Last week we talked about how emotions live in the body’s nervous system creating measurable patterns. They’re not just sentimental out of control moments that cause more chaos.
(The above photo is from: NPR’s article: Mapping Emotions On The Body: Love Makes Us Warm All Over: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/12/30/258313116/mapping-emotions-on-the-body-love-makes-us-warm-all-over )
Movement works the emotion signatures through the body making them dissipate like a bad cramp. Sometimes we also dissociate when we’re stressed. Dissociation is an emergency survival protection where the survival system gets the part of the brain that is ‘you’ out of the room to safety. A good illustration of this is how security teams protect the person they’re tasked with protecting. (Its point six in the article below.)
Having emotions and using your survival system is a form of stress. Stress is called oxidation in science circles. Oxidation is a form of rust. That’s right - the exact same rust that shows up on metals when they’ve been exposed to the elements of weather and moisture.
If you don’t work the emotion signatures through the body, they get trapped in your body and too much rust will cause chronic health issues. (It’s one of the main causes - not everyone’s chronic illness or chronic condition is caused by stress. There are so many other factors and each person’s case is unique.)
So it’s important for everyone to physically and safely move to get the stuck emotions out of their body. Massage is also good for this. I’m not an expert in that area, but the experts consistently say that movement of any type is good for us.
Art helps with emotions a different way. Some people find emotions disruptive and terrifying. This is one of the survival responses too. But it becomes a problem when you can’t face the emotions in your own body - so they’re stuffed away and cause the same health issues I mentioned above.
The solution here is to use art as a buffer between you and your emotions.
The art is a safe place for you to put your emotions.
For writers - the character can have and handle the emotions that you are afraid of or forbidden from expressing.
Art also creates distance between you and whatever your emotions are, particularly if your emotions are tied into an event.
I’ll give an example:
Say you hate Thanksgiving because you don’t want to see your family. And there’s a whole bunch of emotions around that. The art or writing can be the place that holds those emotions. It can be a punching bag, a grieving pillow, or whatever item you need it to be. This keeps relationships intact, and allows you to safely revisit whatever happened releasing the emotions so that you don’t have the stress in your body, pushing you toward flipping your lid. It also separates that original pain moment from The Now. If you can separate the original pain moment from The Now - that is a form of healing, because its training your brain to stay in the moment or The Now - instead of trauma time traveling back to the bad things that happened.
For more on how to use writing to help heal you can check out the series: https://chronicwriter.substack.com/s/storytelling-through-trauma
There's a new NCIS - original. The main character Gibbs helps a young girl create a forensic sketch of her mother's killer by singing her favorite song with her. The girl was instructed to stop when she recognized shin, nose, eyes, etc. I thought it was brilliant. As you offered, there are ways to get around trauma! We need to understand more about these to help people heal.