The inner witness
Dynamics of a simple sentence worded to you can be affected by your past more then we may realize. We often do not just only react to the actual moment but rather influenced by past experiences that may have nothing to do with the current situation. Which then makes us come across as overreacting. But the truth is we only overreacted to what happened outside of us while there’s a whole world happening inside of us.
Obviously this is subject to cause huge problems and difficulties in about any relationship since it is impossible for anyone to constantly and always be aware and know whats going on inside of you even if they know you very well and through and through. They can not and should not have to because they are a person on their own with their own feelings and experiences.
For those who don’t know what I am on about, I’ll give a small example that may make it recognizable. We all have our pasts and have dealt with less pleasant people and situations sometimes. In my example, everything starts out fine, with no complications.
After a difficult past with others, you find yourself ina brand new relationship and truly it’s a wonderful experience, until…
You both are about to go out and while you are still getting ready he is already waiting for you while you still seem to be unable to decide which shoes to wear. So he urges you by kindly and gently saying “Come on baby we’ll be late they are waiting on us.” Nothing wrong with that right? Though you respond irritated and upset that he needs to calm down and relax. Little does he know that you are still getting yourself mentally ready for this outing and that it’s more than just a choice of what shoes to wear.
Even less knowledge does he probably have of your past experience in a similar situation with a person who you were in an unhealthy relationship with that did not go so peacefully. YOU may even not even be immediately aware of how this past relationship affects this current situation. Yet the emotions and feelings from the past have been awakened now and this is not even necessarily accompanied by the awareness of the fact of the likeness of both situations or rather the differences.
When we learn to see the dynamic of this with our inner witness we can then learn how to evaluate the situation better and respond better rather than react emotionally. To be able to respond differently (internally or externally) we need to evaluate the current situation and ask ourselves if our emotions really match the current situation without letting ourselves be affected by our triggered emotions.
From this, we can learn a few things:
- We are still hurt and /or angry about the past situation
- We are not currently being hurt
- We are reacting to emotions based on our past
- The other person has no fault in this
C-PTSD is a complex post-traumatic stress disorder and I have received this diagnosis because of my multiple traumas, starting in my early childhood. While growing up I had multiple different separated from each other traumatic experiences. This makes it extremely difficult and very energy and time consuming to do this because it’s very hard to tell all the emotions from each other.
On top of that, I have due to my traumas and my healing process a renewed freeze reaction because I’m aware I’m not always responding according to a situation, I developed a fear to respond wrongly so I freeze and don’t respond and rather find myself in a situation where I can’t respond due to my fears.
My mind at that moment is working overtime with so much happening at once and is trying to deal with the whole situation at hand. The emotions from the past, the current situation. trying to evaluate it and what my reaction at best should be. My lack of response has startled the other person who doesn’t realize the difficult momentum I find myself in and wonders why I don’t respond to something that’s quite a normal and healthy situation.
Still not bein able to respond adequately my fear grows and I may dissociate because of the overwhelming situation at hand now. I honestly find it difficult to explain how I may react now because I can’t tell at forehand. It happened I reached my wise mind in time and am able to respond well but I may have not and snap. My for the outside world unreasonable reaction is hard to understand and they may react to that themselves which may lead to a huge conflict that we can learn to avoid by training our own inner witness.
