The soul also has scars

"Do you have siblings?"

This is a harmless commonplace question people ask as they get closer. But Katrin Klausner * made her cry for years. She hated that question, and she hated the word. Brothers. Then her neck tightened and she just wanted to get away. Away from the questioner, away from the inner agony, she only wanted to be alone with the pain, which was much too big. Yes, she had a brother.

A big brother, one to admire, in whom the girlfriends fell in love. But the brother does not live anymore. He died fatally on a mountain tour. Katrin was 17 years old and alone. The family could not grieve. Nobody had learned to talk about feelings, and then it was too late to learn. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the red-eyed eyes. I knew silently that the mother was back in the cemetery, that the father took every hour of overtime to forget. The pain lay like a too heavy cloth on everyone, and no one dared to lift it.

We feel spiritual scars when we feel less

The first few years Katrin remained wordless when the language came to Georg. Only her tears spoke. Later, she could say "yes," that was more a whisper, her gaze fixed on the floor, like a convict, that's how she felt.

Finally she began to speak. With her new friend, to her best friend. The pain slowly became weaker. She began psychotherapy and once again said goodbye to her beloved brother. Since then she has been free to talk about George, to remember without fear the minutes when the father of George's friend appeared at the door and delivered the terrible news. The loss will accompany her forever, but the wound has healed in the meantime. There is a scar on her soul now. When she strokes it, she whispers tenderly her brother's name. The pain has died away.

In the invisible world of the psyche, we can not look at our scars. We can only feel how Katrin is forming the scar. When the wound closes, the pain gradually subsides. When the trauma heals, the event becomes the past. We feel our spiritual scar when we feel less. We feel them when we barely feel, when we feel calm, clarity, composure in the face of the unbearable images that have torn us apart. The essence of the scar is the absence of the pain. With a wound on the hand, we can touch the scar, and it is a little numb. In our psyche, it is the liberating distance to once depressing feelings that let us feel the emotional scars.

* Name changed by the editor

There are also scars we do not know about.

But it makes a difference whether we remember the pain or are not aware of it. Maybe we were very young, and the memory is stored unreachable.

Or we suppressed our feelings at the time and did not allow them. Or the pain we experienced was so overwhelming that it was kept out of our consciousness. Psychology refers to this process in our brain as dissociation. We experience something, but it does not penetrate our consciousness. In essence, we are constantly dissociating. When we talk in a noisy restaurant, our brains make any sounds that we have no interest in disappear. In situations too overwhelming to mentally handle, the same thing happens. Our consciousness is separated from experience. This is a protective mechanism of our psyche. But there is no really healed scar. The wound is only hidden.

In severe traumas, even the brain structures change. People who have been badly mistreated in their childhood bear the traces of it forever and become more susceptible to stress and the dark shadows of depression. So there are scars in us that we do not know about, that will shape us for a lifetime. And wounds that we first have to discover so that they can scar.

Mental pain is anchored

Everything has to be scarred if it does not tell us anymore. In the limbic system, the emotional center of our brain, we store memories without knowing it. And these memories determine our lives by shaping our experience. He who is ashamed fears shame and meets her everywhere. And only when the old experiences are replaced by new ones, when new pathways emerge in our brains, we detach ourselves from our past.

These new connections in the brain, which free us from having to go through the same fears over and over again and experience the same pain, are the biological manifestations of our mental scars. When we pause and look at our lives to see what has once held us captive and what today was only a faint echo, a reminder of worse feelings and times.The scars of our soul - in sum, they are our mastered and left behind past.

Scar Tissue Kinesio Taping | Reduce and Mobilize Scars + | Northern Soul channel (May 2024).