How I connect healing with somatic experiencing and processing my emotions.

Trigger Warning: Mentions abusive dynamics in narcissistic abuse.

Hey guys. I am dropping by to share some insights and have some discussions yet again, lol.

Now, somatic experiencing can mean something for me and the way I practise it might not be the way it is supposed to be used, but I have found developing a "felt sense" about how an experience with a person feels when you are not focusing on the details, like their grand gestures of love which feels hollow and almost like something they are doing for themselves. Since a predatory or fake person is performing a relationship, the felt sense is a strong defense against inconsistencies and gaslighting. It is what I could call getting a "felt sense" for every person and interaction, healing triggers/hypervigilance, and reconnecting with your intuition (which I also see as animalistic instincts to detect danger, especially the invisible, mental and psychological dangers which we might detect too late in looking for an "intellectual" or "rational" reason) or retraining your people radar (+ developing your sense of self). I think it is also a very effective way to overcome/heal from the cognitive dissonance without getting into the nitty-gritty details, which are much altered by lies, gaslighting, and projections (I also have some thoughts about this, which I will go into later, lol).

There were countless, countless instances of the felt sense in that exploitative relationship, starting right from the beginning with expericing fluttering in the gut and unexplainable fear about dating the guy, which I rationaised as just nerves. Though, now that I remember that felt sense, the fear was exponentially high and was meant to alert me, but I just didn't know how to read it. I invalidated my own feelings, and went by how the person looked from the outside– goofy, friendly, social, soft, vulnerable, hopeless romantic/wronged in love, and harmless. I don't think there is a bigger danger than a person who has convinced you that they are harmless, while you know nothing about them. The tip of the ice berg is what you see, and even that isn't the entire thing since you could keep digging to find more worms.

Also, all the mirroring and taking on parts of my personality for their facade seems to have fucked me up big time with idk, having a threat response when I see my authentic traits and similar traits in other people. All the mental and psychological stuff seems to have messed me up much more than the covert and passive aggressive stuff, or even direct shaming and attempts to make me feel insecure. Does anyone else relate to this?

There were many felt sense instances that happened in my mind, like just not feeling an emotional connection despite years of "vulnerable and love filled conversations", and feeling very confused, self-blamy, and then ultimately respecting how I felt since I couldn't force love. I compared it to friendships I have had where there might be difficulties, but after about two years there was a bond, with a lot of ease, deep appreciation and "getting along", which did not feel that way with this person after two years. Then there was another such instances where I was told, "My friend xyz was asking me why I was with a girl as ugly as you", which made me mad and was supposed to be an attack on my self-esteem, and it did both of those, sure, but I also had a felt sense for his overall facade, inconsistencies, I had to get out of all of that to see how even though it felt terrible and I didn't know the "exact story", I was still staying true to my perception the best I could, and moving in the direction of me. These instances of felt sense worked as lighthouses to make decisions and gradually pull me out of that relationship, and they are still markers that I have been using in face of all the confusion and gaslighting. I lost them along the way as I left the relationship, deeply internalized the distortion and trauma with no mental health care for it. I basically had a collapse with my functioning going out last (Major Depressive Disorder is one diagnosis I received 3 years into looking for help/care, and then a couple more to change the diagnosis and make progress. At the time of diagnosis, I literally thought my life was doomed). These things have been my anchors in reclaiming my truth and not getting sucked into the disjointed, and bizarre gaslighting stories.

Now, coming onto the processing our emotions, which I have some deep insights to share about. In the narcisstic relationship, there was this incredible level of invalidation, starting with who they are, how they move, what their intentions are, and while we rely on our self-validation to stay and correct course, we are unknowingly spending our self-worth and taking hits to our self-esteem. We are getting spend and losing our sense of self gradually, so much that we might not see how all the invalidation is slowly transferring onto different areas of our life, how it is changing us as a person, and how we might slowly be heading towards a burnout. In fact, I think we as a society mostly recognise burnout as something that happens when you can't function at your "work", and since functioning is about already being in survival and channelling our resources into it, you might not see when you are slowly losing yourself with not enjoying your favourite music or distancing yourself from healthy friendships from it feeling like "too much work". I think there are so many people living with the effects of narcissistic abuse, whether they are aware of it or not, and it affecting different aspects of them. It probably doesn't get the attention that it needs unless you are forced to face it.

