Facebook Publication Date: 4/19/2021 10:04

How does fear show up for you?

For me, often it can often be paralysis; my body disconnects from my brain, a sort of dissociation.

Somatic: I feel a tingle in my haunches; sometimes these days, in my shoulders and arms too.

I forget to breathe.

Thoughts race; I internally, and even sometimes verbally, vomit something- anything- to fill space and to self soothe. Impulse.

Or, I lose my words. Thoughts slog and slow as though through so much molasses. I lose nuance. No shadings of bad or sad or mad.

At least in part because of this situational aphasia, I lose emotional (and intellectual) depth. I cannot access what I can’t articulate.

And even as I slog through syrup, I fast twitch to flee or to fight or to fawn; ineffective expenditures of energy that leave me frozen and exhausted, though ultimately I affected and accomplished little to nothing; effected no change.

I make fast decisions, even as I don’t trust my discernment, or I delay decisions till they lose whatever force they had.

I just re-read the above. Took me less than one minute. In that short space of time, in fear mode, my mind and body can go that cycle hundreds, if not thousands of times, as time itself seems to both race and suspend at once.

My body is not lying when it says it’s exhausted. And it knows (or thinks it knows) when there is no good response; no sure way out.

But there is a paradox.

Fear also blunts curiosity and creativity. Especially when surprised.

https://www.healthline.com/health/somatic-experiencing#the-freeze-response

What does it look like for you?

Next up after we process this piece; individual and collective trauma response.

You can join this discussion in the Bistro at https://laceonrace.com/groups/the-bistro/forum/discussion/courage-above-fear/

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