Learning To Exhale
When you grow up with ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) you do some strange things with your body
When you grow up with ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) like I did, you do some strange things with your body.
You tense up when something feels threatening. You hold your breath, sometimes for a very long time. You retreat into the internal safety mechanisms you oh-so-carefully constructed for yourself, hoping you’d survive whatever-it-is that’s coming at you fast and furiously.
Much of the time you don’t even understand it. (That will come later, either in therapy or sobriety or both.) All you know is that it hurts and it’s scary and you don’t want it.
Image generated by DALLe, using prompts I gave it
Once you find (or create) safety – however long it takes you – the unraveling begins. Unwinding the threads of the mysteries about what happened – and what you need to do to feel whole. (I was going to say “feel whole again” but I’m not entirely sure I ever felt whole or safe once the abuse began. So I don’t have a reference point I can tell about.)
Right now I’m in my 70th decade. I’ve done an incredible amount of healing work. With therapists of every stripe and flavor. With Native American and Tibetan healers. With shamans. With friends and lovers. All of it helped.
Yet to this day, I am still learning to exhale. I’m not saying that I don’t exhale at all (if I didn’t I’d be dead.)
No, what I mean is that mostly I am not aware that I am holding my breath (again!) until I start to release the air from my lungs. Then I realize it’s been a long time since I did. Again.
As much consciousness work as I’ve done (and trust me when I say it’s tons – at least 6 decades’ worth) – that holding-the-breath thing is so automatic it takes overwhelming presence of mind to notice it. And so far I’ve never been successful at stopping it before it starts.
Once, out of curiosity, I timed myself and discovered that I can comfortably hold my breath for almost five minutes without feeling stressed. Most of the time I think it’s around 3 minutes.
The funny thing is, as far as I can tell, holding my breath has no ill effects on me. I am not suffering when I do it. I am fully aware otherwise, perhaps slightly hypervigilant, and attentive to what’s going on around me. I never feel that I’m deprived of oxygen. Maybe that’s because normally I breathe from my belly – I practice full, deep breaths as my conscious default.
How it comes to happen (that I find myself holding my breath occasionally) startles me to this day, because as aware as I otherwise am, I don’t notice when it begins, only when I exhale afterwards. I find that strange indeed! What I most long to experience is relief from the subconscious habit.
It does occur to me that perhaps hypnosis might provide an answer, but honestly I’m not a great hypnosis candidate. The times I’ve experimented with it have been disappointing, as in when I tried to quit smoking. It didn’t work.
Oh eventually I did quit smoking, but I used a combination of other methods that finally led me to freedom. (If anyone wants to know what worked for me I’ll share in the comments.) I was very sad that hypnosis didn’t work, though, because many others have found that it did for them and I desperately wanted to be one of them.
Along the way I’ve acquired many tools that work for almost everything: sobriety, PTSD, chronic pain, triggers, and more. But “learning to exhale” is still an empty spot on the toolbelt, waiting for just the right thing.
All I know is that even if there isn’t the right tool, at least I understand why it happens. And as long as it’s not causing me harm (that I know of) I’m fine with it the way it is.
Knowing me and the work I do in the world, I suspect the main reason I’m writing this is because there just might be someone reading this who needs to know they are not alone. Someone else understands. I certainly do.
If that’s you, you will also know by now that I have nothing to offer you except solidarity and compassion for this strange after effect of something that should never have happened in the first place.
Survivors. That’s what we are. And in a strange way, holding the breath is a tool too – that helps us through moments when we aren’t able to process something quick enough, until the moment passes.
For me, when I’m startled by a sudden event, something unexpected, I often do need more time to process it than I do with other things that happen. Do I freeze? No, it’s not quite that. It’s just that it takes me longer, and then I’m good.
Does it make me feel vulnerable to share this with the world? No, not really – because it’s allowing you a glimpse into something that is true for me, true and real and powerful in its own way.
I’m showing you where one of my growing edges is – something that makes me eminently human. My path towards mastery is not complete. I’m just naming one of the edges as I travel, so that I know where it is as I go.
That’s why I write about it: to let you know how hard this journey has been, and also to let you know how I approach it. To me, it’s just another lesson I’m studying. That’s the best possible way to look at it. I’ll let you know if I master it before I leave.
🙏🙏🙏
Thank you for sharing this. I work in the early years and pre school space and the impact of ACES on adult behaviour is quite stark. I also work in the court system occasionally and wonder what happened to adults I see in their earliest years