When face to face with the initial shock of loss or emotional trauma, we tend to react by shutting down. It is as though one ties a tourniquet around one's heart, mind, and life to numb the painful flow of thoughts and feelings. Wherever we have closed ourselves off, those parts of us and all the energy connected with them in mind, body, and spirit, become inaccessible. The shutdown may manifest as being withdrawn, depressed, angry, or burying ourselves in our work. Or we may repress the whole affair so deeply into unconsciousness that the pain is never seen again except through the camouflage of dreams, inexplicable fears, and seemingly unjustified and uncontrolled emotions. No matter how "successfully" we manage to ignore or numb the pain, the wound is still there anyway. If we never address this wound and leave the tourniquet on indefinitely, we gradually become disconnected—perhaps completely disassociated—from those internal places where we have shut down and cut off the flow.
Because the energetic threads of mind, body, spirit, and emotions are interwoven, when we try to cut the threads that we think are connected with our pain, we also inadvertently sever the flow of energy to other parts of ourselves. We might, for example, decide to never speak up again because of some cruel or painfully embarrassing moment experienced the last time we did so. Bottling things up, however, affects the quality of our health, may undermine career progress or may cause self-confidence to wane—all of which add to the initial pain.
While we cannot always make the connection between past hurt and present circumstances, technically, the hurt is not in the past. The hurt is right now. The hurt comes from the current continued reaction of shutting down or cutting oneself off. The energetic effort it takes to stay that way compromises our well-being as the years go by. Although the saying goes that time heals all wounds, the truth is that time does not heal anything. What heals wounds is processing—dealing with the energies of those wounds (and ourselves), transforming them, and returning to balance.
At the moment of trauma, we may not always have the internal resources to process everything that is happening within and around us. Or we may not have the presence of mind to access those resources even if we do have them. We can therefore get stuck and lost in that traumatic moment. We can then become so accustomed to being in that place that we never move on from it. As a result, the person we used to be and were on our way to discovering before the trauma may become a distant memory.
Whatever doors we close, whatever walls we put up, whatever tourniquets we tie, it may seem that the actual event of shutting down is behind us. It happened yesterday or yesteryear. In reality, however, we have been actively (although, perhaps unconsciously) holding the door shut since the moment we closed it. We have been holding up the wall since the instant we built it. We have continuously pulled the tourniquet taught since the moment we tied it. What started out as an automatic reaction to the moment of pain, mutates into an enduring pain, however sharp or dull it may be, that is no longer solely about what originally happened. This becomes a block to healing. To heal pain, grief and the past is to open yourself back up to your intended blossoming.