26. Sh!t Happens
Emotions are just information.
Emotions are not “objective absolute reality” even though they feel really real and true when they’re happening. That doesn’t mean they’re lies or can’t be trusted. Emotions are just information. What is suspect is how we interpret emotions and what we make those emotions mean about ourselves and others and the world.
“Emotions are powerful, valuable, allowed and accepted - but must always be felt and processed through the lens of information, not as truth about reality. ”
FYI: This has an affiliate link to Amazon.
Trauma reactions are set by the time we’re 18 - they may even be set by the time we reach puberty. A trauma reaction is a learned behaviour that we repeat whenever we encounter painful feelings. Gabor Matè says that trauma isn’t what happens to us, it’s how we react to the trauma that harms us.
Mostly, the actual specific events of trauma are over very quickly. If we can allow the feelings, feel the feelings, express the feelings and process the feelings of the trauma event, we can emerge with greater wisdom about that particular experience of life, and not carry that trauma with us into the rest of our days, forever repeated. lol.
The result of unprocessed trauma is the repeated experience of what we made that event mean about ourselves and our lives and the world. We effectively re-traumatize ourselves by re-enacting the beliefs we learned about what that event meant to us. We use people and situations that happen in our life to prove to ourselves that what we learned to believe is actually true.
It is all a choice of perspective and that choice of perspective is what creates our reality. I don’t know if our perspective literally brings “shit happens” into our sphere of life - but our perspective definitely impacts how we handle “the shit” when it does happen.
A break for physics talk.
**Skip this if you don’t give af about physics.
If you’re into physics - there is a something called a strange attractor in chaos theory.
It’s the idea that chaos on one level is actually congregating around an organizing “attractor” on a deeper level. Scale is infinitely small and infinitely large, so that looking deeper into smaller scales of reality will oscillate between levels of chaos that reveal organization that lead to chaos that reveal organization on and on ad infinitum.
This works both on the micro and macro scale.
FYI: This has an affiliate link to Amazon.
The example used in “Chaos” by James Gleick that I remember, is of a coffee spill. The spill looks random and chaotic on the surface but when the spill is plotted with numbers/math it reveals that what we see as a chaotic spill is actually organized around a “strange attractor” principle that is related to Fibonacci sequences and fractals and all these other mathematical models of organizing principles that are the interior structures of chaos. Krk_wd on Tiktok has a bunch of videos that talk about about the attractive nature of ideas/beliefs/material reality. I don’t know what reality is, but it looks like both chaos and order are working together in harmony. The physics sh!t is done.**
Sh!t Happens
Our beliefs are learned through our childhood observation of adult responses to “shit happens” &/or adult responses to us &/or the situation &/or how we observe other people being treated. Children see so much and they make meaning out of their experiences without understanding adult context and without recognizing adult ignorance and bad behaviour.
Children understand at a very early and primary level about safety/danger, included/rejected, good/bad, loveable/unloveable. Bad, not good enough, deserving, worthy, valuable, safe, evil, good… Through interactions with self, family, community, education, society, media, religion, nations, history, world, life, afterlife, eternity… from these root binaries of juvenile understanding, children create the meaning and mythos of all levels of their existence.
Every child believes that they are the reason that all of the events of their life happen. Good or bad.
You believed it was your fault - no matter what it was that was happening. All of it was because of you.
You believed it, but that isn’t the reality about you and your life here.
We’re all making meaning all of the time and it is based within our own learned lens of experience with the world. We are all making meaning and we all have 100% control to determine what that meaning is for us in the world.
There is NO objective reality outside of our relationship with it. This is a shared reality that we are creating together.
“Who is the witch, the master that makes the grass green?
It’s you. You’re the magician of your own perspective.”
The Practice
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Now we look deeper. Look over your triggers from last week:
For each one connect to what you are making that situation/person/event mean about yourself, the world, other people
What are you telling yourself about that situation?
What are the unconscious beliefs you are holding about yourself?
these people?
these situations?
How are you using these events to prove these beliefs true?
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Connect with community or reach out for support to someone who is on this spiritual journey.
It can be hard to separate self from feelings, separate self from situations. Reach out for support and for someone to hold space for you to connect to these emotions and walk through to conscious awareness.
If I am able to assist, I will. Others may be able to assist as well. Ask for support, we're in this together.