Treading Water

“Trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.” – Gabor Mate.

I’ve read it, I’ve thought about it, I’ve processed it and felt the truth of it, for me, in my bones. Today I saw it play out in front of my eyes. Less than thirty minutes before I took this photo, the child in it stumbled out of the water trembling, holding back tears and all but collapsed in front of me. He’d been dumped, held under, popped up and kept treading water as the waves kept coming, full of shock and fear. He was never in danger, he was next to his Dad and had hold of his board the whole time but when he hit the sand his body went into an involuntary response.

He was the deer in the headlights after the car has passed. His body full of cortisol and stuck energy.

I wrapped a towel and then my arms around him, I willed him to let the tears come. ‘It’s ok to feel scared about something scary’ I told him but you are safe now. He nodded, he understood but ‘my legs’ he whispered. His legs felt like they might give way, exhausted but still shaking uncontrollably. He couldn’t stand, he couldn’t sit, he couldn’t let me hold him. The deer would run now, I thought, the deer would run that stuck energy out and then the deer would be ok.

I tried to tell him what I was thinking, knowing that his thinking brain was not completely with us. ‘I know it feels like your legs are tired but I think what they really want is to run’. I tried to tell him about the deer, to engage him with a story, he couldn’t fully take it in and I could feel myself starting to lose my calm too. Why had he even been out there, why hadn’t he come straight in, why hadn’t they all come in when it started getting heavy out there? Now he would be scared of the ocean. Now everything was ruined. I went silent as I felt my energy starting to feed his and then his Dad arrived with the towels from the car.

He must have picked up on what was happening and said ‘let’s go for a run to warm up’ and they went. I had the awareness, I had the understanding of what was happening inside his little body and what he needed but I was too close, too connected, too affected to get him what he needed. His stress became my stress quicker than I could help him to move his through. His Dad was seperate enough, grounded enough, clear enough to just start running with him. He ran, he moved the stress and the fear through his body. He came back laughing, climbed a dune, jumped off it and then begged to go back in the water. On his own.

The majority of the stress had left his body, we were able to leave it at the beach. It doesn’t get to fester inside him and become a trauma. It’s a memory, an experience but the energy and emotion of it has had its physical affect on him. He has felt it in his body, really felt it and expressed it. Now I’m expressing the part of it that I absorbed from him and held for him during that time. I’m expressing it in these words and I know that I will need to spend some time grounding it all too so that if it comes up for him again I can hold space for him without my emotions being set off by the stress left in me.

We feel big, him and I. Awareness helps, it helps to know about it, what’s happening inside, why it feels the way it feels and also, most importantly, what to do with it. A highly sensitive nervous system is at risk of multiple micro traumas every single day. We are at risk of filling up to the brim with experiences that many would not be affected by at all. Being aware of this, having self compassion around it, learning to articulate it and collecting a tool kit for moving the stress through as often and as quickly as it can accumulate has been a game changer for me and also for him because I wasn’t able to help him with any of it until I could do it for myself.