Liberating Consciousness From the Body, Part IV
How emotional pain becomes physical, and how to release it.
This is part 4 in a 5 part series. Click here to read Part III and here to read Part V.
If you've ever been seriously injured (or seriously ill), you're probably familiar with how vulnerable this can feel.
On Monday June 29th, 2020 I found myself hobbling around the house with a fully ruptured MCL (a ligament on the inside of the knee that is critical for joint stability). Deep internal bruising at the back of my knee and in my calf suggested additional tears in one or more accessory muscles and/or tendons, further confirmed when I failed to perform a calf raise with my left leg (suggesting plantaris, gastrocnemous and/or soleus tears).
Confident in my choice to forego painkillers (something I haven't consumed since I was a teenager), pain was my constant companion.
Being a vocal and publicly self proclaimed "pain advocate," it was time for me to walk my talk.
Pain shows us where we are not (yet) free.
Pain is protection; the suppression of pain is called trauma. Trauma (suppressed pain) causes chronic suffering and illness.
If we allow it to, the pain we feel will set us free.
Opening the floodgates.
Earlier that day I'd sent out a newsletter like I do every Monday, detailing my close encounter with the black bear that precipitated my fall into the river, where my foot got caught in the rocks as my body twisted in the opposite direction, causing something in my knee to snap violently.
Hundreds of people responded to that email with an outpouring of love and concern.
One of them was my mom.
My mom and I had not spoken in nearly a year (except by email) due to a boundary I'd set with her and my dad.
While this particular email wasn't out of the ordinary, nor did it contain anything seemingly significant in its content, my life was about to change as I opened it.
Expressing her love and concern, my mom also mentioned a multi-day trip that she and my dad would be taking. As soon as the words "multi day trip" entered my field of vision, I heard the voice of a little girl inside - me - practically yell, with all the innocence of childhood enthusiasm and the vulnerability of fragile hope,
"Maybe they're coming to see me!"
Immediately following, I heard myself - the adult - say:
"They're not coming.
They're never going to come."
A floodgate of tears burst through the walls I'd erected around this particular wound.
Stefan was there to hold me as I sobbed.
Great heaving waves of heartache shook my body. Erupting at random intervals for weeks, the tears seemed endless; until a few days before my 40th birthday, when they just stopped.
And I felt free.
When we're ready, the truth reveals itself.
Fast forward to a random day in March, 2021, not quite a year after rupturing my MCL.
I was doing some fascia release on a hotel floor in Austin, Texas when Stefan asked me "what's that scar on your left knee?"
"I've told you this story before. I got this scar when I was ten, playing with my friend Sarah..."
My voice trailed off and my eyes got wide in astonishment as a series of past events flashed inside my mind in their fully connected tapestry (like a movie of my life), and for a moment I was stunned into silence.
Oh my god.
"Oh my god!" I shouted to Stefan.
Everything made sense now; everything.
Tears of relief at finally connecting all the dots sprang into my eyes as I recounted what I'd seen in my mind to my best friend.
✦ ✦ ✦
Volatility was the status quo in my childhood. My parents separated a lot and we moved states frequently, often as a result of either their separation or attempts at reconciliation. This meant I changed schools frequently, making me the perpetual new girl. We had no extended family nearby.
When I was ten years old, my mom picked me up from school and told me:
"I'm leaving your dad again. Your brother will be living with your dad. You'll be living with your new friend Sarah and her family during the week. I'll come get you on weekends."
My mom dropped me off at their house, and just like that - I no longer belonged to a family of my own.
Until this moment, at age 40, I had told this story differently than I'm telling it to you, both in my own mind and whenever it came up in conversation.
It went like this:
"When I was ten, I lived with my friend Sarah and her family for a few months while my parents worked out their marriage issues."
This is an adult rationalization of a traumatic childhood experience; this is a "normalization" of unbearable emotional pain, in order to make it bearable.
Normalizing the abnormal is a coping mechanism.
I could bear the idea that I lived with friends while my parents worked out their issues; at such a tender age, I couldn't bear the truth of my inner experience.
On the floor of that hotel in Austin, TX, the full memory came flooding back.
Sitting in the car with my mom at ten years old, I heard myself say in my mind,
"My dad chose my brother.
My mom doesn't want me."
Quick on the heels of these two thoughts were feelings of panic and helplessness, along with the stout refusal to give in to either or betray myself to my mom, who (my child mind told me) must not love me anymore.
No matter what, I would not let her see my pain.
✦ ✦ ✦
At my new home some weeks or months later, Sarah, her younger sister Rachael and I were experimenting with ways to get the best swing of our lives in their semi-wild backyard full of oak trees and brambles.
Clamoring up a fallen oak tree whose trunk was C shaped and arching upwards, I had Sarah throw me the swing attached to a neighboring live oak. Once I grabbed the ropes, my intention was to jump from the fallen tree into the seat of the swing, which I'd done dozens of times before; this time I jumped too far.
My hands gripped the ropes tightly while my knees hung below the wooden seat; hurtling rapidly toward the ground, my left kneecap collided with a cement slab sticking out from the earth.
I felt no pain.
Standing up, I dusted myself off, looked down and saw a hole in my knee; blood was sputtering out of the hole like a geyser.
Both sisters started yelping in fear and ran to get their mom, who quickly called my mom.
Everyone was fussing over me and I had no idea why.
I was fine.
It didn't even hurt.
"The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.”
Gabor Maté
Emotions and sensations are intricately connected.
By numbing my emotions at ten years old (a survival strategy that allowed me to escape the unbearable pain of parental abandonment and believing that I am unwanted), unwittingly I numbed my ability to feel physical pain (along with joy and love).
If pain is protection, then I was alone in the world and utterly unprotected.
