Contents
“A strong person is one who allows himself to feel vulnerable”
Psychology
The psychiatrist Anabel González, specialist in trauma and emotional regulation, reveals in ‘Scars do not hurt’ how to overcome the blocks and knots of the past to enjoy the present and the future
When we make a wound, it is best to clean it well and let it air dry. In this way, it will close, continue its healing process until it becomes a scar and it will stop hurting. And when we look at that scar we will remember what happened, but we will no longer feel that pain. But if we cover the wound or if we ignore it or try to forget about it and do not take care of it, it is possible that it will become infected and end up causing a worse problem. The same thing happens with emotional wounds, according to the psychiatrist Anabel González, who reveals that when something has caused us harm, we must understand how it affects us and discover how they limit us.
In her work ‘The scars do not hurt’, this specialist in trauma and emotion regulation proposes a route towards emotional healing, a path that must be traveled with delicacy, patience and self-confidence. For the author, letting go of the burden of the past allows us to radically change what we live in the present, break emotional knots and heal the wounds that prevent us from deciding in freedom and feel proud of the scars that are part of who we are.
How can you identify that a person suffers an emotional wound or is still tied to an unresolved issue?
On an emotional level, if I think about something that happened to me and it still causes me discomfort, even if it is less than at the time things happened, it is because there is something that I have to deal with.
Other times you may not notice it, due to a certain emotional anesthesia, but indirect signs can be seen. One of them can be, for example, finding myself again and again in a situation in which I do not like to be or I end up being with the same type of person with whom I do not like or getting into situations where it would be the last place in which I would like to be or even having disproportionate reactions or that do not fit with what would seem logical to me. Sometimes the explanation for all these issues is unresolved issues from the past. Perhaps I have had a bad experience with relationships and that causes me to overreact to people who are not at fault at all or it may even happen the opposite, that I block and not be able to react as it would make sense.
In ‘Scars don’t hurt’ you point out that emotional healing processes have a natural course that must be respected, but we tend to be impatient …
If we break a bone in one leg, it takes us several weeks for it to heal and if we intend to jump before it welds, it probably won’t finish welding or weld well. Emotional processes also have their times. This can be understood with something that happens a lot with children. A phrase that seems good to us but that can be counterproductive is “Come on, don’t cry, nothing happens.” If the child cries, it is because something is happening to him and perhaps he is living it from his head and from his perception, but the first step would be to try to put words to what is happening to him and validate the emotion (tell him that we recognize that emotion and that we accept it). And once we do this we can give you tools. But if we want to skip that so as not to see it badly, it is as if we swept under the rug. We are creating a mountain of emotional waste that ends up coming out sooner or later.
We do not like to be sad or to see sad people …
If we hide the sadness or do not want to feel it, it stays within us. Sadness needs to come out and what dissolves that emotion the most is to vent and allow it to come out. If I need to cry, I cry (although not in any place or with any person) and I communicate with someone who knows how to listen to something sad (not everyone knows) and then I ask for a hug. A hug is the best way to dissolve sadness.
The emotions that we refuse to feel do not go away. Accepting them is opening the door through which they have to leave. We cannot solve a problem that we do not accept exists. Sadness does not stay forever if we let it follow its natural course, as if it were a river. But if we block the way, not only will it not reach the sea, but we will have a flood inside us.
But it is an unpleasant emotion …
Of course it is an unpleasant emotion. But that does not mean that the solution is to remove it because that not only will not work but at the level of the nervous system it is unfeasible.
We often refer to people or ourselves as “strong” or “weak” emotionally, what is a strong person really like?
Someone who can feel. I work a lot with people who have lived through very difficult situations and who have had to make themselves strong. That is not the same as being strong, but it is a kind of shield that you put on with which you try to protect yourself from the world and then you go in soldier mode for life. This may be fine for some things but not for life in general. Because with shields we drown.
The strongest person is the one who allows us to feel vulnerable. If I do not feel that I am vulnerable, like everyone else, and that there are things that can affect me when I am in a negative situation or in a problematic relationship, I do not feel that it is exceeding me. And sometimes we can put up with things that we shouldn’t put up with from that idea of ”I’m strong” and from the emotional anesthesia with which we function. And when things break us, it is because we have reached the extreme. Strong people when they really crack, take it badly. Because to have a slump and get out soon I don’t have to have too negative a view of being weak. If when we are in a low moment, we realize that we are wrong, we allow ourselves not to do things at the same level as we did, we seek help and allow ourselves to be helped, we leave earlier.
Those who consider themselves strong have a hard time asking for help
This idea of ”I am strong” denying my limits, my needs and my vulnerability is not solid. I would invite us to try to be solid, being connected, knowing each other well and knowing that turning to others also makes us strong. We do not live in isolation but in groups. And many times it gives us more strength to ask for help from our social groups (family, friends, colleagues …) than to try to do it alone.
