A photo journal prompt waits for you at the end.
Our bodies feel and carry what our minds cannot always name. Bessel van der Kolk’s research confirms what many midlife women already sense in their own experience (2014).
When I found a lost little boy in my alley and carried him home, I didn’t think about what I was feeling. I just felt it. The panic I borrowed from his mother moved through me before I had named it. The relief and sense of joy I felt when he laughed at an old truck and the tears I held back at the reunion with his dad all arrived in my body first, and my mind caught up later.
That sequence is significant to me and was my greatest insight after writing the original post. My body was connecting back to something ancient; the deep wiring that says community is safety, that someone else’s child is everyone’s child. The situation activated a response that skipped over logical thinking entirely and pulled me straight toward action.
Many of us who come from caregiving professions know a different pattern. There is enormous pressure on teachers, nurses, social workers, and mothers to care for others while keeping their own emotional responses at a careful distance. The message, spoken or not, is this: feel the responsibility, not the feeling. Over time, that training doesn’t just change how we respond. It changes what we notice. We become skilled at managing emotion rather than receiving it.
In midlife, the distance between what we feel and what we allow ourselves to feel can become very wide. We don’t always recognize the body’s messages because we have spent years learning to override them, to silence them or bury them deep inside. When I helped the lost boy, I welcomed the emotions I felt, even the more negative emotions. As I reflected, I understood that feeling those emotions and having tears well up in my eyes was a sign of healing. After years of work on myself, I recognized and felt those emotions in the moment.
The journaling practice I have developed can help bring you back to your emotions. It won’t replace therapy, but it can add to the work you are doing yourself or with someone else. Looking closely at an image of your own life (really looking, and later naming in your journal) can help surface what you were carrying without knowing it. The practice can help bridge the distance between what our body and emotions want us to know and our logical controlled mind.
This week’s prompt:
Your body remembers. What physical sensation or emotion was present in you before you consciously acknowledged it? Can you find or take a photo, or create a sketch, that represents that sensation or emotion? Sit with the image. What do you feel it was trying to tell you?
The full story is here, if you want to go deeper.
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