Vachon Imagined

When a person abandons their body, they often place blame somewhere outside of themselves.

They cannot feel, because feeling has come to be experienced as dangerous.

This belief does not appear out of nowhere. It is learned in a world that rewards certain emotions and punishes others, that praises what is acceptable and condemns what is not.

When I was fifteen, after losing my brother to suicide and carrying the weight of years of sexual abuse, I was surrounded by psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, pastors, friends, and family who tried to help me understand what I was going through.

But the only time I was ever asked what I actually felt was in therapy.

And even then, I often could not answer.

Not because there was nothing there.

But because I was not in my body.

I was in narration.

Repeating stories.

Replaying events.

Thinking instead of feeling.

When a person is split in two by judgment—when they are taught what is acceptable to feel and what is not—it creates an internal conflict. A constant back-and-forth between what is allowed and what is buried.

It can look like movement.

It can feel like thinking.

But often it is the same loop, repeating itself against the same internal wall.

And because there is activity, it can be mistaken for life.

But it is not life.

Life itself does not punish or reward in that way.

Life contains all possibilities at once.

It is the mind that splits experience into categories of good and bad, safe and unsafe, allowed and forbidden.

And when life is split this way, a person begins to lose contact with what is actually happening.

They become distant from sensation.

Distant from emotion.

Distant from the body.

When I was young, I learned how to leave my body in order to survive what was happening in it.

I could place my awareness elsewhere. I could escape inwardly. I even created a separate internal world—an imagined place where I could go to avoid what I was experiencing. It had structure, presence, even something like a voice or a sense of protection.

It worked.

Until it didn’t.

Years later, in therapy, I was asked a question I could not answer.

What does anger feel like?

Where is it in your body?

What shape does it have?

I did not know what she meant.

It was as if I had been asked to describe something from a language I had never learned.

And in that moment, I realized how far I had gone from myself.

Not broken.

Not absent.

But disconnected from sensation.

From there, the work was not to invent meaning.

It was to return to the body.

To notice what is actually here.

Anger as sensation.

Fear as sensation.

Grief as sensation.

Not stories about them.

Not explanations for them.

But direct experience.

And I still return to that question when I drift away from myself:

Where is this in the body?

What is actually here?

Because the paradox is this:

You cannot heal what you refuse to feel.

And you cannot release what you have never truly met.