Processing The Pandemic: How We Carry or Discharge Our Emotional Wounds & Stress

So,

Tonight I'm going to be talking about discharging the stress and tension and emotional wounds that build up over the course of painful emotional events or difficult periods of time,

Which certainly we live in right now.

There's a saying,

If it's hysterical,

It's historical.

If it's hysterical,

It's historical means is stating that if a reaction is disproportionate to the situation,

If we have an immediate and overwhelming emotional response or impulse that we can't inhibit or at least pause before acting out on,

Then it's almost invariably discharging energy from a previous emotional event or previous series of emotional events.

It's not actually about the current issue that is so much is driving the reaction.

Triggered reactions in other words are fueled by the energy from previous traumas,

From previous wounding events,

Previous periods of prolonged chronic stress.

They can even and very often build up during childhoods where we didn't get the kind of reliable response that we sought when trying to connect with a caregiver.

So once again,

In life we have traumas or wounding events,

Breakups,

Job losses,

Tensions with friendships.

We have chronic stress over periods of time or we may have had in childhood patterns of insecure bonding with a parent or with other adults or with other siblings.

And then over time these wounds build up if they're not processed and they can be suddenly discharged in our present life in sudden impulses.

For example,

The sudden impulse to where we suddenly feel unsafe in a very neutral situation and we have this impulse to flee or our heart starts racing when we are in a group of people and we lose the ability to talk or we hear neutral remarks as hostile and we lash out without understanding even why we've become so angry.

Sometimes we have something go wrong at work or in life and the mind explodes with catastrophizing thoughts.

Sometimes there's a despair that will happen after we've been on a couple of dates and someone gets ghosted after one or two dates,

But the despair feels like a relationship that has so much more depth and so much more connection to it.

In other words,

When the reaction is disproportionate,

When it's very strong and sudden and can't in any way be inhibited where there's this sense of being driven by our anger or fear or grief or shock,

Disgust or whatever,

Then almost certainly the energy that's driving or fueling this display stems from earlier experiences.

Now the healthy way to respond to challenging situations is first,

Of course,

If it's possible to enlist help with others so that we can,

Because we're a social species,

We're pack animals and the best way we respond to stressful situations is to connect with others,

To work through our choices,

To feel supported and when we have co-regulation,

That means people who are around us that help us feel safe,

Then our responses are less reactive.

Another way we can respond to threats is simply by engaging in mobilization impulses,

Which is to push back,

To flee,

To fight,

To scream,

To some people even include fawning,

To placate a situation that feels overwhelming and dangerous.

So what we do is we act on the survival impulse and then we resolve the experience by finding a safe place with others to process both what has happened and we also sit and allow ourselves,

As Peter Levine noted in his work,

That animals after they've been threatened or they've been attacked will go somewhere and tremble and shake it off.

Unfortunately,

Human beings generally fail or often fail to take that essential step of after we have important experiences to stop our lives,

To talk about them so that we can co-regulate the emotions that have resulted but even more so to shake it out,

To discharge the tension and the stress that is built up in the body.

Now there are many times where we can't act in the way that's the healthiest to stressors.

For example,

There are conditions where mobilization is impossible,

Where we become immobilized in a freeze state,

Where we dissociate,

Check out,

Depersonalize,

We no longer feel like we're in our own body,

It seems like we're moving in slow motion and people seem very distant and essentially there's this disjunct or disconnection between ourselves and what's actually happening around us.

When we brown out or black out due to a state of shock,

What remains of the experience are unconscious body-based memories.

The narrative memories aren't stored because in a state of a black out or brown out where we're only partially aware,

Where we feel distant or we feel checked out or we derealize,

Derealization means we perceive the world around us in a kind of fuzzy way,

Then what happens is the hippocampus which stores narrative memories is overwhelmed by all the neurotransmitters and adrenaline and cortisol that has suddenly flooded and it stops functioning and so the memories are stored by the right amygdala and those are body-based disjointed memories that are stored physically rather than as narrative memories.

Another way we fail to respond at times in a healthy way to emotional wounds or painful experiences is not just the freeze response but when we deny or play down that a distressing experience has occurred to us.

