effortlessly, needless of constant input for reverification.
Trauma emotions, conversely, result in retellings which lead to incomplete catharsis, a flash of emotions that artificially stabilizes the energies, creating a self degrading cycle, offering relief ever more briefly, requiring larger amounts of support to maintain. We see this degradation play out as trauma symptoms intensify and triggers generalize over time instead of diminish even under care.
Our bodies, our unconscious, can only support a trauma lie for a limited period before it starts to break down under the instability of that energy.
“If trauma emotions are an unstable lie, why can we hold them at all?” you’re asking.
Because we are built for living. Emotions are components that allow us to interact more deeply with other players in the life game - Ouroboros. They add adornment, color, and create fun. (Your most favorite thing in the world won’t be very exciting if you can’t feel it.) And how we feel about our emotions indicates the playing level.
We are capable of suspending disbelief to make the lie matter. To feel it. To experience. But we are not built to exist in that space indefinitely which creates break-down, physical pain, mental turmoil, and dissociation. Entropy in human form.
Breaking through trauma loops requires the same amount of energy as perpetuating them. It seems harder to break the cycle because within the cycle we know what to expect. We know what kind of pain we are facing. We know what kind of behavior we will offer. We know how people will react to us.
When we choose to move forward. All of that changes. Our responses to the world are different, people see us differently, and we have no idea what new experiences we open ourselves to - what kind of “dangers” and new pain.
That is what our shadowed belief tells us in an effort to sustain its own lie and the life it has taken.
Our instinctive knowing and desire to maintain our power and control in trauma inspiring situations streams through this shadow, distorting it so we believe we are looking for someone to blame. This is why we turn that blame on ourselves. And why hearing the go-to reassurance “it is not your fault” never fully lands in your bodymind, no matter how many times you hear it.
Dismantling trauma, its cycles and its symptoms, requires shifting the frame and reclaiming responsibility free of blame.
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