I have 1 deep-seated survival need as a human animal, which is connection to the herd. That is where my bodymind will do everything it can to maintain that connection. Without a connection, I die. Is the ingrained perception of my bodymind system.
Now it may well be that I have such an unpleasant experience with the herd that I turn away from it and go on alone. Then still the connection is there but now in the form of rejection and shunning that same herd. Surely this creates an unconscious tension. Energy is leaking out. Until I rid myself of my conditioning to the point that I feel and think autonomously. Then I can be in or out of the herd without experiencing a preference with it. Then I am, then I react in the moment to that which presents itself, without associations with anything pleasant or unpleasant.
Trauma is an overwhelming event experienced in isolation from the herd. Isolated and with no ability to act. I couldn’t get from A to a safer B.
If I am in A and an event is unsafe or life-threatening I will want to get away from A to B. The herd is my salvation but if I do not feel connected then my system will “invent” something so that some sort of pseudo-safety is experienced. Not a real solution to the perceived problem but a pseudo-solution. Which is good enough for now to re-regulate my system. I can’t think of anything better for the moment.
Such a pseudo solution is a dissociation. A disconnection in consciousness, causing certain actions or experience to occur outside of normal consciousness. This can be done by giving the event a different meaning. For example, “hitting is part of it” or “hitting is sign of love,” “he means well,” etc. Or I deny that it is bad, or didn’t even happen,(DISSOCIATIVE STORY).
Often people dissociate by copying something that parent do in order to get into the gust of that parent. Not very consciously, but almost automatically. And if it seems to work then we’ll keep this in the progarmmature.
A love contract develops that says; If I do x do you love me. If I make myself invisible, do you love me. If I do angry, do you love me. If I count myself away, do you love me. And this will be a lifetime contract that I didn’t even consciously sign up for. I took a job that I really didn’t even want. Pfew!
If I got used to something in my childhood, for example strawberries on Sundays, it can feel (unconsciously) nice to eat strawberries on Sundays as adults. It is familiar. Similarly, an unpleasant experience can feel familiar so the familiar takes precedence over something unfamiliar, even if the unfamiliar is safer, better for us. What the farmer doesn’t know he doesn’t eat.
Connection
People are born way too early. Animals are born and can do something on their own pretty soon. Walking, flying away, grazing, BIj me as a human it took a year before I took tentative first steps. That premature birth connects to our obsession with connecting me with the herd, the mother in the first place. Mother is everything. Mother is survival.
