The Four Layers of Suffering: A Sperm Whale’s Guide to Navigating the Internal Sea of Suffering

📷 Brandon Cole / Te Papa Museum, NZ.

Want to be able to navigate the sea of internal suffering like a majestic sperm whale?

In working with myself and with clients, I have noticed time and again that a clear pattern emerges in terms of how layers of pain, emotion and survival responses build up over time and how they are processed.

And knowing this is very helpful when it comes to navigating the internal sea of suffering like some kind of majestic sperm whale that just intuitively knows when/how/where to migrate across thousands of miles ​​🐋. 

Check it out, y’all:

The reason why our suffering can be so intense is that often ALL FOUR layers are active at the same flippin’ time. 

Our body is simultaneously holding (for example) all the hurt, all the anger, trying to hold all of that in desperately, while also indulging in endless coping mechanisms to get through the day.

It’s deeply bananas.

So let’s dive into each layer like a playful porpoise. 

First, there is the core hurt.

This is the original threat to our safety and/or attachment to primary caregivers. This almost always originates in childhood.  

This could be deep sadness, chronic/toxic shame, a felt sense of lack, deficiency or a general sense of being not good enough and unloveable. 

The hurt is generated in order to signal the presence of a threat to the system. Often this hurt is very overwhelming or we don’t have the support we need to process it. 

Secondly, there is a survival response that arises in order to protect us from this hurt.

The major responses here are fight (anger), flight (fear), freeze or fawn. 

• Fight—or anger—seeks to regain control of that which is a threat to neutralize it. 

• Flight seeks to run away from the threat.

• Freeze seeks to remain still, quiet, unobtrusive and small in order to avoid exposing the fact that we feel hurt to the wider world. 

• Fawn seeks to behave in whatever way is felt necessary to avoid triggering another person’s fight response (and therefore avoiding having our own hurt triggered in the process). 

Survival responses are physiological. The whole of our human physiology is harnessed in order to get to safety: increasing or decreasing heart beat, tightening or relaxing muscles, widening or narrowing the pupils, and so on. 

However, in many cases the intensity of our survival responses is not allowed by our parents, authority figures or society. In that case, we have to suppress it. 

So when whatever protective emotion arises is either too overwhelming or we feel it will be unsafe to fully express that emotion, we must prevent that emotion from being felt, seen or expressed. We must hold it back, hold it in, pretend it’s not there and so on. 

In short, the survival response must be repressed, which is the third layer. 

• Rather than allow the fight response, we push our anger down. 

• Rather than allow the fear response, we pretend we aren’t afraid. 

• Rather than allow the freeze, we pretend everything is cool.

• Rather than allowing the fear that lies at the base of the fawn response, we push it down and make avoiding conflict part of our ‘nice’ personality.

But when that happens, crucially, the repressed emotion doesn’t go away. It gets pushed into the BODY, literally into the muscles and fascia and nerves, where it is stored as pent-up survival energy ready to be triggered by any similar threat. 

Often the repressed energies are accompanied with deeply held unconscious beliefs like “I can’t get angry or they’ll yell at me” or “I can’t show fear or they’ll reject me”. 

At this point, we have the core hurt, the survival response and the repressive mechanism all operating in the background of our awareness. 

It turns out that holding all of this pain and energy down is INCREDIBLY PAINFUL (who knew?). 

This brings us to the fourth layer: the coping behaviours. 

These behaviours are designed to help us manage the huge amount of survival stress locked into the system and just get through the flipping day! 

We do this in several ways, here are a few of the main ones:

One is dissociation. We simply check out of our body and move into our mind completely. Our body just ‘disappears’ the feelings by numbing itself out. The issue here is that, by numbing ourselves out from negative emotions in the body, we also numb ourselves out from positive emotions, our natural sense of biophilia (love of life) and connection to ourselves. It’s a high price to pay. 

Second is addictions. We use substances (alcohol, drugs, etc.) or behaviours (sex, work, etc.) and even identities (political ideologies, being right, being the ‘smart one’ etc.) to help us regulate our nervous system. This works in the short term, but can be very painful in the long run as we tend to get exhausted by the compulsive pursuit of our target substance/behaviour. 

Third is control. We seek to control ourselves and others and the world in order to help us feel safe. This might arise as being very self-critical or judgemental, adhering to very strict disciplines (or trying to), trying to control the behaviour of others or trying to change, destroy or save the world. This makes us very tense and anxious. 

These are all ways of trying to manage the three preceding layers.

Within any given individual there can often be hundreds of patterns playing out across these four layers. It’s pretty wild. 

Important note #1 : there’s nothing wrong with any of this. ALL of it would have been necessary at a certain point in our lives. It just might not be necessary any more ;). 

Important note #2: this is just a model! It isn’t absolutely ‘true’. It’s difficult to draw very clear distinctions between the different layers of this model, so just use it as a rough guide. Take it with a SaltBae-sized pinch of salt. 

When it comes to our healing journey, it helps to stay cognizant of the different layers and their respective purposes. 

We can’t necessarily go straight to the hurt without looking at the repression or the anger, for example. And if we want to work with addiction, we should consider the core hurt that is driving it. 

And we need skill. 

Without the skill, we are like a sperm whale trying to migrate across the ocean but not know which way is North or South! More like fail whale, amirite?! :D. 

When you try to look at one part (say, sadness) you’ll find that the other layers activate in response and try to get in on the act. 

So you’ll move towards the sadness, but then fear will arise. Then if you look at the fear another part will come in to hold that back. Then thoughts about chocolate or ice cream step in to try to distract you. 

And if you’re not careful you can end up being lead round the houses, being dragged from part to part without truly feeling into each one. 

Equally, you can be overly dismissive, trying to ignore or push aside protective parts in your bid to get to the core hurt.  

There’s a careful balance to be found between respecting each part and also not getting bossed about by them! 

If you want some support navigating the internal sea of suffering with sperm-whale-esque majesty, then check out my one-on-one Somatic Inquiry sessions here ;). 

Or you can read more about what my clients say about working with me here. 

Good luck! 

Ben

Need help getting to the root of your own suffering?

I offer one-on-one Somatic Inquiry sessions to help people to uncover and unravel the pain - rooted in the body - that is driving them bonkers so they can live in greater freedom. 

You can book a free and quite chill call to chat to me about it ;).