When I was young I would occasionally get this weird sensation, where things seemed ages away, and then very close up. Sometimes I’d get it when reading intently. The book would loom large, with text massive and in my face, and then might zoom out – slowly or quickly – and seem to fade into the distance. Or it might happen with a line on the ceiling or a speck of dust on the carpet. It was pretty disconcerting, but I never told anyone about it. It was the worst during a fever, with disorientating zooming in and out, and with noises too – a quiet crunching in the distance, and then a booming, excruciating crescendo of white noise as ‘it’ (whatever it was) approached. And that was in blackness or with my eyes closed. It was my worst childhood nightmare, but I never once told my parents, or anyone. I imagined it wouldn’t have made any sense and they wouldn’t have understood why it felt so dramatic. I didn’t have the words for such a thing.
When my son was about five he told me he felt the same kind of thing when reading a book one day. So I took him to our family doctor. This doctor, known for her no-fuss approach (mixed with a good measure of competency too), said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s Alice in Wonderland syndrome. He should grow out of it soon. Don’t worry too much.’
Alice in Wonderland syndrome? So is that what I had all those years ago? How many other people have had this? How dramatic does it get? Apparently it’s a known thing, as Wikipedia and the interwebs will attest.
Alice in Wonderland. The big and the small. The close and the far…
Lately I’ve been doing a heap of soul-searching on my childhood and my attachment style. As I’ve found things out, it’s hit me like a tonne of bricks. There are things I’ve always known about my childhood and my responses to things, but some of these have never had any framework or reference points. Led lately by some childhood therapy, a powerful men’s circle, a supportive (and triggering!) partner, and a bunch of power books including the incredible Hold Me Tight (Sue Johnson); Polysecure (Jessica Fern), some vagus/breath work and meditation, and a few big fevers thrown in the mix, I feel like I’m searching some fertile ground.
In Hold Me Tight, Johnson argues it’s important to identify your weak spots, your big triggers, and where they came from and how they feel in your body. Where and when they hurt. She asks us to look for a ‘base emotion’ when you can get close to identifying the big hurt. Is there anger, sadness, shame, fear? Now here’s where I got stuck lately. I couldn’t identify any of these, or maybe a weak mix of all of these. Nothing clear to pinpoint.
Now, being a ‘murky edge’ follower, I feel like the end-point is not some clear and packaged revelation of exactly ‘what’s what’. It’s kind of missing the point to try to identify these base feelings/experiences with a microscope and our precise English language. We instead want to aim for what’s not so clear. We want to touch the murky edge. It’s more of a body reaction that we’re looking for. A primordial ‘aarrrrrrrrggggggggg’ … now that’s getting closer. If we can wrap it up neatly, we haven’t got it. So there’s that.
But hunting towards the big feeling… this feels like an important journey. What happens when I get triggered? And then trying to reference that back to some of the early moments and how that feels/felt in my body/mind. What were the feelings then? Anger? Sure of some kind. But not a heap, and anyway, is anger really a base emotion? I feel like anger is a transitory emotion between two states. A quick, simple message rather than a base emotion. But maybe I don’t understand core anger yet?? Fear? Yes for sure, probably the strongest, but this doesn’t feel like it. Shame? Definitely, that’s there too, but it doesn’t feel like the big thing. Sadness. Yes, I’d say sadness is there, wrapped up in a big dose of loneliness.
So this doesn’t feel like it helps. It’s all of these big emotions. It’s none of them as the one.
My revelation today is that the biggest feeling is a kind of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ feeling when I’m triggered. I pull towards, I zoom away from. It puts me in the liminal space between humanness and soul, and dangerously swinging between the two.
It’s a loved-one’s face, looming in my face, saying ‘explain yourself; use better words’. It’s me hiding away, backing away, finding a cubby or a bed to climb into. It’s me wordless, disconnected, voiceless, unable to communicate. It’s the safety of my own body, the retreat into myself. My soft toys, my doona. It’s ‘flight’ rather than ‘fight’. It’s anxious attachment and avoidance attachment rolled into one.
The yearning I feel for my partner is like the zooming in of an Alice in Wonderland feeling. Full of anxious (and beautiful) attachment. My partner is huge, filling the vista. Filling my consciousness. Everything is microscopic. Everything is in sharp focus. I’m consumed by the moment and my senses are heightened, tingling. Fully ‘on’.
When the trigger happens – whatever that is – the zooming starts. I zoom out. The sharpness blurs. The chasm looms. The distance goes from microscopic to kilometres, to aeons. To scary, empty space between. I retreat the other way. I feel myself talking but I’m not there, not present. I’m sheltering in myself, down to the atomic level, folding inward.
Does that make any sense? Do you think this is the first step and I still need to identify core emotions underneath? How do I progress from here? I feel like this is a big revelation, but I want it to lead to the next step, I’m just not sure what that is!