The Shock Field

Part 2 of The Shock Field Series

What the Body & Nervous System Remember

In Part 1, When I Could No Longer Hold Myself, I explored what became visible when I could no longer rely on the familiar ways I had learned to hold myself together.

But perhaps what has stayed with me even more than the pain itself is the shockingness of the experience.

Not simply the intensity of the pain, but the direct experience of shock, deep in my nervous system.

What feels interesting is that I was not really aware of this in the moment. I was aware of pain — excruciating pain — but I do not think I was aware of shock itself.

Looking back, I do not think my mind was really online at all. There was no greater awareness observing what was happening. There was just the immediacy of the experience itself and something much more primordial taking over.

Entering the Shock Field

The pain felt electric. My body seemed to move into some instinctive survival response that had very little to do with thought and everything to do with something older.

One of the strangest parts of the whole experience was the period after they gave me morphine. I had never had opioids before and, while there was still pain and intensity, there was also humour, lightness and moments of laughter that somehow existed alongside it all.

Looking back, I have found myself wondering whether the medication created some buffering around the deeper shock moving through my system. Not completely, but perhaps enough that I could stay with the experience without fully dropping into the depth of everything that was happening all at once.

Because it was only afterwards, as the medication reduced and I came home, that I felt as though I crashed into the depths of the feelings moving through me.

I felt unusually foggy and tender, and my emotions sat incredibly close to the surface. I also had this strange sense that I had not fully landed back in myself yet.

I found myself becoming deeply curious about the fragmentation that can come with shock. Not because it felt as though parts of me had literally disappeared, but because there was a very real felt sense of splintering — parts wanting to stay close to what had happened, parts wanting distance from it and parts wanting to disappear from it altogether.

Some of this terrain was not entirely unfamiliar to me. I already understood something of shock, dissociation and the ways the nervous system instinctively protects us when experience becomes too much to fully stay with.

But knowing something and being dropped directly into it are very different things.

This was not an idea.
I was inside it.

And what struck me afterwards was that the shock had taken me somewhere in my nervous system that I do not think I had consciously been before. It was terrifying, and yet I did not disappear.

Something in me now knows that I can be there — even if only for moments — without losing myself completely.

There is something powerful in that, although not in the way I might once have thought of power. Not triumph or conquering, but something quieter than that. Perhaps less fear of my own depth.

I have also had the strange sense that this experience opened a doorway into the shock field already living within my nervous system.

It almost feels as though acute experiences can open seams within us, giving us access not only to the immediate feeling itself, but perhaps to all the layers of that emotion we have known before. Layers from this lifetime, experiences consciously remembered and perhaps even experiences we do not consciously remember.

And perhaps, if I stay open to mystery rather than rushing to certainty, something wider too — collective layers, ancestral layers and something deeply human that we still do not fully understand.

I do not know.

But I found myself wondering.

Seeing the Architecture

One of the things that has struck me most through all of this is the strange gift of seeing something so clearly. Not because I would wish the pain itself on anyone, and with huge respect for those living with chronic illness and long periods of suffering, but because this acute experience seemed to move me through something in a highly concentrated way.

Shock entering the system.
Fragmentation and splitting.
Buffering and numbing.
Emotional reverberation afterwards.

And then a gradual return and reopening.

And suddenly I could see the architecture of something I suspect I have lived many times before — only much more slowly and much less consciously.

This was terrifying, fragmenting and deeply vulnerable, and also profoundly revealing.

And perhaps what feels most interesting of all is that I can sense this inquiry is still not finished yet.

Something else feels quietly present at the edge of it.

And perhaps that is where Part 3 begins.