I’ve been reading my journal for last year and came across this piece. It’s a possible way to understand why sometimes reassurance works right away, and sometimes it takes longer. One thing I’ve suspected for a long time is that the earlier the trauma, the longer it takes for the brain to recover healthy self-regulation.
From my journal for August 14, 2019
I was thinking how Dulany tried to reassure me after we had got as far as we could dealing with the scam. But I did not reassure. Sometimes I’m able to feel better as soon as I’ve done something successfully and sometimes I’m not. I go on feeling scared for several hours. I’m not at all sure why it works sometimes and why it doesn’t. I suspect it depends on how deep the trigger goes. If it’s very deep, then I think first the cognitive layer has to relax, and then that will help the next layer down to relax. If it’s very deep, it will take a long time for each layer to reassure the next, I suppose the younger layers may fall into a default of anger, making themselves or the younger layers wrong — I can see that it would be a complicated business. Not possible to work on it cognitively. I suppose one could do a voice or gestalt process, identifying each of the triggered ones and ask them what’s going on.
I was thinking I could try letting different little Jennys speak as I did once before, but some part of me feels heavy — I want to do something else, something with color and shape, maybe a real puzzle.