In the absence of protection, we have no choice but to survive by any means necessary.
Just after my 13th birthday I would be targeted by a 30 year old male neighbor who spent 6 months grooming me before ensnaring me in a violent nightmare that involved abuses of every kind.
Meanwhile, my parent's marriage continued its stormy path leading to yet another period when my mom disappeared for months.
Today, I understand that their own traumas (suppressed pain) contributed to their inability to be fully present and accountable; that they were doing the best they could with the level of awareness they had at the time. Still, the impact of these events on me was profound.
When I got news at age 17 that my best friend Rachelle from California was killed in a car accident (we had moved one month before to Oregon), my parents and brother were several states away. I was home alone when I got the phone call, and drove myself to the airport the following morning without a driver's license to attend her funeral.
I didn't cry when I learned she died.
I didn't cry at her funeral.
I'm not sure I had cried once since the day my mom dropped me off at Sarah's.
A really good man who became my boyfriend a year later broke up with me because, he said, "I can't find you; I can't feel you."
He told me this with deep love and palpable sorrow.
We're still friends, and I love him dearly for giving me the gift of pain.
While his words (and the breakup itself) didn't elicit any emotion, they stung in a place deep inside, because I knew he was right but I didn't know why or what to do about it.
This loving reflection, polarized by the heartbreak he allowed me to see as tears poured down his own face, cut through my walls to wherever I was hiding inside, and my feelings stirred.
Pain is protection.
How emotional pain becomes physical, and physical pain becomes emotional.
From age ten onward, I reacted to all pain - whether emotional or physical - in the same way:
While inwardly I often felt panic and helplessness, outwardly I adopted a persona of stoicism and high "pain tolerance" (aka, numbness); I endured pain by normalizing and dismissing it; and I was absolutely committed to concealing my hurts from others.
In this way, my emotional coping mechanisms were adopted reflexively with all manner of physical pain starting at age ten, with the swing incident.
Projecting my own desire to feel strong rather than helpless onto my body, I clung to her for dear life. Physical ability was synonymous with [emotional] safety to me.
This is how trauma (suppressed emotional pain) turns into chronic physical pain and dis-ease.
When physical pain spread from my gut to my jaw to my knees and eventually throughout my entire body during my teenage years, I felt as though my body had betrayed me.
Reacting to the growing physical pain with the same panic, helplessness and stoicism, I was caught in a self-created prison of perpetual suffering.
Physical injuries and pain, in this way, get entangled with our emotions and emotional survival strategies, turning them into traumas (which beget yet more pain).
The human soul, by way of the physical body, will continue to give us pain until we wake up and protect ourselves.
The universe expresses itself in patterns; patterns express themselves through us.
When I began running at age 16, it was my left knee that started hurting.
It was my left knee that eventually stopped me from trail running for 8 years, and hiking for 6.
Left knee pain is what set me on this path of learning about fascia, physiology, psychology, the nervous system, survival programs and how we break free.
It was my left knee that I injured when I fell into that river.
Pain is protection; the suppression of pain is called trauma.
The only way out [of trauma] is through [pain].
We must be willing to feel the unbearable feelings; we must turn towards them and summon the courage to bear them. If we do not, the patterns will repeat.
I faced my fear of physical pain from 2008 to 2013, during which time I learned about fascia, began stepping on people, and, with the help of my best friend Jess (who learned how to step on me) began running and hiking again.
Waiting for me since age ten were feelings of helplessness, panic and terror at the thought of sharing hurts within my relationships, or depending on anyone but myself.
Those exact feelings were triggered yet again when I ruptured my MCL.
This time, however, they were fleeting and faint; like echoes ricocheting off a canyon wall from events long past.
Yet, despite two decades of good healing work, I had not been able to see the most important piece in my own trauma healing puzzle until that moment in the Austin hotel:
I had a deeply ingrained abandonment wound.
While this seems incredibly obvious in hindsight, I did not see it for 30 years; I couldn't see it through the very blinders I'd put on in order to survive it.
Then one day while hiking in the high altitude mountains of Colorado, I saw a bear and had an out of body experience as I watched myself step backwards off the dry rock into the rushing waters below.
Of all the injuries I could have sustained that day...it just so happened to be a left knee injury.
As if by spiritual design, it was like that wild bear emerged from the woods with an intense energetic force meant to knock me into that river in just the right way, injuring my left knee specifically so that I would (finally) remember.
Approaching my 40th birthday, a part of my child psyche emerged that had been waiting all this time - three decades - for my parents to come get me; to rush in to where I was hiding, wrap me in their arms and assure me:
"We're here, and we love you!
We'll never leave you again.
Let's go home."
✦ ✦ ✦
Back in 2020, when my mom wrote me that email, I knew without needing confirmation: whatever multi-day trip they were making, it was not to come see me.
For my 40th birthday, I gave myself the gift of letting go.
This act of self reclamation freed my body from bearing these burdens of my soul.
On my birthday, I consciously released my parents from my inner child's longing that they be different parents than they were; I would do my best to accept them as they are.
The same week that I was in Austin and remembered what had actually happened inside of me at ten years old, my mom had her own breakthrough and remembered long repressed events from her own childhood.
Since then, we've had many conversations about the past, and our relationship has deepened in some beautiful ways. I love you, mom!
Next week, in Part V of this series, I will share more about what "protection" means regarding the statement "pain is protection" (from my perspective anyway), along with my letting go process and its profoundly positive impact on my body's lymph (detox) system.
In closing, I can't help pointing out that it took a BEAR to wake me up to the emotional pain I would need to bear to set myself free.
Sometimes, life really does have a wicked sense of humor!
Sending love and courage your way,
Elisha