So for example,

We're riding a bike in a city and we're very busy,

We're trying to get things done,

We're trying to go to the grocery store and maybe return to do some work or we're late for something and we narrowly avoid coming into contact with a car or suddenly out of the blue something scary happens and at this point many of us instead of stopping and allowing the body to pant and discharge the energy because of our obligations and responsibilities and feeling that we have to live under a schedule,

We'll keep pushing through life and so what will happen is we'll compartmentalize the event and not allow it to be discharged.

Sometimes when we have really painful events in life like breakups or disagreeable interactions at work or with family members,

People will turn to intoxicants whether alcohol or food or Netflix or drugs or to cut off the feelings and so once again the emotional wounds that have built up the stress,

The tension,

The feelings have not been discharged so they remain essentially lodged in right temporal lobe and right orbital frontal and right hemispheric embodied and unconscious realms.

The right hemisphere which stores negative emotions and negative emotional experiences tends to express and hold those memories in an embodied way.

Left brain which is far more narrative and tends to tell stories about life is far less embodied.

Another way we can fail to discharge mounting tension,

Not just when we freeze or blackout in trauma and not just when we play down or dismiss or deny that anything challenging is happening but a third way is when over a long period of time there's an activation of chronic stress which is essentially a ongoing chronic sympathetic nervous system state where we are constantly in that mobilization state where we're vigilant,

Where we're walking too long,

When we're moving faster than normally,

When we fail to titrate and slow down,

Where we are rushing from one place to another.

The evolutionarily ingrained response to sustained threat detection is to band together with others or to migrate to someplace safe.

In our evolutionary history,

Our species,

When things would change in the environment and we would be in ongoing stress states,

What our ancestors would do is they would migrate from one region to another.

And this is why over the course of the pandemic so many people have either banded together into pods so that they can go through the ongoing stress of this current situation in a small group of people like our ancestors would have done or many people have migrated.

They've left urban environments,

Small apartments and have essentially moved to rural settings and that has enacted that evolutionarily ingrained impulse to either band together or to flee when there's an environmental change and we are all living in this prolonged right now environmental change.

One of the things our brain is constantly doing in the background is not just holding our emotional wounds and our histories but it's also neurosepting the world around us which means it's observing unconsciously the setting of the world that we're in.

And if there's enough constant change or negative stimuli,

If you're in a realm of people that seem stressed out,

If suddenly every store in a neighborhood is shutting down,

If there's this ongoing deluge of bad news and so forth,

Then what's happening is our nervous system is detecting threat or change but many of us are not able to act on it.

We're not able to flee or band together with others.

Many people wind up stuck in small studios or one bedroom apartments.

Many people don't have enough connections to co-regulate and you know or even the practices that allow them to discharge the stress that has built up over the course of this pandemic.

Even when people do act on the impulses to flee or to bind together with others for support,

Ongoing environmental shifts like what we've been going through can still activate our sympathetic nervous systems and over time we wind up with chronic stress.

And what happens then is our reactions become increasingly survival based.

We start detecting threats even where there are none,

Sometimes hypervigilance in the form of insomnia or anxiety states build,

Sometimes it becomes difficult to have a healthy food appetite and so forth.

But mostly when we're chronically neurosepting signs of change in the environment around us,

Which has been going on now for five months,

Is that people's nervous systems go on alert.

We literally,

Our movements become faster,

Our muscles tense,

Our bodies hold this state of what neurologists call action potential where our muscles are engaged to act very quickly and our blood flows and our heart respiration picks up needlessly fast because there's so much constant change in the environment around us that our body now feels that we have to be ready to survive at all costs.

So this is the way that not just traumas and not just unpleasant single experiences but ongoing periods of change can result in this embodied state of stress and if we don't know how to discharge it then anything can trigger us into essentially disproportionate reactions.

Now if we do manage to repress some of these experiences,

Such as say a trauma or a painful event through drinking or through chronic,

Through watching Netflix or through any other way we deny our emotional pain,

Over time all of these unprocessed emotional wounds and stresses become compounded as unmetabolized experiences.

In other words,

If we don't discharge energy that builds up after a negative,

Challenging,

Threatening,

Unpleasant experience then over time in the unconscious where it's been compartmentalized the body compounds and couples all of these affects and impulses together into complexes of emotional wounds.

