(Finally) Spiraling without Shame

How trauma comes up to the light so it can finally leave

Lordy lordy, what a week the last one was, anyone else? As I often say (to anyone who will listen), I’m always so comforted that astrological energetic forces are influencing my healing, bringing up what needs to be revealed and healed, giving me some tough love when I need it, and ease when I need to rest and integrate. And when we understand that the healing most of us are doing is essentially becoming securely attached to ourselves, and we become secure inside when we can rest in relationship with someone bigger, stronger, wiser, and kinder than us, we can use these big brains to orient to the astrology as yet another way the Grand Parent of the Universe is looking out for us, providing for us what we need to become healed and whole, and all we have to do is (increasingly) surrender and collaborate.

So apparently last week there was “transformative energy, characterized by Venus sextile Pluto and a strong, fiery Aries influence.” I am not an astrology expert, but just like my body pumping my blood, I don’t fully need to fully understand it for it to happen, or for me to trust that it’s happening. At this point in my own maxed out logistical life, the only way I work with astrology is that every once in a while I get on my phone and some really cool woman is telling me what the planets are doing and making me feel less crazy for what life is serving up and what I’m feeling thinking and doing.

And by the way, that’s exactly what a wise secure parent does: they name what is happening, they acknowledge the context and they de-shame our current response to that, emotionally and behaviorally, seeing the goodness beneath it, honoring our precious development as a person, and making us feel not alone and loved in the discomfort of growth. And absolutely, setting the ideal relational waters for that growth to occur.

Turns out, the myriad of secure relational forces we can notice, receive, and collaborate with in our day-to-day lives, start to rewire the patterning in these bodies that just want to stay in those damned default settings, want to associate this experience with that reaction lightening fast, because they think it’s protecting us (juuust like the dog that barks at the mailman [I refuse to use Amazon Prime as an example here on principle, even though it’s more common]).

Yup, we are working with this wiring in these bodies, because it’s the only way to get free and we’re hellbent on our healing. Can’t stop won’t stop, until we stop having a stress response to external stimuli that is not objectively a threat to our literal safety.

And y’all, last week? I felt like I got a lightning fast MarioKart Bullet Bill-level blast through every old pattern I’ve been dissolving in myself for the last several years within several days. Allow me to illustrate, so you feel less alone in whatever shiitake you’re wading through:

Ugh I know, so annoying. Why do they make it this way?? When is it over? When does it feel better? Haven’t we done enough?? I have felt ALL THESE FEELINGS, and you know what? Those, are just more feelings, that needed to be felt with safety, with compassion and acceptance and patience and love. That’s always the answer by the way: safety, connection, reverence, acceptance, presence. For our kids, our bodies, dogs, and yes, even our old historical feelings that are now so hysterical our brain thinks we’re crazy and bad (but the brain is just reflecting the programming we picked up from caretakers and culture about this feeling, not the truth).

And they only leave, and lessen, when they’ve been loved on. And you don’t have to do that all yourself (of course not, that would be insane!), you can reach out to a safe friend, and tell them you need to be witnessed and listened to, you can imagine your best friend from childhood’s Mom who made you feel so safe and special, soothing and seeing you at the kitchen counter of their old home, you can play a song that says to your earholes exactly what you know you always wanted to hear (cough cough Mr. Big), you can sit in the sun and feel the warmth on your skin, and tell yourself I’m being loved right now but the biggest, strongest, wisest mother of them all, the Earth.

And you can trust that the more you deposit these secure relational experiences (they don’t always have to come from IRL people, get it??) into the bank that is your body, you start to have more access to your conscious mind when your old trauma responses come up and out, and you start to have more agency and awareness around them, not so that you can behave better, so that you can see yourself better, and put yourself in the way of what you needed the entire time.

And while I’ve always known this and have increasingly experienced this, but not all in 5 days around my Ground Zero trauma (as I currently see it) like I experienced last week.