The bodily experience we have taken in from [other people that our body has internalized as 'imported parts'] will affect our muscles, belly and heart brains, autonomic nervous system, eyes, ears and vocal cords when they are active in us. While carrying this much of others can feel like an overwhelming burden, it is also the open door to healing, since their aliveness inside us means they can be touched with the ... care that others might offer us.
Each time I experience the unseen wisdom of a person's system, it deepens my trust in the inner process unfolding and my awe at the way we are organized to be protected until the possibility of healing arrives.
We stayed with the one who felt dead inside, acknowledging his protective value, even though we had no cognitive awareness of who and what he was sheltering ... 'What is this depression, this one who is so still, wanting to tell us?
It can help us keep our balance to distinguish between the living people who were hurtful and the internalized ones who are now part of our neurobiology. Those who harmed us may never change, but once they become part of us, they seem to partake in our impulse towards healing.
Only if we are able to widen the lens to take in the bigger picture that includes both the outer challenges and the inner distress do we begin to sense that the protectors are in proportion to what is in need of shelter. It is our system's sense that moving the safeguard aside and allowing the implicit to emerge would be more harmful than whatever the protector is doing in this moment.
When we consider our rich inner communities, we will find it is quite possible that more than one pattern of attachment can arise at the same time, sometimes in support of the others and sometimes in conflict.
If we can see the scientific viewpoint as one way of perceiving rather than as offering the only or superior truth, then we can learn from these discoveries without shifting into a more mechanical viewpoint ourselves.