A reflection on the inner conflict between longing and fear, and how coming to know our own embodied language of safety can soften the protective patterns formed in survival.

The Wordless Pull of Complex Trauma

There is a truth within 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, while beneath it another language moves, embodied, wordless, and older.

Emotional Flashbacks and the Body’s Memory

Perhaps we can call this an aspect of alarmed aloneness, a fear without 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 move through implicit, somatic, non-declarative memory, activated by subtle sensory cues well before explicit or declarative recall becomes available.

There is a certain something within a relational interaction that cues a threat to our system. The cue comes without context, and what remains is 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, however much reasoning we bring, 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 think of it as a lived rhythm of safety and fear moving together, a push and pull that formed in service of survival and moves within us still.

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 within the system 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, and subtler forms such as silent freezing, intrusive looming, or unpredictable withdrawal.

Correspondingly, frightened 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 Embodied Knowing

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 is the way we learned to survive. To figure it out is to seek certainty within uncertainty, to predict the unpredictable, to ground with sense what could never have made sense, then-and-there, and here-and-now.

Yet perhaps now something is shifting. A want, a willingness to move deeper, beneath the rational logic the mind offers and into the felt sense of our own system, scaffolding 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 listen beneath the logic of the mind, toward the felt sense of safety moving within us.

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. Once, and again, and again. Through repetition our system begins to learn predictable, containable connection.

This, of course, is easier said than done. Cultivating safety is an ever-emerging process, distinct from a destination to be reached or another rote practice to be perfected. What is sought is a felt sense of safety within the Self, something that may be returned to again and again along the journey toward equanimity. A unique and individual noticing of sensation, perception, and interpretation, allowing us to know our Self in all our known knowing.