What is Your Tipping Point?

 

   Four Kinds of Stress

1.    COMPRESSION 

2.    TORSION

3.    SIMPLE BENDING

4.    TENSION

The Breaking Point

 
There are four kinds of stress,
Yet we are not concerned
Today with compression,
Torsion, or simple bending
But (for this unknown substance
No wider than your spine)
Strictly with tension:
You will notice the sample
Is clamped at either end
By a framework designed
To measure the exact strain
Required to break it: this
Experiment might be crucial
To you: if you can learn
Under careful control
At what stress it will fail,
You are forewarned and -armed
Against one small disaster;
Therefore, not knowing
The breaking point
Precisely we begin increasing
Tension, at first seeing
Nothing, but soon on the surface
A change, an ashen look
As the crystal structure goes
Amorphous, and suddenly
The irreversible thinning
Out, the elastic failure,
The crack, the full fracture
At a waist like an hourglass,
The gauge spinning to zero,
And the two jagged halves
Never to be made one
Again except through fire
And the founding hammer.
 
December 1975.
BY DAVID WAGONER

This week we are going to personalize our healing from trauma by writing about the process of being under traumatic pressures.

 

It is interesting to think about the type of pressure you face. What does your trauma feel like?

Compression, Torsion, Simple Bending, or Tension ?

 

How does tension show up in your body?

 

Write a paragraph about where tension lands in your body.

Torsion is the stress that occurs when you twist a heavy solid object. The object moves from being a plane to being a curve.

 

In the metaphor of torsion.  How has truth or justice been turned and twisted so that it is distorted and it leaves you with fear or mistrust?

 

Write about a time truth or trust became distorted through twisted logic or deception.

 What does it mean to you personally to face an immovable force that wants to weaken you or fold your will in half?

 

Write a paragraph about ways that you might restore your emotional resilience?

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