Why good experiences can feel scary?

Intimacy, joy, connection, vulnerability, being seeing and all good experiences come with a lot of somatic charge. They feel too expansive for a nervous system that has been in self-protection and contracted for a long time.

For this reason the good things can feel scary and overwhelming, even when we cognitively desire them they may not feel good at first, as we don’t have the capacity to experience them in our bodies.

That’s why we often can run away from good supportive relationships. Feel empty or undeserving when good things, we have always longed for, happen.

Part of my work with clients, among other things, also includes building resilience, creating capacity for expansive experiences.

It’s not enough to just discharge incomplete fight/flight/freeze/shutdown responses from the system.

The absence of a negative doesn’t make a positive.

It’s imperative to create new neural pathways, so that you have a different response to these expansive emotions and sensations. In sessions we also show the body, in a safe controlled environment, in a titrated manner, how it’s like to feel safe and to experience good emotions.

This work involves so much more than just trauma release.