One of the times in my life when I experienced the sensation of terror happened when I was unable to breathe. My airway was blocked and I found myself desperate to breathe.
Although the experience happened as a young child, its effects, like other traumatizing episodes has stayed with me. The sensation of being unable to breathe does that to you.
In my case, the object blocking my breathing consisted of small Christmas ornaments. It not only scared me, it scared my parents as well. After that episode I never inserted small objects anywhere near where I breathed.
Images of that event occasionally run through my mind anytime I find myself in situations where my breathing is challenged.
In a similar way, if you feel smothered in your relationship, or your spouse feels smothered, it’s a threat. The emotional smothering or actual smothering each trigger the same reactions. Your brain sees the similarity so it reacts to triggers and anything similar to them.
The sensation of panic, a sense of desperation and anxiety flood over you. The inability to breathe triggers strong panic sensations. Your mind races and quits processing information in its usual way.
These sensations are even worse if you’ve been traumatized in the past prior to the suffocation episode. If your spouse is into including suffocation as a way of enhancing sex, it can have disastrous side effects in such cases.
Suffocation activates old trauma circuits in your brain. Once those old circuits are activated, your reactions are strong. You react without thinking. The reaction can be so strong that it hits you like a blind panic.
Your fight or flight reactions kick in. At that moment, its’ about desperation, not passion. You may even start hitting or clawing at whatever you view as a threat in that moment of panic.
Suffocation isn’t good for you or your relationship on any level. Cutting off life sustaining oxygen is never good for you or your relationship, both of which need to breathe.
If you find yourself feeling suffocated, whether physically or emotionally in your relationship, change is needed. Something needs to be altered in the way the two of you are dealing with each other.
If you have trauma reactions, you need to take care of that as well. In the video on Affair Trauma, you can learn ways of breaking those old patterns and the power they have over you. The material also helps with other earlier life traumas as well.
When you are being suffocated, even emotionally, you aren’t thinking clearly. Those sensations are telling you that change is needed.
Instead of gasping for recovery and your breath, you can start working on the traumas with a few clicks.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
