CONTAINMENT

No, this entry is not about covid.

It’s about something way cooler: a transformative encounter I had recently that taught me so much.

I was attempting to tell a friend about a challenging experience that happened a few days prior. However, talking about it reactivated the anxiety surrounding the original event, and the story came out in tangential little fragments as a result.

He provided what I would call a container for my process. Put another way, he “held space.”

He simply listened and allowed me to have my experience. He did not join me in my emotional state, but did not dismiss it either. It was valid, but it was mine.

He also did not try to fix the situation or create a dependency on himself. There was no rescuing. He seemed to know intuitively that I was capable of moving through the intense feelings, and held the frequency of “all is well.”

My nervous system attuned to his more regulated one and I was able to ground. I felt seen – which helped me to see myself.

By him being fully present with me, I went from a 6 to a 2.5 on what we call the “distress scale” in the EMDR therapuetic model- as opposed to jumping to a 10 (which can happen when we don’t feel seen or heard).

I finally had a felt sense in my body that the event was over and that I was safe. By the next morning the residual energy had cleared altogether, and it seemed very far away.

It was a reminder to me that so often the being goes way farther than the doing, and that we have the power to connect to, and support each other by our presence alone.

Photo: Hendersonville, NC July 2021