Emotional Self: Can Childhood Trauma Cause Someone To Disconnect From Their Emotional Self?

It could be said that there are at least three types of people; those who are connected to their mental and emotional self, those who have a weak connection to their mental self and those who have a weak connection to their emotional self. Naturally, the ideal will be for someone to be connected to both parts.

This will enable them to both think clearly and to feel deeply connected to others and to life itself, among other things. Each part of their being is important, with one part being no better or worse than the other.

One Experience

If someone has a strong connection to their emotional self but not their mental self, they are not going to have any trouble feeling connected to others and to life. What will be a challenge, however, is for them to be able to step back and to detach from their experience.

This can then mean that thinking clearly and responding to life, as opposed to reacting, will be difficult for them. They can be like a small boat on the ocean that is constantly tossed around by the waves.

Another Experience

On the other hand, if someone has a weak connection to their emotional self but a strong connection to their mental self, they might not have trouble thinking clearly, stepping back from their experience and responding to life. Nonetheless, what is likely to be a challenge is for them to feel deeply connected to others and to life.

It can be as though they are living on the surface of life and are watching life as opposed to actually living life. Like the person who has the aforementioned experience, they will be out of balance and this will make their life harder than it needs to be.

Just How Life Is

When one experiences life in this way, it could be how they have been for as long as they can remember. Consequently, one could believe that they were born this way and that there is very little that they can do.

If they do have this outlook, it could make it even harder for them to handle what is going on. Their experience on this earth is, in general, not going to be very pleasurable; in fact, it could often be as if they have been left outside in the cold.

A Closer Look

As they don’t have a strong connection to their emotional self, they may find that they often feel empty, helpless, hopeless and down. From time to time, what is going on could wear them right down, causing them to feel suicidal.

Ultimately, the support that their emotional self would provide is rarely, if ever, going to be available to them. To use an analogy: they will be like a plant that is rarely watered; it won’t die but it will be incredibly malnourished.

An Inner Split

Taking a step back now, what is clear is that they will look like a whole and complete human being from the outside but, on the inside, they won’t feel like one. They are likely to spend a lot of time in their head, seldom being connected to their body.

Their emotional self will be found in their body and, so, in order for them to reconnect to this part of their being, they will need to get back into their body. But, while this is indeed what they will need to do, it doesn’t mean that they can use the power of their will to do this.

A Good Reason

How they are experiencing life is causing them to suffer unnecessarily, yet there is likely to have been a time when it was far too painful for them to be in their body. The pain that they experienced during this time will have remained in this part of their being.

And not only will their mind have automatically moved their awareness out of their body and into their head to allow them to survive what was going on; it would have also developed a number of defences and armoured their body to try to stop this pain from entering their conscious mind. Considering this, one won’t be able to re-embody and to become a whole human being overnight.

Going Deeper

The big question is: what took place that caused them to be so traumatised, that they had to disconnect from their body? This could be due to what took place when they were a child and/or it could go back even further.

If it does, it could mean that their birth, and even their time in their mother’s womb, was deeply traumatic. This would have been a time when they were in a very underdeveloped state and couldn’t handle their body’s responses and their might not have been a lot of external support available either.

In A Frozen State

Once they start to work through their defences and their bodies armouring, the will be able to get in touch with how they felt all those years ago. There can be times when they will feel like a very small child and times when they feel like a baby.

This doesn’t mean that they will have simply ‘regressed’ and that their mind is utilising a defence mechanism, though; it means that they will be experiencing pain that has been locked in their system for many, many years. They will be connecting to one of their split-off parts/selves and they may carry many of these parts/selves; with each part carrying deep physical and emotional pain.

Developmentally Stuck

It will become clear that although their physical and mental self, and perhaps even their spiritual self, has grown since this point in time, their emotional self hasn’t. This part of them will have stayed stuck at a point in time when they were powerless and helpless.

For this to change they will need to acknowledge and to work through the pain that is held deep inside them. This will be a time when they will be doing inner child work and grieving their unmet childhood needs.
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Awareness

If one can relate to this, and they are ready to change their life, they may need to reach out for external support. This is something that can take place with the assistance of a therapist or healer.

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Oliver JR Cooper