Eroding Trauma

Many therapists use nature as a way to connect lessons or concepts to the feelings we are experiencing. Our brains know how natural elements work (for the most part), and so metaphors using nature resonate deeper than just with our intellect. Nature speaks to our hearts, our felt experience. Susan McConnell, in her book Somatic Internal Family Systems Therapy, compares water to the process of mending our hearts, “Water teaches us about relationships and the process of change. Resonating with pain in a fully embodied way eventually dissolves the hard places of hurt.” She is essentially saying that by actually feeling the pain, we become like water, eroding away the places that our past hardships have stayed with us internally. We are fluid and ever changing, and when we lean into our felt experiences, we embrace the power that water has, giving it motion to carve out the landscape in our minds, shaping ourselves as we wish.

“Water teaches us about relationships and the process of change. Resonating with pain in a fully embodied way eventually dissolves the hard places of hurt.”

~ Somatic Internal Family Systems Therapy, by Susan McConnell