Throughout time, no-one existed outside of community. I believe that’s why we need all these fancy healing modalities to regulate ourselves in modern times. We have to compensate for a thing that never existed until now: aloneness. 

While we’re in transition towards this ancient and new coherence, many of us find ourselves navigating hard things alone. And in those times, it’s helpful to have a holistic understandings of the body and the psyche to help us navigate.

Understanding Shock

Understanding shock has been crucial in my region of Southern Appalachia where devastation from Hurricane Helene, almost a month ago, is still being grappled with. Here are some body-based frameworks for navigating. 

Shock is a cushioning of the system. A big energetic and emotional bubble wrap around us. It’s the body defending from a blow.

It’s a built in warning system, protection, and gift that occurs when something is too overwhelming. It generally means we can’t process the thing with our current resources and we don’t have the internal and external infrastructure to tend to what’s happening at this moment. Often because those systems are overwhelmed as well.

Shock informs us that we need more resources in order to integrate. And shock also allows us to stay in the adrenalized state to deal with the external emergency until we can get somewhere safe to unpack the experience.

The body can do this for a time. But it is NOT meant to do this indefinitely. It’s not wired for that.

When we push our bodies beyond their natural limits by delaying the unwinding, the shock may go underground and calcify into disassociative patterns. That lives in us as unprocessed trauma. Once it gets to this point we become exhausted, fatigued, and hopeless. We start to ‘somatize’ our pain, which means the unprocessed experiences show up as pain in our physical bodies.

If we are already struggling with fight/flight/freeze patterns and long-standing nervous system dysregulation then unprocessed experiences and shock may deepen these patterns. And compound them. This is what happens with flashbacks and triggers of earlier traumas. 

If we’ve been doing deep healing work, accessing our own regulation, and have even discovered some new resilience in ourselves, then getting hit with a shock requires attention to continue to access these gains. 

In either case we may likely need support. The best possible support for this is other people. Either one-on-one healing or group experiences help us to integrate. The community is our biggest resource in times of collective stress. For folks looking to offer and receive support, check out this page. 

So glad you are a part of my community.

May you be nourished by and with others!