Shawn can recount horrifying facts — sleeping under the bed, cracking his father with a guitar, the chronic violence — without becoming emotional. Joe calls this “speed bumping”: going right over an emotion he won’t let himself feel. The unfelt feeling is the longing for his father’s love, a longing that doesn’t disappear no matter how abusive the parent was, because something in us inherently wants a relationship with our parent.
“Until you can feel the hurt and the pain of the experience, then you’re you’re still going to be controlled by it.”
The endurer’s predicament is precise: he can be self-reliant and withstand anything, but he cannot express or feel hurt. As a child, showing hurt to his father would only have invited more abuse, so the hurt became unsafe to feel in his own body — and that is exactly the thing that has to be felt to get through the trauma. What finally breaks Shawn down isn’t the violence but feeling the childhood anxiety again. That feeling is the actual material being processed.
Processing trauma has an order: first talk about it in a safe place, then deeply feel all the hurt and pain. Without feeling it, a person keeps “living a life as if that trauma is still occurring all the time.”
Related Concepts
- Abuse creates either the endurer or the perpetual victim
- The ancillary pain of not being seen must also be processed
- Closing your heart to protect yourself traps you
- Believing you’re bad perpetuates the trauma cycle
- Anger is the doorway from endurance into buried sadness
- The endurer pattern survives by refusing to feel pain