Chapter 13: Living From the Neck Up

In Part I, we wrote a full story of What Happened.

Now we’re ready for Part II: Feeling What Happened.

Part II has three chapters. In them we’ll focus on feeling the emotions we were too overwhelmed to face the first time around.

As I mentioned in Part I, after something overwhelming, the survival brain hunts for answers:

1. How did I end up feeling so powerless (or vulnerable)?
2. What did my body go through?
3. What can I do to keep it from happening again, or be more prepared next time?

This boils down to:

1. What happened?
2. What did I feel?
3. What happens next time?

So far, our writing has answered the first question. We wrote down what we remembered and layered in the sensory details our body carried.

Now we turn to the second question: What did I feel?

It’s possible that, even while following the steps so far, you’ve been able to circle the hardest parts of past moments without landing on them. Or maybe, like it was for me, those memories still aren’t fully available yet—they may be suppressed.

Either way, the pain will surface when it’s ready. When it does, it helps to be prepared.

Facing it matters because those tough memories hold missing pieces. Without them, we can’t move on to Part III and write a new ending—one where we meet the original challenge and overcome it.

The new ending we write in Part III gives our survival brain “proof” we can handle similar situations in the future. It helps reset how our nervous system reads the baseline safety level of the world around us and our ability to handle threats.

When our system stops scanning for danger every second, the good things get louder.

That’s why the heart of Embodied Wholeness Storytelling is reconnecting with the sensations in our body we didn’t fully feel back then. Those sensations are a doorway back to the instinctive intelligence inside our unfinished fight, flight, or freeze responses.

Those instincts were shoved down and boxed up, not lost. We need them to guide us toward the new ending.

To do this, we’ll revisit the most uncomfortable details of the original event—the places we never wanted to go again. That can bring up a lot of pain.

The challenge is that when pain takes over, it drowns out the softer signals underneath, and we lose access to our instincts.

So Part II is about building the capacity to stay with the burn just long enough for the quieter signals to come through again.

That’s why, before we write the new ending, we’ll explore how to feel what’s under our pain.

Why feel what happened?

For years, I told my military stories to friends, therapists, and other vets.

I explained how I thought I felt. But I stayed in my head the whole time. I wasn’t actually feeling what I was describing.

I was telling my stories from the neck up. Which kept me living from the neck up. 

I didn’t even realize it. I’d spent so long dodging my emotions that I became an accidental Grand Master at it. I could tell stories that moved people to tears, laughter, or shock. But did they move me?

Nope.

Did I ever slow down and feel how I felt about what happened?

Hell no.

First of all, I didn’t really know how. Second, I didn’t see the point.

I thought:

“What good is it gonna do to feel all this stuff? How will that help? I need to stay positive. You don’t enjoy life by being a sad sack stuck in the past.”

So I kept pretending I wasn’t. I look at old photos now and I can see it—those smiles look more like grimaces.

The idea of actually feeling the rage, letting it move through me, of letting out that fucking raw howl of bitterness and heartbreak…what was that gonna do except drop me into a pit of negativity I'd need days to get out of?

Then, one afternoon in early 2019, everything shifted.

With my partner having my back, I made it into the places where I’d hidden my grief and rage. For two hours, she sat with me as I stayed with the pain I’d always run from. The black hole of "clenching" in my gut—the thing that had sucked all the light out of my life—I finally worked my way through it.

I stayed there, feeling the most godawful stomach sensations I can imagine anyone feeling. It was like being stabbed with a hot knife or giving birth to a lava baby—over and over.

The next morning, the moment I opened my eyes, I could sense something was different. The constant low-level headache I’d woken up with for years was half gone. Over the next few weeks, the stomach pain I’d carried for a decade also dropped by half.

It felt strange, like a part of me was missing. It was as if holding onto that grief had given my life meaning. Like it was proof that I hadn’t forgotten the people I lost, proof I still honored them. 

It was also an excuse to stay the way I was. That grief had become part of my identity.

I’d bent my life around avoiding that darkness for so long I didn’t recognize the unclenched face in the bathroom mirror.

Who was I now without that black-hole badge of honor?

That’s a story for another time. What mattered was: those two hours showed me I’d never really learned how to face my deepest pain.

I realized that if I wanted to feel better, I had to get better at feeling.

So I made it my mission to “feel every truth in my body.”

The next two chapters in Part II cover strategies to help you do that, at your own pace.

Starting with Chapter 14: Breathing Across Time.

Let’s keep going.