Key Takeaways
• Calmness can be a trauma response ||| • Trauma-based calm can create disconnection ||| • Calm as a survival strategy signals compliance ||| • Healing involves relearning emotional movement ||| • Healthy calm is responsive and flexible.
Learning Calmness Is Key
Calmness is often prized and encouraged, often associated with maturity, control, and emotional intelligence. Yet for some individuals, calmness wasn’t born out of safety but instead was developed due to environments in which emotional expression would have been risky or ineffective; staying calm became an effective means to reduce conflict, avoid punishment, or remain invisible; from a Gestalt perspective this creative adaptation evolved out of necessity rather than preference.
Difference Between Regulated and Suppressed Activities (Regulatory Vs Suppressive Operations (Compression Vs Compression).
Regulation requires flexibility – emotions arise and pass, intensity fluctuates, contact remains possible; suppression on the other hand freezes experience; in contrast with this kind of calm, when calmness serves as an emotional buffer rather than integration; surface calm is maintained while internal system tension remains; such calm requires effortful maintenance rather than natural ease of existence.
Calm as a Survival Strategy
Emotional expression in unpredictable or overwhelming environments is likely to attract danger; remaining calm signals compliance while decreasing attention. Over time, this strategy becomes automatic as our nervous systems learn that safety depends on remaining still; even as adults respond differently than expected when circumstances alter, our bodies still opt for stillness instead of reacting immediately – calmness thus becomes both choiceful and reflexive behavior.
Disconnection Disguised as Stability
Trauma-based calm is often marked by subtle disconnection. Sensations become muffled; emotions become narrowed; pleasure may feel distant compared to its original intensity, while distress management increases aliveness. Gestalt psychology emphasizes contact as central to health; when calmness reduces it limits not only pain but vitality too.
Why Anger and Joy Are Unsafe Emotions to Feel
Individuals whose calm has developed as protection may find strong emotions dangerously disconcerting, including anger which feels out-of-control; joy which feels too exposed; even positive intensity can spark fear in certain individuals; as their system has learned that remaining neutral prevents harm, emotional expression may become restricted more broadly rather than only during times of extreme stress.
Body Support of Bracing System
Even when calmness appears effortless, our bodies often reveal different tales. Jaw tension, shallow breathing or rigid posture could all indicate ongoing bracing that has gone undetected until now. Gestalt-oriented awareness calls attention to these sensations not to undermine it but in order to understand its costs; our body often shows us what the mind has normalized as normal behavior.
Calmness in Relational Contexts
Trauma-driven calm may create distance in relationships. Others may interpret your presence as contained yet unavailable; conflict may be avoided but intimacy limited; needs go unmet, boundaries remain implicit, contact becomes polite instead of real and you feel safe, yet something essential seems amiss in these interactions.
Relearning Emotional Movement
Healing does not mean giving up calm; rather it involves restoring movement – that means allowing emotions to rise and fall naturally without suppression. Gestalt work provides invaluable assistance with present moment awareness, impulse monitoring and sensation sensing – thus encouraging movement within systems so they no longer perceive expression as risk and can relax their rigidness more gradually.
Allow Calm to Turn Flexible
Healthy calm is responsive, not static; it encompasses activation and rest capabilities. Once trauma-based stillness softens, emotional range increases: Anger may be felt without overflowing into violence while joy can be experienced without fear. Calm becomes something the system enters or exits rather than an unchanging state that must always exist within a system’s confines.
When Calmness No Longer Provides Protection
As awareness expands, its old function of calmness becomes clear. It becomes evident as something which once protected but now limits connection – an observation which does not necessitate judgment; instead it promotes choice – making calmness an option rather than mandatory; what then emerges is an empowered presence capable of contact, expression and true regulation.
