When we sit in discomfort, in the anger and the rage, and allow it to be witnessed in a healthy way with curiosity and without judgement we begin to understand the parts of ourselves that have often been left without explanation. What we normally see is only the behaviour or reaction. We rarely see the story underneath it.
Last week, I wrote a couple of blogs about my mother's will mediation and the things I felt move and process. What I didn't share was how edgy I felt afterwards.
It was that old sensation, the one where I felt ready to take on a fight with anyone or anything that crossed my path.
What was different this time wasn't the feeling, the thoughts, or even the sensations in my body. They all showed up just as they have before. The difference was that I had a choice. I didn't have to engage.
I didn't have to react. I could become aware before my survival pattern took over and responded for me.
You see, I began feeling anger towards the very person we were in mediation with. The irony is that, aside from him disliking and taking issue with me, which is a story for another day I wasn't the person who had wronged him. I barely knew him. I lived in another state altogether.
So why, when the outcome was read, did I feel such rage? Especially those feelings that, as Christians, we often try so hard to fight against. I say this with amusement because I don't believe we can will ourselves out of anything. Healing requires alignment of the whole person mind, body, and spirit.
Then it hit me.
He represented something far bigger than himself.
I wondered why my brother, who had wanted to fight this battle so much, found resolution and was relieved it was finally over, while I felt completely disarrayed. It felt less like the end of a battle and more like the beginning of one.
Then I realised why.
My mother had spent much of her life putting men before all else. So much so that whenever I was unhappy, she would ask about my relationship status, as though happiness itself depended on having a man in your life.
I also believe it was part of the reason she treated our brother so differently from us girls. Not because he was better than us or more capable than us, but because she valued men differently. She spoke differently to him. She respected him differently.
She treated him differently.
So why did this mediation stir such detest in me? Why did my body react as though there was unfinished business?
Because for me, this battle was never about material possessions or money, regardless of what others may think. It wasn't about being a "seagull" circling for things that weren't mine.
It was something far deeper.
The man in mediation represented something I had fought before.
When the man who abused me as a child walked free from court,
There was no accountability. There was no justice.
There was no protection.
And here again stood another man a perpetrator in his own right, a man who had harmed others, jailed for offences involving videos of children and predatory behaviour. And once again, my mother chose him over her children. She chose him over safety.
He wasn't the man who harmed me when I was eleven.
But my body didn't know that.
My nervous system wasn't reacting to the mediation. It was reacting to a familiar story.
The same helplessness. The same lack of accountability. The same feeling that the perpetrator had somehow won.
In that moment, I wasn't only sitting in a mediation outcome. I was standing in a courtroom all those years ago, fighting the same battle I fought when I was eleven.
That realisation mattered.
Because the moment I identified the similarities, everything changed.
The rage made sense.
The anger had a story.
The fight response wasn't irrational. It was intelligent. It was my body trying to protect the younger parts of me that had never fully been witnessed.
And because I could see it, I no longer needed to become it.
The anger transformed into awareness. The rage softened into sadness. The activation moved towards integration.
This is why embodiment matters.
Without it, we can spend our lives on autopilot, reacting to present-day situations with the same survival responses we developed in entirely different circumstances. We respond as though we are still under threat because our bodies recognise a familiar pattern, even when our minds cannot.
Embodiment allows us to pause long enough to ask:
What does this remind me of?
Who inside me feels unsafe right now?
What story is my body remembering?
Because sometimes our reactions aren't about the person standing in front of us at all.
Sometimes they are about the eleven-year-old still waiting to understand why the perpetrator won, why the adults didn't protect her, and why her pain felt invisible.
And sometimes healing begins not by fighting the rage, but by finally listening to what it has been trying to say all along.
