What if polarization isn’t a problem, but the wisest solution in a trauma-induced state of blocked imagination?

If that were true, instead of fighting with polarization, we would rub it in a warm blanket and let it rest at the fire. At this time, we would focus our energy on widening fields of embodied, felt safety to practice radical imagination, inviting dreaming, paradox, and sacred pause. I note, that to imagine, means to soften into the present moment, and for that, the present moment needs to be safe enough to close your eyes.

When in the state of traumatic activation, we don’t have time to reflect, and analyze. We are incapable of listening. We need quick judgment and quick guidance towards fight or flight. The tigress in front of us could be dangerous or harmless. If we acknowledge that at her core, she is a beautiful creature with potential towards the whole spectrum of actions and feelings, we could be eaten up before our empathic thought is formulated. We are wisely programmed to survive by shortcutting and narrowing our judgments so simplified truth can give us direction.  Extremism may feel like a safe harbor when there is no capacity to process unbearable experiences. Especially, when those have been repeated over generations, constituting a foundational story of our ancestors. The story, in which we are not self-reliant agents, but missionaries burdened with hope for writing the story’s healing closure or a glorious happy end at all costs.  Expecting people in trauma (acute, frozen in past traumas, or a blended mix of past and present) to act with deliberation and mindfulness, also towards their perpetrators, does not seem aligned with our nature’s constitution. Yet, we so often expect the impossible from people who are already flooded by the impossible.

If polarization is our nature’s wise response, how do we heal the polarized world? 

In the past, I would vote for dialogue and education, but as noble as they are, for them to work we need humans who can access their prefrontal cortexes (nature wisely blocks us from overthinking when under high stress), we need attunement of many nervous systems able to access parasympathetic, ventral vagal activation (that is embodied multilayered safety that enables connection). To access does not mean to be necessarily fully there, it means being able to soften into a gentle opening towards compassion and imagination.

 So if that’s a prerequisite, the answer that keeps showing up for me is that we heal the world one nervous system at a time, persistently widening fields of safety. For that mission, attunement is our most powerful tool. We can become a healing presence, an energetic field that gently invites people to rest, soften, and trust without convincing them into any ideology. Here, safety is something we innerly sense, rest into, and soften into, rather than physically build with wires and bricks. For me, it is this inner state of:

“At the very core we all belong to love, and the world is created in abundance. I can not avoid pain and conflict, but I can see innate goodness in myself and in you, regardless of the pain and triggers that separate us”.

  The anchoring line may sound different to each of us, but the inner sense of spaciousness, trust,  and awareness of abundant resources that we can share without scarcity, plus deep inner knowing that we are one, interconnected and intraconnected world, will bring us closer to the most natural way of relating: compassionate presence. 

Healing the world one nervous system at a time, my nervous system is the first one I am responsible for.

Taking care of my inner landscape is not an avoidance of life reality, but an attuned response to the reality that needs safe harbors to digest its pains.  As long as I don’t wall myself off, keeping blooming gardens to myself, but inviting others to rest at my inner lakes, mountains, and rivers, I am part of a global healing movement. A peaceful inner landscape that cannot integrate dark clouds into its beauty would be a healing bypassing, avoidant strategy based on trauma not less than loud screaming is.

Gifted with a peaceful surrounding, I can welcome the safety of the moment to widen and stabilize my inner container. A spacious inner container can welcome complexity without fear or overwhelm. I learned that holding polarities in compassionate awareness is a pathway to healing and a sign of an inner abundance of resources too. It is like taking a deep breath to welcome life in its messy wholeness without falling into a dark mess yourself. 

Safety is more than a lack of danger. It can persist also when the danger is there as I can hold it all without collapsing. Part of me feels despair and part of me feels love. And I can breathe into love, make more space for her, and let the desperate part know that there is more to this moment than fear.

The healing practice of holding polarities starts simple and it progresses deeper.

I feel the coldness of my feet and the warmth of my forehead. 
I see beautiful trees and ugly plastic bottles as both belonging to my village. 
I feel pain that belongs to the past and I feel loved in this present moment. 
My heart is racing with fear and my feet are firmly supported by the Earth. 
I see your inborn dignity and I feel rage in response to your actions. 
I feel rage that burns like fire and I hold inner knowing that a decision can be made once rage has been digested into a clear boundary. 
I grieve and I hope. 
Part of me feels helpless and lacking agency, and part of me remembers how my father rebuilt a sandcastle when the wave took it by surprise.

The most difficult tend to be welcoming polarities, inner dichotomies of significant others, like integrating the wholeness of a father who was both an amazing companion on mountain hikes and a perpetrator of violence. How to not fall into either-or? We hold parts and the parts of us are capable of actions that do not seem consistent or coherent with each other. We are not a simple sum of parts, but a dynamic, complex system that may get dominated by parts that suffer the most and hold enough energy to surface strongly. Holding awareness of others’ inner complexity is not necessarily about forgiveness, it may but it does not need to have any other purpose than honoring the messy complexity of life and welcoming wholeness. That makes sense if truthfulness holds innate value for us and we find liberation in wholesome authenticity. We may recognize a deep suffering that leads to violation and still have no acceptance for the violation itself. Staying with polarities, and integrating paradoxes, saves us from falling into trauma-narrowness. But again, that isn’t a conscious mental choice we make, that’s what we can practice once our nervous system is attuned to safety.

Attuning to safety and learning how to have one foot on the stable ground and one in murky waters, allows us to strengthen our capacity to feel, process, ground, and become a healing presence for others. This is this beautiful moment when the nervous system attuned to compassion invites other nervous systems to settle. Or when one’s inner spaciousness can lend some space to others so they can feel and process whatever feels like too much.

Healing creates an inner, wide container to stay with high-intensity emotions without the urgency to soothe them by numbing or acting them out. It not only supports this inner processor but also helps us get free from trauma-based roles: rescuer, pleaser, quick fixer, rager, escaper, and makes it safe to not have answers, safe to not know, safe to take time to grief. Individual and collective healing feels like the best investment in the future. And yet, it can feel discouraging as a long-term process that does not respond to the urgency of the moment. 

The thing is… urgency is a trauma response on its own.

Urgency tricks us. It does not pass the cultural trauma diagnosis as engraved in normality. Urgency is awaited in dominant, competitive leadership like a godsend challenge in which one can show stamina, power, and boldness. Urgency accelerates history. “I don’t have time” is both another criterion of trauma and our culture’s criterion of success. 

Trauma creates cultures that keep us stuck in the past, and the more we rush the more we move backward.  With the speed of impulsive responses, we lose a narrative that could offer sense, meaning, coherence, belonging, direction, and above all, so awaited resolution. And if we authentically crave resolution we have found another reason to slow down. There is no resolution to complex problems without taking time to dive into this complexity with patience. 

Cultures that build their identity on urgency and fight, often do not offer prescriptions on how to function once the resolution is achieved. Resolution is truly awaited by all parts of us, once there is a realistic, implementable vision of how the life after the resolution could look like and a clear prescription on how to feel our value without being a warrior, an oppositionist, a rescuer, or a defender. Without this clarity, we only exchange the pain of the suppressed for the pain of the lost. I am aware that before this clarity can be found we need the capacity to welcome a few episodes of “Adventures of the Seekers in the World of Ambiguity, Doubt, and Grief.”

I allow myself to imagine a world in which there is a pause between trigger and response, between pain and solution, between input and judgment… 
For me, that would be the world breathing hope. 
Peace breathes before peace talks and no peace talks without peace breaths.  And if we lose peace breaths may we stop any talks till we sense inner peace again.

Yours dreaming in the felt sense of safety,
Hania Hakiel