Let me give you an example.

Suppose over a history of interpersonal rejections,

Disappointments in relationships,

Breakups,

Unpleasant dates through dating experiences and whatnot,

We have all of these emotional wounds stemming from feelings of rejection.

These experiences don't stay apart in our unconscious.

They don't live in separate memories.

They all begin like pollution to merge together into compounded blobs of emotional pain associated with rejection and abandonment.

So unpleasant emotions don't stay distinct in our unconscious.

They all become coupled and interconnected and blended together and that's the way the right hemisphere works.

It associates much of its content together.

And so this is why when people sometimes go out on one date or two dates and then the person that they've only just begun to know ghosts them,

They can have extreme release of grief and feelings of worthlessness and despair.

It has nothing to do really with the person they've dated twice who's ghosted them.

It has to do with this amalgamation of feelings of rejection and worthlessness and I'm unlovable that gets triggered by each subsequent rejection in our life.

I was once on a Buddhist teacher's conference back in 2011 with a wonderful Buddhist nun Ajahn Sundara,

Very,

Very,

Very wonderful,

Smart,

Brilliant teacher and we were talking and she noted how in the course of life we have all these unpleasant experiences and instead of feeling and processing and discharging them,

What we learn to do is take these,

Like she talked about it as being like a label of toxic experiences that happen every week.

We take these toxic feelings,

These pain,

This anger,

This frustration and we go to our back door and we chuck it into the backyard and then she says over the course of a lifetime we wind up with this huge toxic sludge in our backyards which is her metaphor for the unconscious,

These compounded emotional wounds of feelings of rejection and disappointment and she said that most of us want to just be given some kind of practice that will make all those toxic feelings go away.

But of course there is none.

We have to get rid of them the same way that we put them there.

We have to feel it feeling by feeling and slowly we begin to address all of this emotional pain that has been shunted into the unconscious.

When these consolidated emotional wounds like lumped under feelings of rejection or lumped under feelings of outrage and mistreatment by other people or lumped under a general label of the unfairness of the world and we all have our own toxic sludges under various different,

You know,

That are associated by various different types of experiences but in mostly rejection and anger and grief and loneliness and so forth.

When these consolidated emotions are triggered,

Unlike in movies which show it as a visual experience where we start seeing memories from the past,

It's not the way it works.

When consolidated amalgamations of emotional wounds as feelings in the body are activated by a current experience,

What happens is we have these strong impulses to undertake the survival action that we didn't take in the past.

So now what we want to do is run or fight or flee even though the situation in the present is not that threatening or not that difficult but now we're feeling all of those survival impulses,

Those nonverbal feelings and any situation in our present life that even has anything remotely in common with those big compounded feelings that are in our unconscious can trigger this flood of emotional response.

So somebody again who has a history of feeling cheated and taken advantage of in work and builds up this but doesn't ever act on it so they have all of this anger and resentment that has been shunted into the right hemisphere and is held in the body as this stressful tense impulse.

The moment somebody at work in a new job or in a other situation does something that could even possibly be interpreted as unskillful or taking advantage of us then all of that pent up desire to fight back and to yell or vent like it can be released and at that point there's an inability to inhibit the impulse.

If we don't have,

Even if we don't manage to compartmentalize those feelings,

Even if they stay suppressed and repressed in the emotional body which stays tense,

What will happen is to keep those painful feelings stemming from so many wounding events where we never discharged or metabolized those painful feelings.

It takes a lot of energy to keep those things repressed.

There's at least four different ways I'll mention very quickly.

One,

People develop protective strategies,

Workaholism,

Minimizing their needs,

Self-reliance,

Perfectionism,

Constantly proving ourselves,

Busyness,

Racing through life.

All of these are ways that we will keep repressed emotional wounds compartmentalized out of consciousness stuck in the body but not being aware.

We're just not aware of them in our left hemisphere.

Our thoughts blissfully go through life making plans unaware of just how tense,

Just how much stress we're carrying because we're so busy.

We're working so hard or we're minimizing awareness of our bodies or we're just caught up in this perfectionism so we're unaware of the stress and tension that is built up in the background.

Another way we keep feelings in the body,

Emotional wounds compartmentalized is obsessive ideation,

I.

