difficult beauty
In Somatic Experiencing, we use the language “trauma vortex” and “counter vortex” to describe two equally powerful human experiences that intensify with our attention.
The trauma vortex can suck us in like a tornado, especially when our nervous systems have adapted to attune very carefully to threats. When we’re in its swirl, our bodies might feel overwhelmed, tense and contracted, or lifeless and slack. We are built to survive, so the trauma vortex and can be loud, easy to fall into, and even attractive or familiar.
The counter vortex is often quieter, but just as powerful. There’s even a Somatic Experiencing podcast called Sneaky Powerful for that reason. The counter vortex is a place we can land when we attune to the safety, connection, and resources available to us within our web of support. A resource that often anchors me in my own trauma processing is an image of my friend Esmie and her silly pineapple shirt she kept texting me photos of when I went through a really hard time. When I think about her it helps me soften and feel seen. That softness helps me feel the hard stuff.
I’m simplifying here, but the healing process is learning how to pendulate in between these two experiences— touching into our pain and then resting in resource before we get lost in overwhelm. Through this pendulation, our nervous system can digest traumatic experiences and form a more cohesive somatic narrative rooted in presence, support and compassion. Accessing the counter vortex expands our capacity to safely feel a wide range of emotions without going into survival mode. It gives us the space to feel it all.
Recently I read philosopher and journalist Chloé Cooper Jones’ incredible book Easy Beauty, and it made me think more about the counter vortex. The title comes from a philosophical context: “Easy beauty” is “apparent and unchallenging,” she says, unlike “difficult beauty,” which requires “time, patience and a higher amount of appreciation.”
Jones writes:
Difficult beauty, Bosanquet says, “simply gives you too much, at one moment, of what you are perfectly prepared to enjoy if only you could take it all in.” The ability to perceive and appreciate truly complex beauty requires a willingness to process it slowly, bit by bit. We must not demand it make itself apparent all at once…
It is possible to change. I just don’t know how. But I am not unable… I see what presence looks like, what it feels like, what effect it has on others… [It] begins to dissolve a corner of my conventional world, and the model for a new future shimmers in the distance. I try to take it in, bit by bit.
When we take in big feelings bit by bit, we can make enough space for the complexity of life. Like a rubber band, we stretch out slow so we don’t snap. When we change on our nervous system’s timeline, we make room for more to be beautiful, possible, or at least tolerable.
I am not here to suggest that everything can be beautiful; there is overwhelming injustice, violence and loss happening in our world at a global scale. I’m also not saying there’s no value in easy, uncomplicated beauty either. We all need to chill sometimes and just eat a good sandwich or whatever.
I mean in order to continue feeling and living, the world is requiring us to expand together so we can hold a lot of feelings at once. We have to learn to rock back and forth between the trauma and counter vortexes, between disconnection and connection, contraction and expansion, rage and love.
As Jones says in a recent interview with Chris Duffy, “we have to be able, sometimes, to be confronted with beauty that is so vast and is so overwhelming that as we're experiencing it, we are simultaneously reminded how small we are and how essentially brief our life is and, perhaps in the bigger picture of things, insignificant our lives are.”
I think when we can sit and take in that feeling she describes on the outside, we can find that spaciousness on the inside too. We place our story within a greater human story.
She elaborates on these vast human experiences, like love:
When I think about the concept of love, I don't wanna reduce it. I wanna let it be as big as it is. But letting love, whether it's self-love or love for other people, truly be as big as it is, means that there's, it contains a lot of other feelings within it. So real love or real connection includes disappointment, frustration, anger, resentment, obligation, hardship, conflict.
Those things, that’s just what… Love is so big. It has to encompass all those things. A life is so big, it has to encompass all those things. Being human, it's so vast and cool and massive that it has to encompass all those things. And one thing I think that often happens is we want to excise those things from our lives.
As a therapist, I often find that love is a counter vortex, in all of its easy and difficult beauty. Love of something soft, love of a snack, love of a view, love of an animal, love of this planet, love of a person, love of a family, love of a people. Love is vast, and some kinds are more complicated than others. My hope is we can widen enough to experience it all, back and forth, bit by bit.
Yours truly,
Katie
cover art by Bjorn Lee