A reflection on the quiet conflict between longing and fear, and how learning the body’s language of safety can soften old survival patterns.

The Wordless Pull of Complex Trauma

There is a quiet truth to the pain and ambiguity of complex trauma. Something not easily discernible, and certainly hard to conceptualise. We might describe it as a wordless pull that makes no sense, yet it shapes and pushes our very sense of being. Indeed, this something is a felt sense from within, an embodied, ungrounded not-knowing that leaves us searching for the grounded known, recurrently looking for the logic that might soothe the inner alarmedness that often feels as though it penetrates the soul.

Yet even with all our manners of making sense, the intensity of this inner alarm remains. We find ourselves caught within an inner battle of confusion and overwhelm, of self-doubt and self-blame, grasping for answers and solutions, feeling the pressure to fix and amend what feels fragmented and unpredictable. This pressure often shows itself as a push-pull of embodied aloneness. A paradoxical movement between approach and avoid, fear and longing, protest and apology, wherein our minds speak a language of sense-making, yet our bodies speak a different one entirely.

Emotional Flashbacks and the Body’s Memory

Perhaps we can call this an aspect of alarmed-aloneness, a fear that holds no solution, yet a longing from within for the solution that might bring peace. This felt sense of no-sense is what is known as an emotional flashback. Unlike visual flashbacks, emotional flashbacks are affective and ambiguous. They do not hold explicit or declarative memories; rather, they hold implicit, somatic, non-declarative memories that may be activated by subtle sensory cues.

There is a certain something within a relational interaction that cues a threat to our system. There is no context to the cue, only a felt sense of being alarmed and alone. Within our bodies, our past becomes our present, and a fragmented fear begins to permeate our sense of being. We struggle within ourselves to grasp something, anything, that might help us find our ground again.

We tell ourselves that logically this is that, and that cannot be controlled, predicted, organised, relied upon, nor hoped for. We offer ourselves rational explanation and understanding. Sometimes we move between protest, despair, and numbing detachment before circling back to logic and analysis, declaring certainty amidst the inner chaos. Yet, no matter how much reasoning we gather, we still sit within the alarmed aloneness, fear without solution.

A Relationally Embodied Dynamic of Survival

I am here to let you know that this is a relationally embodied and embedded dynamic of survival. A relational matrix that, in some way, reflects a preceding pattern of attachment, a disorienting dynamic of frightened and frightening relationship.

This experience is sometimes described as fearful patterns of relating in adulthood – where Others feel confusing and the Self feels confused. I prefer to think of it less as a label and more as a lived rhythm of safety and fear moving together, a push and pull that once kept us alive.

This is the emotional flashback of what might once have been called disorganised or disorientated attachment: the implicit memory of threat and helplessness, reactivated without conscious recall. It is the embodied reminder that at one point, the very person you relied upon was also the source of fear and alarm.

The Ambiguity of Safety in Relationship

It is important to recognise the ambiguity of safety in relationship. Safety resides in the body of the beholder, it is a felt sense, unique to each of us. Another cannot determine what feels safe within us. And so, when we speak of frightening and frightened relationships, we speak to a wide range of experiences.

Frightening relational interactions may include instances where the Other is overtly threatening, hostile, abusive, or critical actions, or subtler forms such as silent freezing, intrusive looming, or unpredictable withdrawal.

Frightened, on the other hand, refers to an interpersonal relationship wherein the Other is themselves fearful, often due to unresolved trauma, loss, or dissociation, their fear becoming a signal of danger in and of itself.

In both cases there is an impossible dilemma: approach the Other and experience fear, or withdraw and lose safety.

Turning Toward the Body

It is this dilemma that now emerges as an emotional flashback. In the felt sense of no-sense we are alarmed and alone. And that push to figure-it-out? It was the way we learned to survive. To figure it out was to find certainty in uncertainty, to predict the unpredictable, to ground with sense what could never have made sense, back then, and here now.

Yet perhaps now something is shifting. A want, a willingness to go deeper. Not into the rational logic the mind offers, but into the body, to scaffold what was never offered: the embodied knowing of safety.

Perhaps here lies the invitation to turn inward. To pause and to notice. To place a hand on your heart and check in with your body: ok, not-so-ok, not-ok. To hear not the mind speaking its logic, but the body speaking its felt sense of safety.

When we notice the not-so-ok and not-ok, we can offer a small gesture of acknowledgement, a hand on the heart, arms wrapped around the self, a weighted toy resting on the chest. To pause, connect, give space. Not just once, but again and again. Because only through repetition does the body begin to learn predictable, containable connection.

This, of course, is easier said than done. Cultivating safety is not about reaching a destination or perfecting another rote practice that diminishes our deeper aloneness. What is sought is a felt sense of safety in the Self, something that can be returned to again and again along the journey of reflected equanimity. A unique and individual noticing of sensation, perception, and interpretation, allowing one to know themselves in all their known knowing.