E.

Being caught up in the preoccupations of life.

Freud noted that when the repressed returns it creates signal anxiety and signal anxiety can take many different forms.

One way it takes its form is through obsessive preoccupied thought,

Being caught up in some craving-based activity or thought where we can't switch off.

Preoccupation with others,

Preoccupation with situations at work,

Catastrophizing thoughts about what can go on in the future,

Self-pity,

All of these types of ongoing chronic stressful thoughts are there to essentially distract us from the tension and stress that we're carrying physically from all of the emotional events in our life we never discharged the tension and stress from.

Sometimes we'll engage in addictions.

Another characteristic of signal anxiety which happens when the repressed returns is we'll start eating or drinking or shopping or getting high or watching TV or compulsive sex or gambling or any maladaptive coping strategy we can to distract our awareness and numb ourselves so that we don't have to feel the body.

That's the key of keeping the compartmentalized and the repressed repressed is disconnecting us from awareness of our bodies and numbing the body and keeping the body from discharging the stress that needs to be articulated.

Finally,

Many people will at times displace a little bit of the emotional energy onto others.

The person who constantly has repressed their anger about their boss or the people they work with and then finally comes home and vents at their partner or their child or the person who has been compartmentalizing,

Disconnecting,

Suppressing their fear who suddenly out of the blue gets terrified and anxious in a completely normal interpersonal situation.

The key is for us to discharge from the body the stress and tension that has been compounded over the course of life that at times features either unpleasant interpersonal events or traumas or as what we're going through now prolonged periods of environmental change and stress.

Discharging from the body can be done in so many different ways.

Somatic experiencing,

A practice by Peter Levine,

Sensory motor psychotherapy by Pat Ogden and others,

TRE exercises,

Tension and trauma release exercises,

Just a series of exercises where people develop a little strain or activate muscles in their legs and then lie on their back and allow their legs to tremble and discharge the energy that's built up.

In the now famous book,

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk,

Notes how in the most of the book it talks about the various different modalities that can be used to discharge trauma that has been stored in the body such as yoga and different kinds of movement.

Many people will dance it out or shake it out.

In Buddhism,

Perhaps the most core theme of discharging built up emotional wounds that have essentially been compartmentalized but are slowly beginning to either be triggered or resurface,

The tool is mindfulness to bring awareness to the body.

That's the key because of course that's where the stress and the emotional wounds are held and locked in.

So what we do is we discharge the stress by bringing awareness back again and again to the body,

To feelings,

To moods,

To the first three foundations of mindfulness which are again body,

Feelings and moods.

The Buddha taught,

If a practitioner is mindful and wise,

When a strong feeling arises,

They will know the following.

A strong feeling has arisen in me.

It was triggered,

But by what?

A sensation.

The practitioner will know that all sensations,

Including those that trigger feelings are impermanent,

They pass.

And so all feelings are impermanent.

Knowing this,

One simply observes feelings,

Contemplates as they pass with detachment,

Without clinging or resistance.

That's how the Buddha taught to discharge the emotional energy,

To bring awareness to the body,

To allow the feelings to arise and pass and then to allow the body to release.

In my studies with Buddhist renunciates,

Monks and nuns in the Theravadin tradition,

I noticed that whenever they would practice awareness of feelings,

They would animate their breath and their body with very strong rhythmic movements that again would allow them to discharge all the stress and tension that's built up in the body.

If we connect with something that is overwhelming,

That creates either panic or flooding of emotions or if we start to shut down,

I dissociate.

The most important thing to do is ease off whatever it is we've connected with and then to.

.

.

This is why the Buddha not only taught mindfulness but concentration,

You bring your awareness back to something that's safe and you stay with the safe sensation.

You neurocept something that's a safety cue,

That can be sounds around you that are pleasant or distant or it could be another sensation in the body that's soothing.

For most of us,

The palms of our hands are very soothing.

It can be just a phrase,

May I be happy,

May I be peaceful,

May I be free of stress and suffering or I like the phrase,

I love you keep going and just hold an image of yourself,

I love you keep going.

And you stay with that until you find your heart rate has gone down,

The attention is settled and then we go back gently into the body and reconnect.

