Covid and Terror

A big part of healing from COVID is healing from the terror it invokes. Our bodies instinctively suppress terror as it is so hard to face, especially alone. It is an immediate and appropriate stress response. But it is also impossible to deeply heal with unresolved terror in the system.

In Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, we hold space for that terror to come forth. It will come bearing fearsome language — “I can’t breathe” “I will never be the same” “The tests all show…” — but the deeper truth is we are holding that terror with something untouched by the terror. Becoming familiar with this space, a space of health and trust and fluidity, we can heal the terror. Not with brute force or will but with tenderness.

In a similar vein, terrified children are not soothed by logic or by being shown that blood oxygenation levels are “within normal range”, they are soothed by being held in a loving space that allows them to express and release.

And being held with patience too. A space that accepts that healing from terror is an open-ended process. It’s part of who we are now, as individuals, a society, and a planet. It’s our teacher.

Anxiety often arises from unconscious avoidance of buried terror. Address the terror and anxiety will ease.

The lungs are up by the collarbones. The feeling of not being able to breathe is usually held by the diaphragm and sternum — because that area is evolutionarily suited to hold terror. This should be reassuring — that terror is not the lungs expressing an ironclad cellular truth but the system on a whole expressing an emotional one.