Bouncing Across the Deep End

Today I was remembering when I was a little kid. When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a big kid. Did you ever have that experience? 

One day my mom took us all swimming, it was a big indoor pool, and I could see all the big kids down at the deep end, swimming all around and having so much fun. While I was just a little kid at the little end. I thought, “I want to be a big kid.” 

I was quite creative and courageous. I started bouncing. Maybe you’ve tried something like this, where you bounce going down into the water to push off against the bottom with your feet to pop out of the water to get a big breath of air before you go down again! Each time I bounced I would move forward a little bit more. Down, up, and down, and up. 

I was determined to find a way to get to that deep end to be with the big kids. What I ended up getting, was a lifeguard’s attention. That lifeguard watched me super close, they wanted to make sure that I was going to be safe. They tuned in to me, watching to be sure I came up for my next breath. Then they came and had a conversation with me on the side, encouraging me to practice a few skill-sets, so I could learn how to swim in the deep end and stay safe and secure. 

I think this memory is a lot like what it is to heal from trauma. When we begin to heal from trauma and come up to break through to get a new breath of air, we get a glimpse of what’s possible. We haven’t developed our capacity strengthened enough and we feel as if we are getting sunk down, underneath the water, and maybe that water feels like it is stagnant and painful. When we go down the water is covering us. Some of my clients say that it feels as if there are rocks that are holding them down under the water. 

That sparked my memory of what it was like when I was a kid and I could enjoy the water. When we have somebody that comes alongside us, that has the skill-sets needed, they can accompany us even when we go under the water and feel like there are rocks that are holding us down. They can leverage through their experience, attuning and resonating with us, and start to life those rocks and peek to see what’s hiding underneath them. 

What is it that is holding us down? Even just a little shift of one of those boulders or one of those pebbles, whatever size it may be, there is a felt-sense experience that’s felt from the inside out that signals that healing is possible.