fearing what we long for
Recently, I volunteered as an assistant for another Somatic Experiencing training in Kansas City. Every day for four days, I had the privilege of witnessing the students in their small groups as they took turns receiving supportive attunement and/or touch from other healers they have come to know over the last two years.
For all our talk about how essential support is, one thing about therapists is that a lot of us feel way more comfy being the one who’s giving it. And it’s not just therapists, it’s basically most people I know. Seeing the vulnerability it took each healer to ask, direct, and receive supportive touch from one another made me teary each time.
Love and support is something humans need and yearn for. But the intimacy of being witnessed in that way isn’t always quick and easy— nor does it need to be.
When we’re vulnerable and experience harm intentionally or unintentionally, our nervous systems can start to associate vulnerability with danger. Harm can come in the more recognizable forms of emotional and physical abuse, or inconspicuous ones like engrained midwest modesty.
Our body may adapt by shielding us from vulnerability to protect ourselves from threat. This protective response puts our basic human needs of safety, belonging, and dignity in conflict and creates a dilemma. For example, we need to be safe to survive, but we also need belonging—and belonging involves the vulnerable leap of intimacy.
Well shit.
So how do we honor our body’s protective response and let love in?
Attachment therapist, author, and trainer Dr. Diane Poole Heller’s practice called the “Kind Eyes Exercise” can be a soft starting place. It is an imaginative practice that can be less intense than taking in another’s loving attention IRL. I’ve written my own version of the exercise below if you’d like to try it:
Imagine looking into the world and seeing kind eyes looking back at you. Are they a pet’s eyes, a person in your life, an ancestor, a character in a book you read or a movie you like? Sometimes it’s nature, but see if you can bring in actual eye contact from some source.
Our imagination opens up the realms of options available to us, like who is looking at us with love and how far away or close they are, if they are blurry or clear, black and white or in color, etc. For example, imagining my dog gazing at me feels less intense than imagining my friend or partner.
Envision looking out into the world as a baby or a young child, and seeing someone (person, animal or nature) looking back at you with loving, kind, caring eyes.
As you imagine this gaze, what happens in and around your eyes, your body, your emotional state? With your eyes opened or closed, see if you can track what happens in your body, and specifically your face and your actual eyeball.
Notice what happens in your body, your emotional sense, your thoughts, and let your eyes move out to their eyes. Let yourself register their kindness, their caring, their love.
Take a moment to see if you can see that, take it in, and bring it back into your body, back into your eye, while you are maintaining an awareness of how it’s affecting you. It may be helpful to place a hand on the chest and the belly, inhaling and exhaling down through your body, feeling your hands gently lift and settle.
Just notice. This might bring up a wound, or it might bring up pleasure. I often notice an oscillation between a recoil or contraction and an expansion or settling. There are all sorts of possibilities, and there’s no incorrect response. We are just looking for awareness of what the gaze is like for you. What do you expect? What happens when you see positive, caring, nurturing, “you are special to me,” and “I love you” being communicated through the eyes?
Take a moment to feel what’s arising. Whatever is there is fine. You can track your emotions or thoughts, sensations, images, the body’s reaction, the nervous system. And when you find an okay place to land, give yourself a moment to transition into opening your eyes or orienting to your surroundings when you are ready.
. . .
I keep learning over and over that healing is not finding aways to eradicate parts of us we don’t like. Healing is growing our capacity to be curious enough to make space for them to ebb, flow, move, be seen and be loved.
Georgia O’Keefe once said, “to see takes time like to have a friend takes time.” Befriending our protective responses and growing our capacity to receive love does not have to happen quickly or linearly. It can begin with the kind eyes exercise, or practicing with a pet. As you lean in and try to trust the process, I will be walking along side you, trying to do the same.
Yours truly,
Katie
cover art by Katie So