The more that we titrate out and return to safety and then go back into the body,

Then the more what we develop is this dynamic where we can move towards feelings in the past we couldn't process or discharge or metabolize previously because when we would turn towards them,

It would be very very painful.

Now you did mention that it brought up an old coping strategy associated with maybe cutting or self-harm in some form and what I've found very often with people is that it's very interesting that self-harm or cutting is very,

In many ways it's linked to what's called body dysmorphia and also as well which is the sense from an early childhood experience there's something,

I'm not getting secure attachment,

I'm not getting a sense that I really belong,

That I really am loved.

And so the child ourselves at that point develops this emotional belief that there's something about me that's unlovable and so yes in that sense the person is trying to maybe,

Could be literally you know the cutting or the harm or whatever could be seen as that.

In my experience it's just though the feeling that there's something unlovable about me is so unpleasant and so damaging that we look to take it out on something specific in the body.

So some people at that point will look at themselves in the mirror and say it's my face or my body or it might be they just want to create pain in the body to deflect,

To make the pain real as a feeling that's from that kind of physical pain rather than stay with the emotional pain of rejection.

So whether cutting or body dysmorphia it's an attempt to actualize and point to something because the feeling that I'm unlovable is so unbearable.

So for instance the child with a parent that's engulfing or the child with a parent that is emotionally dead or distant or the child in the situation where siblings or peers completely reject them or the child that just feels like they don't belong in any situation they will try to translate that feeling into an actuality into something and you know to displace the fact that it's just this general sense of me-ness,

Me who I am is terrible.

So yeah that's tonight's talk and what we're going to do is practice discharging stress and tension that has built up over time in our unconscious,

In our right hemisphere.

What we're going to do is try to connect with that kinesthetic energy that we're generally not aware of that exists entirely outside of the realm of narrative thought and we're going to move into the places where it's held and we're going to be doing a couple of visualization techniques to try to connect with all that stored tension and then what we're going to try to do is observe and help discharge it.

So I thank you for listening and as you get ready to find a really comfortable position just noting if you would like to support my teaching as a Buddhist pastor I do everything by donations so if you would like to support my work if you're not one of the people who lost their job in the pandemic but if you do have some ability to support my work the Venmo is DharmaPunks.

Com.

So thanks for that and find a really comfortable position.

And if you like you can also lie down on the ground that's okay as well.

You don't have to keep if it's if you feel like meditating but not being on your not visible that's fine as well.

