When we stop holding (and coregulate)
It’s not a doing / addition move – there’s nothing you’re adding on top of what’s happening. It’s a subtraction. You stop the holding, and release into allowing the emotion to flow to the other person
Most emotions are too much for a baby’s body. You just don’t have the capacity to feel through them. You need your mother, or father, to hold you – you need to borrow their nervous system capacity and regulation. The cries can move through your body and into theirs, and be met with love, and you come back into regulation.
If your mother or father were in fear, or rejection, or couldn’t tolerate those emotions in themselves, then you don’t get to run those emotions through their nervous system either – they get blocked. And because they’re too much for your body to tolerate on its own, you also block them in your body.
The lesson is: If my anger reaches my father’s energy system, something bad happens. You learn not to be in coregulation with your anger. It doesn’t get to be met with loving presence.
It’s like thunder. Babies usually aren’t scared of thunder, because they can feel that their mothers aren’t afraid. They learn that it’s safe through the presence of a regulated nervous system. This is what relearning coregulation is about.
Our energy systems are these globs of energetic vibration around our bodies. In their full form, they are like ... crystalline lines of light that softly move, and free flowing energy between them. When we have to stop certain emotions from coming out and from reaching the people around us, our own energy systems get blocked.
Sometimes it’s heavy fields of stuck, low-vibration energy, sometimes it’s hard and metallic plates that keep the energy in.
The beauty of coregulation is learning that those emotions can come out into our fields and be felt by the other person, and it’s safe.
It’s not a doing / addition move – there’s nothing you’re adding on top of what’s happening. It’s a subtraction. You stop the holding, you stop the blocking that’s there, and release into allowing the emotion to flow to the other person.
The other person, in the ideal world, meets your emotion with okayness, with regulation, with loving presence.
If you stop the holding consciously, you might just be left with numbness. Like, below the conscious holding, is a bunch of subconscious holding that your body won’t let you access to release because it hasn’t learned to trust others yet. And then you just let the other person be in loving presence with your numbness. It is an energy, that is also felt by them, just a much slower energy.
One way I invite people into coregulation is by inviting them to let whatever emotion they’re feeling radiate towards me. Radiate, because it’s an allow move, not a doing move.
When we get really caught in our emotions, our awareness and our energy fields contract around the emotion. There’s no space for the emotion to flow or move or digest. When I invite people to let the emotion radiate out, it opens awareness up so there’s more space for the emotion to flow.
Sometimes I invite them to let the emotion inhabit the space just around their body. This is also a way to expand the constriction and create more space.
We often don’t want more space for the emotion, because then we have to actually feel it. When we’re caught in the emotion, it sucks, but we’re not actually feeling it. We’re blended with it, we’re not digesting it. We’re using the emotion itself as a way to avoid feeling the emotion. When we give more space to the emotion, then you can feel the raw tenderness of it, the part that you couldn’t tolerate as a kid. And that’s often so much more painful, but also so much more cathartic. It actually releases.
Barbara Brennan refers to these as the pain of the defense, and the pain of the original wound. The pain of the defense is intense, reactive, you can go around in loops, it doesn’t move or digest. The pain of the original wound is soft, vulnerable, raw. It can hurt more, in a way, because it’s what we’ve been avoiding, but also less – because it feels like contact, and catharsis.
Sometimes we try and push the emotion out as another way to avoid actually feeling the emotion. We might try and express anger by screaming into a pillow or sending energy waves out into the world. These can be really good, to be clear. But sometimes we do that because we can’t tolerate the feeling of anger just ... existing, in our body and energy field. When we let the anger just exist, when we let it take up space in our field, it will move itself. It’ll find its own way to express, from the natural impulse, rather than because we’re trying to do something to push it out.
When you’re coregulating with someone in an emotion that’s difficult for you, you often have to feel that the person you’re with is really safe. Because your whole body is saying “something really terrible is going to happen if I let this emotion out”, and you have to have some meta awareness that the person who is holding you is not, in fact, going to hurt you or judge you or whatever it is you’re afraid of.
In my most intense moments of this, some parts of me are in complete denial – I’m in the experience that I’m going to die. And so I need to trust whoever is with me so deeply, to know that there’s something beyond that fear.
One experience of feeling my terror: my healer was holding my hand and sitting in deep loving presence, and I was hyperventilating and annihilating him with my glares. And he kept saying something along the lines of, just let yourself feel it. And I was like, I don’t think you understand that I actually am about to die buddy. But I had so much trust in him, from many interactions, and could feel beyond the immediate experience that even though my body was screaming at me that it wouldn’t be okay to let my terror out, that it would probably be okay to let my terror out. So I did, and it was such a relief, and some part of me incarnated more deeply onto this planet.
Another relevant note: I have also been in situations where I thought I should trust my healer, and I didn’t actually. You probably know what trust actually feels like. If you’re doubting it on a meta level, beyond the immediate experience level that will always feel afraid of letting that emotion out for the first time, you may just not trust that person. Trust, usually, comes from many little interactions, where you’re not sure if they can hold you in something, and they hold you, and you feel safe. Over and over. Until you get to the next cliff, and you’re not sure if they can hold you, and you’ve felt them hold you before, so maybe it’s okay to take the step this time.
This is the power of someone being with you directly, not mediated through parts. Someone actually embodying the regulated nervous system, interacting directly with you. You could spend so long getting to know the parts that are afraid and protecting, or you can feel a loving human’s invitation to let the emotion flow through even though you’re afraid. There’s something more ... masculine, about it. Inviting you into coregulation through the fear, without needing you to do anything, but unwavering in the love and stable presence.
When we are met in loving presence, with enough space and emptiness and love, if the tender places in us feel met, the emotions and energy unwind themselves. There’s nothing we need to do. Our energy wants to liberate, it’s trying to liberate, if we get out of the way and let it, it will liberate. That’s often the scary part. We’re trying so hard to get the thing to liberate because we don’t actually want to feel what it feels like for the energy to move. Life finds a way. Energy wants to express itself. Our souls want to expand into the world.
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