It establishes analogies between physical and emotional wounds by referring to concepts such as “uncovering, removing what contaminates and letting the body start its ability to heal itself.” How can these expressions be transferred from the physical to the emotional?
Uncovering on an emotional level would mean that we stop to observe and look inwards (now with the pandemic there are many people who have stopped to do it) and then share it with people who know how to listen (not with just anyone) or even with a professional. That would be letting him breathe air into the wound. The idea is that it is not something hidden because sometimes there are things that generate shame or guilt and we believe that they are things that we have to hide. And when the light hits them, it turns out that they are not so terrible. Or that if they are terrible it makes him lose that monster characteristic and allows us to look at him in another way. In addition, when we share it, we discover that things also happen to others. That makes you feel less alone, less weird …
Do we contaminate the wound by recreating ourselves in it?
Yes, when something has happened to us it is that we do not dig into the wound because sometimes we dig down to the bone when we are constantly reproaching ourselves or we feel weak because we are affected by something and that is contamination. Feeling bad about ourselves for being bad is to curl the loop negatively and add self-torture to suffering. And that will neither diminish nor improve.
Sometimes it can even happen that we are assuming responsibilities that are not ours. Sometimes we blame ourselves for the things they did to us. But curiously, the person who suffers the situation is the one who feels the guilt or shame that the other does not feel.
He explains in his book that change scares us more than to continue badly or that we even venture that we are going to be worse …
Change implies exploring, taking risks, making mistakes… We have to make mistakes a lot, many times and in many ways and that is how we learn. But it costs.
And as for venturing that something will be worse, there is a well-known experiment in psychology that uses a concept called learned helplessness. In this experiment, it was suggested that every time a laboratory animal tried to get out of the cage, it received an electric shock. The conclusion was that once the control time had passed, this discharge was eliminated but the animals did not leave the cage, not even if there was food outside of it. This creates a kind of prediction that everything is going to go wrong and we no longer check it, but we put ourselves at worst to protect ourselves. But what we do is we drown in those shells or armor that we put on.
What is the EMDR (Eye Movement Desensibilization and reprocessing) technique with which you have worked with patients?
It is a therapy specifically oriented to work with traumatic memories or memories that have not been assimilated. What it uses is a way of accessing the memories by looking for a series of elements of the memory and a curious ingredient is used which is a certain type of eye movements (it is known that these have to do with the processing of information and that there are phases of the sleep in which there are certain eye movements), but the effect that we see in the clinic is that the memory, when you ask the person to think about the sensation and the emotions that it produces and you use the eye movements, loses strength and differently from other therapies an associative process is opened. That is, the person is thinking about something else, other issues are coming to him and he makes other associations. He associates, associates and associates and when he returns to the memory, he is seen to lose strength so that a memory that caused him a discomfort of 10, let’s say, stops producing it and begins to be seen as an old memory.
It reveals that self-care patterns are not born from the air, but rather have to do with our learning about caring and being cared for. Do we inherit them from our parents?
It has a very important part of learning, such as emotional regulation. For example, if a father or mother does not have a life of their own and is always looking after the children, that relationship can be excessively closed. A child needs to be cared for but also needs to develop autonomy. Therefore, if you always take care of others and never take care of your own, there will be an imbalance. It is like physical hunger. I can give food to others and distribute but I also need to eat. There has to be a balance in self-care with respect to caring for others and there are people who are very caring for others but forget about themselves and that in the long run, emotional malnutrition.
What would those emotional nutrients be?
The things we feel are good for us, not just the pleasant ones (which don’t have to be always good). But in reality they would be the things that we would recommend to a good friend. There are internal things that make us grow and make us feel good about ourselves and that make us lead a rewarding life. And another has a lot to do with connecting with others and being able to maintain meaningful relationships.
And it also invites us to listen to the body
Sometimes we only hear the body when it yells at us. But look, when you ask someone to stop for a minute to observe the sensations of their body, they discover things. This is fascinating to me because it means that under normal conditions we are not looking at or listening to each other. Sometimes in that minute we can feel more tired than we thought and that can lead us to think about taking a little break or something else that we need. If I never stop, I accumulate that fatigue with the one the next day. If we do not stop to listen a little, and not only when the body gives us problems, the body accumulates and we will notice many of the emotions in the body (headaches, insomnia …), which tells us that we are not so Wonderfully how it seems to us and that not everything slips us, as we sometimes believe. If I stop to think about them or feel them, I can give them a solution.
Expert in trauma and emotional regulation
Psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Anabel González is a doctor in Medicine and a specialist in Criminology. She works at the University Hospital of A Coruña with people with stories of complex trauma and populations in social exclusion. For years she has provided training to other specialists, is an EMDR therapy trainer, a teaching collaborator at CHUAC and a visiting professor in the Master in EMDR Psychotherapy at UNED, as well as a doctoral tutor at the University of A Coruña. He has coordinated various investigations around trauma work and emotional regulation. His previous book, “The Good Things About Having a Bad Day,” became a publishing phenomenon translated into several languages.