Soul Mirrors
An exploration of the crossroads of the soul, our traumas and love
I always appreciated the idea of the soul fragment. It's easy to visualize. We then consider the notion that we experience traumatic events which dislodge soul fragments, which leave our energy body getting stuck in a place and time.
Perhaps what we call stored 'trauma' is the cement that holds the remaining fragments together. It hardens and keeps the soul mirror from disintegrating, but perhaps also, from fully re-integrating.
Perhaps grief fills the heart spaces that our lost loves, friends, and family members filled when they were available to us.
Instead of cement we could envision the traumatic scaffolding as ice. As the love interest or friend approaches and the soul parts have an affinity, that creates warmth. The soul shards vibrate and dance and reach in anticipation for those of the other. The warmth creates melting, which would seem to threaten the stability of the structure of the soul mirror, as it were.
This awakens the sleeping trauma, the sentinel. The trauma then does what it does. Maybe it attacks. Maybe it runs. Maybe it freezes or fawns. Perhaps it attacks, runs, freezes then fawns. I've seen it or done it. But always it mistakes the intention of the pure-hearted lover.
I love every fuzzy animal. I have birdseed out for the birds and squirrels. I want nothing more than for a raccoon or a squirrel to eat from my hand. Then I could pet it, name it, put it in my pocket, build it a little house etc. It's just how I am.
But that squirrel doesn't understand. His survival instincts tell him I want to eat him. And these crude instincts work--they keep him alive. And yet, they're absolutely wrong about my intentions. This is, in a nutshell (see what I did there?), trauma. It keeps us alive. But maybe only half-alive.
And just like the squirrel, the trauma survivor sees the love interest resembling the narcissist that caused all the wounding. The compliments, the promises, the apparent empathy. This is the trauma employing pattern recognition and it can be a shortcut to, or a faulty means of discernment.
And yet, if we probe deeper, the trauma does serve a function. It does hold the shambles of our weary souls together. The threat IS real. Not because the lover intends any threat, but because the frozen and crusty trauma glue is a provisional solution--often the best a scared kid’s subconscious could do in a pinch. It's not a workable long-term plan. This becomes all-too-evident as these lovers attempt to court or integrate their lives and the walls come up. We thought this person was the one that didn't/wouldn't illicit such responses, as if we had kissed enough frogs and now our Prince Charming had arrived at last. And then we feel even more broken.
We vilify the other or ourselves or both. We blame, we draw the wrong inference. We see from the sentinel's guarded perspective. We dehumanize the other and traumatize them. Hurt people hurt people. We conclude that we might as well just withdraw.
And I guess I bring this up, not to merely describe the human condition as it pertains to romantic love, but to offer that this moment where the warming occurs might be the most opportune place to start doing the work again in earnest. We can work on ourselves when alone, when not triggered. But when we are wide open and our defenses keep coming up, we see it in technicolor.
We might seize the opportunity before us. This is our chance to release more of the provisional soul crust and to invite those alienated parts back into the fold. We can mirror this to our lover. We can assist the lover in their personal archaeology and/or be working on ourselves in parallel.
Imagine the trust we could build. And yet, since love is giving, we may find ourselves in a situation where the only way to truly give that love is to not try with them. Not to reach out. Not to soothe or seek soothing. The only option we are given to be truly loving is to let go. No asking. No explaining.
And it's in that place where we discover if we're capable of absolute altruism. And maybe that's where the most basic foundation of trust is built, in our acquiescence, however reluctant.