Just find a really comfortable position as a Buddhist pastor I have to at leading a class I'll be visible you don't have to be and so what we're going to do is we're going to just try to land in our bodies and of course this means we have to undo so much of our ingrained routine state where for much of our lives we're moving from looking at screens to walking around lost in thought to connecting maybe with people and interacting to reading and so we often lose track of those or lose those essential outlets where we stop and come to a complete halt and land in our life and in that stopping we reconnect with though our emotional history which has been stored and held in our bodies as tension and stress and contraction and heaviness or numbness and in so doing in reconnecting and seeing that lived history is it stored in our body we then begin to learn how to release and metabolize all of the emotional wounds and disappointments and frustrations and stresses that have been stored there so let's take a nice full in breath and lift up the shoulders and rotate the shoulders back and drop the shoulders just opening up the chest making a nice space for the air to replenish us with the in breath and be released in the exhalation and then breathing into the belly let it expand with the in breath and then as you release the out breath just feel the belly soften and become pliant so the in breath becomes synonymous with bringing energy and awareness to the body and the exhalation becomes linked with releasing tension in the body in brings awareness enlivening bringing attention and awareness to the body the out breath releases tension this is the timeless way of the anapanasati so let's just start this practice by bringing our attention either to the sensations of your body breathing just noting some area of the body where you feel the inhalation most with greatest clarity for some that will be the tip of the nose for some it will be in the belly or in the chest expanding or for some it will be a slight movement in the shoulders or maybe in multiple areas and then we sustain awareness observing as the breath is released from the body and of course what will happen is the mind's interpreter faculty in the left hemisphere that turns every experience into language and ideas and stories and plans we train ourselves when we come to a stop to get lost in thought over so many years of just that's the way the mind is inclined so it will take a lot of practice to keep bringing awareness back again and again and again to the lived experience of the breath in the body now for some of us might not like working or feel comfortable working with the breath and that can be fun we can just bring awareness to the sensations of contact the contact of the feet on the floor sit bones on the seat or a cushion or back against a chair or for some of us we just can have an open awareness of the body as a constellation of sensations like stars in a night sky just opening to the vastness of our internal experience without pinning our attention to any single sensation just opening up to the experience of the internal not the external but the internal the sensations that we've very often paid too little attention to in the rush through our days so let's just sit here with nothing to do nowhere to go nothing we need to address right now all the issues and challenges and obligations of our life we're just going to take a little break from we're going to revitalize and recharge renew and release the stresses by returning to the body right now right here so so once again we're going to reconnect with some of the emotional energy affect stored in both the recesses of the right hemisphere and the body one of the ways we keep the wounds and stresses and tension and emotional pain of the past locked in place is by whenever feelings start to present themselves signaling that there's something that needs to be felt and processed and metabolized when those feelings occur we get lost in thought so when grief starts to signal its need to be felt many of us get lost in self-pity instead stories of unfairness sometimes when history of emotional events stemming from mistreatment or disappointment with others starts to return as anger we protect ourselves from our anger by getting lost in resentment stories about the most recent disappointment in life rather than feeling all of the anger beneath it from so many other times in our life we were frustrated or disappointed by others sometimes when fear from stemming from so many events in our life where we felt unsafe starts to express itself as fear or anxiety in the body then we get lost in catastrophizing thoughts again all of these thoughts keep our history locked hidden compartmentalized shunted into the body where we carry it as stress where it leaks and then gets pushed back down through a whole array of unskillful techniques so what I'd like you to do is bring to mind some events that you've been thinking a lot about that has triggered a lot of thought ideation wherever there's a sudden flood of thought it invariably signals that there's a feeling beneath it that we are trying to suppress trying to run from so whatever that these thoughts are about sometimes disappointment with someone in our current life masking a whole history of disappointment or of anxiety about some important decision or some series of catastrophizing about money or all the things that can go wrong whatever it is just stop with that thought and just ask yourself what needs to be felt what is beneath all this stream of inner chatter what needs to be felt what's there beneath all this sometimes it might be helpful to have a visual so what are all these thoughts about what what person or situation see if you can represent it with an image in your mind and just ask yourself what do I need to feel right now what have I been running from what's beneath what's there scanning the body the front of the body for tension maybe in the throat maybe in the jaw maybe a tight abdomen maybe a tightness in the chest or in the arms what do I need to feel what have I been running from I welcome you the Buddha didn't run from suffering he turned to face it and so doing he made it bearable what have I been frightened to feel what have I had not enough time to feel or experience if you don't connect with anything just try to hold in your mind recent interpersonal events that have triggered or activated a lot of thought just hold the image in your mind and see if you can connect with any form of tension or holding or this impulse to move in the body for some of us it might be okay to allow the arms or the legs to tremble slightly to discharge some of the energy that is been held beneath awareness or to bring a full inhalation into some area where we feel tightness for so many of us in the pit of our stomach a tightness that holds all of our fear or stress or worry from so many previous wounding and disappointing and scary and overwhelming events in life and just to bring awareness to that to allow ourselves to feel and be with the energy not to keep cutting it off to allow the energy to metabolize allow recognize and allow the energy that's stored in the body and if right now all we can come into contact is just very slight feelings of tension that's fine just keep up this practice so that in our life if we have this mindfulness practice in place the next time we find ourselves lost in a parade of thought or about to engage in an addictive behavior or about to vent instead we find and connect with all the pain that has been held by the body for so long to sit with it allow it to arise allow it to be there for some of us this might mean bringing up a memory of a recent unpleasant event somebody who didn't show up for us someone who disappointed or disappeared and then find the tightness the gripping the hollowness the sensations in the body that hold our entire lived experience of disappointment so in a moment I'm going to ring the bowl and just allow yourself to bring with you whatever feelings whatever embodied awareness you've developed try to bring with you into the rest of the evening don't use the end of this set to essentially put aside this mindfulness of the body and feelings so at this point I want to thank you for listening to the talk and the practice and once again if you feel like supporting the work the venmos dharma punks and we see you