And along the lines of how there is so much invalidation, confusion, and gaslighting happening, that we basically start losing touch with what emotions or feelings are coming from where. It is a sort of depersonalisation, I think. Then there are the trauma bond emotions of guilt, shame, self-blame, which feel bad, but the real source of them is the true bond, and not what's "happening" in the relationship or what they accused you of. It is such a dangerous place to be in since I think you are basically dissociated and very pliable to manipulation since your (pent up well of) emotions can be guided against your will. I basically experienced this throughout childhood, and now I am placing my finger on where the fears mainly came from and how displaced my reasoning was (made to be). I had made a lot of progress with it, but then I run into another person who shows the same patterns in my first (in-person) relationship as an adult.

Healing for me has involved lots of narrative journalling which I still keep up with (while skirting on the edges and stopping if I get pulled into guilt, shame or self-blame), but in the recent years it has involved working more and more with the sensations coming up in the body. I think of having started my somatic experiencing journey two years ago, when I started feeling sensations that somatic experiencing describes instead of the constant pain and global muscle tension I experienced. In reality, I was having migraines and other symptoms already start when I met the person in 2014, and then it turning into a full-blown pounding in the head when I left. A few years of somatic experiencing was just tuning into that pain, staying present with it, noticing it, and then incorporating self-massages and hot showers as non-verbal ways to communicate with them. I see the sensations as a compressed form of all the feelings (most of my views on how I see them are based on reading Waking the Tiger and my own lived experience) that need to be attuned to, given space, felt, and they come erupt in emotions or give us fragments of insights and realisations, maybe even bizarre drams and images. The whole phase of processing this stuff and integrating it is also a whole scary and bizarre things, because how much do we concretely know about narcisstic abuse and the symptoms/effects of it? I never had bipolar like symptoms, but I seem to be having those or maybe it is a temporary effect of narcissistic abuse or I already had a incling to develop it and narcisstic abuse finally tipped the scales. I am basically trying to determine reality with my anxiety/worst case scenario thinking or predictions, but I gotta keep healing to find out. I have been open with all mental health professionals so far and haven't received a diagnosis for a different mental illness. It's so much holding on and working through scary shit for dear life with things even we don't understand, let alone a person who hasn't experienced it. I have basically been trying to find out what went wrong and what's missing while I am in the middle of the story.

In my 3 years of healing since I received the depression diagnosis, the sensations went from all over body pain and numbness, to becoming contracted in places, turning into sensations of tension, heat, fluttering, and requiring emotional attunement, daily basic self-care, and it feels pretty intuitive (but still destabilizing, confusing, unsure, and scary) to work with them. From a recent group therapy session I received some long-term perspective/direction that I was seeking, and that is– as I increase my ability to hold these sensations in the body and work through them, the gap between what my feelings are and their source reduces. These sensations changed and evolve, and I expect it to leave my body feeling quite pain-free, neutral, pleasant, even when they finally abate. And while I work with them, my capacity to trust and reconnect with people, to see people clearly, and "feel" emotional connections and much more again has been returning, along with spontaneous/intuitive rebuilding and expansion in all other areas of life. I got the "felt sense" of respect from a childhood friend who I reconnected with lately, which was somewhat odd because it was always there, but I never registered it. I had a felt sense for the dispect in the narcisstic relationship too, but I gaslit myself/thought it was a protective part from childhood that always criticized people ruthlessly and irrationally the same way my mother did. I learned to ignore those parts and live with them, which was okay in a healthy relationship, but not when my brain is telling me about predatory dynamics. Those parts have been dissolving/getting integrated too.