We could only dissociate in order to cope with it

Learning to tune in to ourselves to assess and respond to our needs, and develop some level of care for self, was and still is hard. Many of us are not very good at it at all. Our medial pre frontal cortex, the ‘front middle bit’ of the brain which helps us reflect and zone in on our internal experience, has in many cases failed to develop sufficiently as a result of neglect. I like to see this part of my brain as a muscle that is puny and atrophied, but which I am now regularly working out at the ‘gym’. As I do, I'm beginning to see progress, and I'm less liable to want to respond, “But I don’t have a body” or “I don’t know how I'm feeling.” Use it or lose it, the slogan goes, and I'm learning, slowly and sometimes still too reluctantly, to use it.


But there is a huge fear that many of us have when we first start to tune in to ourselves – that we have within us such a huge reservoir of need that attending to it will burst the dam, and we will drown. It is a very tangible fear, full of a sense of overwhelm and risk. What if, instead of turning the tap on slowly in the safety of the confines of therapy, what if, instead of just having a little cry and then being able to pull ourselves together again, what if … what if … what if the whole thing comes gushing through? All those years of hurt and heartache and trauma and terror? All the hugeness of all the loss and all the abandonment and all the abuse that was so overwhelming that we could only dissociate in order to cope with it, and which resulted in us being the way we are now?







The Ten Stages is a studied recovery course. It is a source of reconnection a method of unlearning and a reintroduction to our child within which leads us back to our one true intuitive voice.We start to learn and come out of our protective dysfunctional shell and reclaim our lives. #childwithin#10stages