Persisting and Collapsing

When our systems are shaped early by prolonged volatility, and when turbulence remains ever possible, our experience organises into patterns of protection, or parts of us, that implicitly learned how to adapt and respond to Others and the World whilst keeping the Self safe.

Parts of us move toward daily functioning and toward getting through, they feel the push to persist. These parts learned long ago how to push on and push through alone, sensing and perceiving shifts in the atmospheres within and between Self and Others well before anything is spoken.

Other parts of us want to scream, to shrink, to sink into the floor with a cry for help. They sense the body collapsing under the pressure to persist.

Yet even within the very real core need beneath the collapse, the panic, the dread, and the shame of being found wanting begins to press in. Parts terrified in the aloneness of the collapse itself.

Perhaps because parts of us still remember that it was the cry for help, and the collapse itself, that once awakened frustration, expectation, anger, intrusion, and retaliation; or worse still the stark absence of the Other even within our cry.

And so, our core needs prevail while an inner battle between persisting and collapsing abides. We become frozen yet functional. We are always ready, never resting… For resting is the remembered risk, the moment the true harm came.

Certainly the World around us offers no relief, where accountability is scarce, where collective care is thin, and where we are expected to survive on our own. And often, even the help does not help.

So we rise. We push on. We push through. We persist. And the collapse awaits. Perhaps this is why complex trauma persists.

For when we needed it most, when we need it most now, there was and still is no Other to gently be alongside us. Maybe even that is why what is needed now is gentle accompaniment.

To know that someone is there alongside us within the needed collapse, as the losses of our earliest years become shareable and knowable in togetherness.