The Ever Unravelling…

10 Feb

The beauty of learning somatics is that you begin to truly appreciate the complexity of trauma and emotions and how nothing is ever black and white.

How we respond, process, react… and how those responses can shift and change to the very same experience or memory. Ever‑changing. Not only through autopilot, but also through awareness knowing that at times, we can play a role, we can have choice in how something is held.

In my younger years, I held onto things tightly. And I mean really tightly.

When you experience sudden loss, twice within two years during early development you start to feel an urgency to retain, recall, remember. Almost to the point of gripping too hard. The details become everything. Dates. Places. Music. Sounds. We cling to them, often without realising that we’re no longer witnessing the memory as a whole we’re dissecting it.

We do this with intention.

For survival.
For love.
For safety.

But at what cost?

For over twenty years, I recalled events, anniversaries, and anything connected to my father more out of obligation than embodied memory. A sense of duty to remember. He died when I was quite young. Death terrified me so deeply that until I reached the same age he was when he passed 46 I couldn’t breathe. And when my eldest child reached six, the same age I was when he died, I lived in constant hypervigilance.

Watching. Waiting.

Some of this was conscious.
But so much of it lived in the micro‑observations, the imprints that quietly layered into deeper, more complex PTSD.

Eventually, as I’ve shared in previous blogs, this unfolded into aphantasia, the loss of mental imagery. I truly believe the trauma from sexual abuse at eleven was what finally tipped my mind into darkness. But who really knows. There are many stories held within us. Many events. Many traumas layered over time.

I was talking to Matt on the weekend as the anniversary of his father’s death approached seven years. The way he spoke about it stopped me. There was distance in his words.

“Oh, he’s my dad… I need to acknowledge it. Say it out loud.”

But did he feel anything when he said it?

How often do we create shrines to memory out of expectation rather than embodied recall? How often do we mark dates because we’re meant to, not because the body asks us to remember?

I shared with Matt my own long journey of mourning a parent. How culturally and socially we become fixated on anniversaries and in doing so, we often focus more on loss than connection. On what’s missing rather than what was shared. We feed the trauma lens instead of softening into moments of warmth, safety, or love that also existed.

This blog came to life today in a very unexpected way.

I was admittedly doom scrolling when an image of vintage Coca‑Cola yo‑yos appeared. Nostalgia, right?

Except my body did something else entirely.

A sharp gasp.
Tension.
My stomach dropped.
A wave of panic.

Why would a toy I remembered playing with for hours create such a visceral response?

I had to stop. Sit with it.

With aphantasia, there was no visual recall. No image came. But then it landed.

That time in my life.
The time of my sexual abuse.

The object itself isn’t the cause.

It’s a symbol a cue. A doorway into stored implicit memory.

The body remembers the fear, the tension, the discomfort even when the mind cannot produce an image.

Implicit memory isn’t just stored in the brain.

It lives in the body.

And this is why embodied processing and learning the language of the body is so vital for healing.

Micro‑observing through the body, beyond our usual senses, allows us to notice subtle sensations. To uncover hidden layers and stories. To receive insights that don’t arrive all at once, but unfold and integrate over a lifetime.

Years ago, without this awareness, I would have acted without knowing. I would have been snappy. Grumpy. Impulsive. My body would have reacted, and I would have followed.