22/03/2026
Courtesy of J. Mike Fields who's infograms absolutely nail my understanding of trauma, parts, dissociation and reintegration.
👻 Sitting with ghosts
For a long time, well, since I was around 13 years old, I've never liked late afternoon/early evening especially if I am alone or returning to an empty home. This is also when my fatigue is at its worst.
🏃♂️For years instead of coming straight home after work, when the daylight began to dim, I would unconsciously avoid going home. I would go to a supermarket or stay late at work to avoid the aching sadness and traumatic sense of loneliness echoing from a period of my life I barely remember. I would also stay late at work due to being dyslexic and undiagnosed ADHD and it meant I could actually concentrate).
😦 I used to experience a strange sense of deja vu, at this time as the sun dimmed, especially from September onwards when the nights would get darker. I thoughI I had Seasonal Affective Disorder.
🤔 Despite years of counselling I never knew why I hated this time of night.
Over the past few years I've undertaken trauma training and have learned how to regulate my nervous system. I've also training in and been having EFT for trauma processing (emotional freedom techniques. This is a body based approachs that regulates the amygdala whilst also processing trauma. I'm also learning how to find ways of working with the strengths of my ADHD instead of against my ADHD brain.
🧠 Through quietening my brain and nervous system, these moments have become increasingly uncomfortable. I can only describe this time of day like "Sitting with ghosts". The ghosts and echos of a time of life, that for me, frankly was deeply distressing. A time of day that always involved coming home to an empty house. These sensations and emotions served to remind me of amongst the worst times of my life.
🫴Through EFT and IFS I was able to explore this and my strong feelings of abandonment and isolation which made the trauma even more traumatic. Not being able to tell anyone through fear and shame. It lodged so deeply into me that all I had were these sensations in my body, the sense of feeling like part of me was muted, existing but not present. Shut away in the basement under the stairs protected but also imprisoned.
👩⚕️As so many trauma experts say trauma is a wound, distressing experiences change the brain, body and nervous system. The body remembers what the mind has forgotten. But perhaps what makes trauma traumatic is the absence of an empathic witness to share all that had happened to me with, holding it alone is what made it traumatic.
👂Decades later I heard the faint cry of younger me in the early hours of the evening and sought to distract myself again as I had done most of my life until my life was so quiet, that I couldn't refuse her cries.
🙌 Through EFT this part and the protective parts that had formed an alliance to protect her are being unburdened. She no longer needs to hold the feelings of abandonment, and they no longer need to find hacks to distract, defend, avoid or zone out.
🫂 Healing, finding and unburdening exiled parts through EFT is a powerful way to address the trauma through the body feelings and sensations if or when we don't have the words or cant bare to speak them out loud.
👶 She is with me now, all of the time. Not locked away in the basement, sounding muffled cries. She can live and breath, and experience the world with me in all its fullness and sorrow.
🫶 Trauma can be addressed... but only by activating the nervous system and engaging and connecting with the bodily and emotional cues that our feelings and nervous systems communicate.
🌈 Trauma cuts of our connection with ourselves to silence the cues of trauma. There is nothing 'down there' we haven't already experienced and once we reconnect with all of us, no one can take that connection away ever again... no one.
Having worked through this journey (which is ongoing) I can help other people work through theirs and helps people find their own way all the way out of their own trauma reliving or dissociation experiences. This is my biggest privilege and honour and I am hugely thankful and humbled by the trust place in me 🙏
