You are listening to Designed to be Awake with Mick Kubiak.
Hello,
Dear listener.
This episode is about being alive and being a human.
We can sometimes just suddenly find ourselves in a state of fear or panic or anxiety and we don't even know why.
We're like,
Wait,
Why am I suddenly like this?
It's like when you're wandering around in a city and suddenly you're like,
Oh,
Wait a second,
I'm not in a safe neighborhood anymore.
Bad neighborhood,
Deep breath.
More than that,
How you can begin to bring these two different neighborhoods in your psyche together,
How you can start to integrate,
How they can start to influence each other in a sense and knowing you'll find your way back to where you feel safe.
Hello,
Hello and welcome to another episode.
I am sitting here on a Friday evening at my kitchen table,
My dining room table,
Finishing a busy week of clients and a couple of things happened today that I thought that would be a good one to talk about.
So that's what I'm going to do today is talk about two things.
One,
The value of regarding your psyche,
Which is to say your being,
Your experience of being alive,
Your psyche,
Your thinking and your feeling,
Your physical sensations and the whole package of being you in quotation marks.
And how it's helpful to see yourself,
Your psyche as a landscape or a city.
I like cities.
So I started to see my psyche this way when I would find myself stuck in fear or dread or anxiety or darkness of any kind.
It started to feel to me as if what had happened was I had wandered into a bad neighborhood and I couldn't find my way out.
And as I started to see it that way,
Rather than to see it as,
Oh,
This is just the way it is now.
It was as if I was able to speak to myself in a comforting way with this idea of,
Oh,
You're just a few blocks off.
You're just a few blocks away from safety.
I just remember New York when there were neighborhoods that were dangerous.
It doesn't seem to be that way in Manhattan anymore.
But,
Um,
That was when,
When I was in my twenties and even my thirties where you could be walking and not really paying attention and maybe listening to music and it's two in the morning and you left a bar and you're like,
Oh,
Welcome.
It's cool.
And then suddenly you become aware you're looking around you and there's not people on the street and there's not a lot of light and you're kind of in the middle of it.
And I think that that's exactly what happens to us when we get stuck in these states of consciousness that are super unpleasant,
Very scary.
And reminding myself that I just got a little lost here.
I just got a little lost here and I know my neighborhood is nearby cause I'm on my way to it.
And I just need to,
I just need to get back there.
It took a lot of the edge off.
And I was talking to a client today and she's just going through it.
She's at a point where this part of her psyche is so present.
And when she gets in it,
It's as if this is all there ever was.
There's only ever been this bad neighborhood and there will only ever be this bad neighborhood.
This is just what it is to be alive.
And so I was sharing with her a bit about my experience,
My story.
And we were talking about what's called the trauma vortex,
Which is the part of the psyche that holds unresolved trauma.
And it is a vortex.
And when you get near it,
It can just pull you in and down.
And then you are back in the state of consciousness.
It's like going through a portal and you're back in the trauma as if it's happening to you right now.
This is essentially what flashbacks are.
PTSD,
PTSS,
Whatever acronym you prefer.
Sometimes you're still going to wake up in a bad neighborhood,
For example,
Or be asleep and find yourself in one of those bad neighborhoods.
And that's okay.
And it's even okay to get pulled into the trauma vortex because it has to be okay because it happens.
And you're just in there.
And the thing that starts to change is that even when you get pulled into it,
There's just a little part of you that knows this is just a matter of time.
I just have to take a deep breath and this will pass.
These sensations,
These thoughts,
These false beliefs,
This dysregulated nervous system will play itself out.
And sometimes we're even able to like sit down in the bad neighborhood and get our feet on the ground,
Drop roots down from our feet,
Drop little tiny anchors down from your sitting bones into the earth,
And just summon all the light that you have.
And sometimes when you do that and you breathe,
You can close your eyes.
And when you open your eyes again,
You're somewhere else.
You're not in that dark,
Scary,
Grim place anymore.
And the idea in somatic therapy is to also recognize and in fact really get clear about the fact that you have areas of resource.
You have,
To use the city metaphor,
You've got your Fifth Avenue and you've got your awesome neighborhoods that everybody wants to live in.
And that's in you as well.
And the more that you can titrate,
Go into that bad neighborhood,
Grab a couple of things,
Bring them back to the West Side and go through the box there so that you are the great majority of how you're experiencing yourself is healed and resourced and well as you go through this,
You know,
Trunk,
Chest,
Box of darkness.
It's so much more manageable that way.
And you can actually make much quicker progress,
Progress period,
Because you have what you need to detoxify,
To cleanse,
To shine the light.
You have the light to shine on these things.
And it's an awesome experience once you recognize it.
And then you start to be really careful.
Like you feel it.
You don't get lost in the bad neighborhoods anymore.
You're aware when you're down the street of your psyche,
Where you are,
You know where you are and you stay grounded in the present moment,
Which is always,
Always an area of resource.
Even when things are not well in the present moment,
It's an area of resource because it's happening now.
And now is the only place from which we can affect anything.
Everything else is really an illusion.
And this idea of the psyche is,
Is yeah,
Just another illusion,
But it's a useful illusion.
As long as you're in it,
You might as well play with it.
And so I offer this to you as always with love in my heart.
And with the thought of you,
My beautiful listeners,
Going about your day,
Doing the dishes,
Pulling clothes out of the dryer and folding them,
Jogging,
Driving,
Whatever you're doing,
Whoever you're being,
I wish you all the healing,
All the light,
All the love,
And I will see you next time.
Thank you so much for listening today.
This episode and every episode would be impossible without my amazing team,
The brilliant Chase Coughlin,
Who not only edits every episode,
But also composed the music for the show,
As well as Maya Young.
If you enjoyed listening,
Please leave us a review.
Thank you so much for listening,
And I will see you next time.
