Not even sure this is a hashtag I’m using anymore. It’s a term I’m still using for sure. Emotional Mapping is a process that I like to think I invented, the truth is that I managed to pluck it out of the ether as a way of having a trauma sensitive conversation. We don’t always want to talk about our trauma and talking about trauma can in fact be retraumatising. So my rationale is that we can talk a lot about feelings without talking about the incident, scenario or even relationship. We can just talk about how we feel looking at the abstract without too much detail. I know it sounds weird. It also works. You see you can take one feeling and in fact almost any feeling and discover that the feeling alone is a gateway into another world.
Feelings are there to be explored. They create pathways towards ourselves in ways that are little known except by poets. That all feelings have their place, in words, sensations, movements, colours, tastes, smell and even visioning. That feelings can move backwards and forwards in and through time. In and out of history and are often metaphors for building the future. All the things that we have to resolve. All the things that we can’t see our ways clear too. All the things we can’t see and even feel. How they weigh on us, as we don’t speak them and hold them in our patterns. These are the emotional maps of the innerscape. The internal landscape that we have not explored that is all tied up in feeling. That the innerscape is a real place that opens to us through emotional resonances that we haven’t given words to. You might even say the innerscape, it’s thoughts, feelings and sensations are all caught up in the pre-verbal.
Our emotions can seem trivial and even arbitrary if they are not bound up in survival. Something frivolous that only the fanciful get to engage in. One foot in front of the other. Keep on keeping on. Except how do we get rid of the inherited? How do we interpret the things we are born into? The things that have always been and yet very little understood. You see so often our feelings are not ours. They belong to other people, our parents, our grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings and even friends. Somewhere in the mix even our school teacher got a look in along with the childminder as to how we process and examine the world and thus our innerscape. Informing the emotional map of our souls. Especially when we don’t feel safe, if we don’t feel emotionally safe, we don’t feel physically safe. What would it take to make you feel held I wonder? Even for me that is tricky? Especially when I often don’t feel seen.
You see trauma gets passed on. We hold trauma in our DNA and genetic makeup .
So we have to believe that healing does too. All our ancestors sitting on our shoulders saying when is it our time? When do we get our healing? When do we get to be heard? When will this matter truly be dealt with and addressed? For hundreds of years now we have been running away from our trauma, disconnected from land, place and even family. As we wander from one trance party to the next looking for belonging. Using psychedelics to tell us what is already known, that we are ignoring. Turning to plants to ingratiate us with the wisdom we were never taught.
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