Expansive Space: Exploring Trauma Narratives and Meaning-Making
The Air Element In Trauma Recovery
If Earth is the structure that holds us, Air is the space within and around us. It’s the invisible thread between body and spirit, past and future, self and other. It enters us before we even choose it. The first inhale. The first scream.
Air is the element of language and logic, dreams and insight, questions and meaning-making. It’s the story we tell. It moves through the lungs and the mind, between people, across time. It’s connection, communication, cognition, and consciousness. It’s what we remember and what we believe.
After trauma, we can lose perspective. It’s natural to doubt what’s real and cling to beliefs that once helped us survive. The sacred intelligence of Air in survival can look like grasping for “the truth” or spinning stories to make sense of the hurt. When Air predominates, we become expert explainers. Skilled dissociators. Disembodied thinkers. Detached observers.
But, in trauma healing, the element of Air also teaches us to make space. To observe with gentleness. To listen to the inner winds. To return to the breath. It helps us metabolize memory. It opens a window where there was once only a wall.
When we have enough safety in our bodies and our lives, when our feet are on more solid ground… we may notice the body begins to soften and the soul begins to stir. Air comes in, whispering an invitation to allow breath to return. To make space for reflection and curiosity. To name what happened, to wonder (not fix, not analyze) what it means. Not as an intellectual exercise, but as an act of reclamation.
Polyvagal Pathways: Air as Flight
If Earth corresponds to Freeze—immobility, collapse, hypoarousal—then Air correlates with Flight: the sympathetic escape response.
In the language of the nervous system, Air aligns with the sympathetic branch—specifically, the flight response. This is the state of mobilization that arises when danger feels imminent and escape seems like the only viable option. Heart rate spikes. Breath quickens. Energy surges through the limbs. The body gets ready to flee.
This is a state of anxious momentum. Of scanning, strategizing, and spinning out. The mind races to make sense of things while the body tries to outrun the ache. Not grounded. Not still. This is movement without anchor: Restless. Frantic. Unsure where to land.
The body is wired and tense. The inner voice says, “I must!”
So we keep moving. We dissociate through doing. We try to figure it all out. We grasp for control. Air is clever. It adapts quickly, reads the room, fills the silence. It can look like achievement, deep insight, articulate reflection—even like healing itself. But, when it’s fueled by urgency and not integration, it just keeps us spinning in story.
There is such genius in our Flight response. It helped us survive. We developed sharp minds and agile instincts to stay ahead of collapse. Uncatchable. Too fast to be hurt.
But healing asks us to slow down.
To notice what’s underneath the hurry.
To breathe into the chaos instead of bypass it.
When Air is rooted in safety—when Earth has held us long enough to make space for the breath… then it carries us back to ourselves. It’s a portal to perspective. It lifts us out of the immediacy of pain and helps us see the wider sky. It names what we’ve lived through. It helps us put the puzzle pieces in place. It clears the static. It tells the truth.
Air and the Parts Within
In Internal Family Systems (IFS), we understand that every part of us is trying to help. Even the ones that feel chaotic, frantic, or exhausting. Air is the part of us that escapes. That thinks fast, talks fast, moves fast or just up and disappears.
Our Air parts are often the planning, perfectionistic, productive, over-achieving Managers. But, they can show up as Firefighters, too—panicked parts that spring into action the moment things feel overwhelming… flooding us with ideas, impulses, or distractions. They obsess, intellectualize, analyze. These are the parts that keep us scrolling at midnight. That organize the spice rack during a breakdown or in a fit of insomnia, rip up the linoleum with their bare hands at 3am. The parts that replay conversations in a loop or rehearse every possible scenario in our minds. Parts that say: “If we stop, we might fall apart.”
Exiled Air parts are often the little ones inside of us who were never believed. Who spoke a truth no one wanted to hear.
We can choose to turn toward all of these Air parts with awe and get curious about the energy that drives them.
That means we track their speed with care. We invite more breath. We cultivate internal spaciousness so that urgency can begin to settle. It means offering evidence of the contrary to the parts of us that believe stillness is unsafe. Once we’ve fostered trust, these wind-whipped parts can slow down and come into presence.
Then, the re-membering begins.
Archetypes of Air
Air is the archetype of the witness. The thinker. The translator. The one who questions everything and refuses to be pinned down.
Air is the Seer or the Messenger. The Sacred Scribe. The Winged Spirit. Speaking in riddles, dreaming in metaphors, living half-a-step beyond the visible world. These are the ones who live in the liminal, who track patterns and possibilities, who search for meaning in what seems senseless. Air is the realm of language, perspective, theory, and thought. It’s the capacity to zoom out. To name what’s happening. To speak the unspeakable.
In Jungian terms, Air aligns with the archetypal dimension of the symbolic mind—the part of the psyche that generates meaning through association, intuition, and image. Air is the realm of logos: the ordering principle of thought, narrative, and reason; But, it also touches mythos… connecting us to the collective unconscious through dreams, signs, synchronicities. It’s the place where memory and metaphor intermingle.
This element brings both the gift and the grief of awareness. Too much air, and we get swept into abstraction—disembodied, anxious, disconnected. Too little, and we lose vision—trapped in survival with no frame for what it means. Air is the balance between mind and meaning. Between knowing and wondering. Between understanding what happened and allowing the mystery to remain.
Astrologically, Air signs—Gemini, Libra, Aquarius—embody curiosity, communication, and mental agility. They translate experience into language. They thrive on insight, exchange, and interpretation. Each air sign relates to the mind in a distinct way: Gemini gathers and shares knowledge, teaching us to hold contradiction. Libra harmonizes and mediates, guiding us in the art of relationship—balancing head and heart. Aquarius envisions and disrupts, offering us collective liberation by speaking for what’s yet to come. And yet, every gift of air holds its shadow: restlessness, indecision, dissociation, detachment.
Still, these archetypes offer potent medicine. They remind us that understanding is a form of intimacy. That naming an experience can help us metabolize it. That language can reconnect what trauma tried to sever.
Air invites us to ask: What story am I telling myself? Whose voice am I hearing in my head? What do I need to say aloud, and to whom?
When we are healing, we need space to speak. Space to listen. Space to think our own thoughts and follow them like birds on a current, not knowing where they’ll land. We need to remember that breath is always available. That meaning-making is a sacred act.
Air reminds us that there’s more than one way to see something. More than one truth. More than one path. And sometimes, it’s not clarity we need, but curiosity. Not certainty, but room to imagine a different ending. Or a new beginning.
Between Protection and Possibility
When we’re feeling more connected with access to our ventral vagal state, Air isn’t noise—it’s whitespace. It’s what opens up when we begin to remember, reflect, speak. It’s the breath that loosens the grip of fear. The pause that lets us see clearly. The perspective that softens shame.
Air is what allows us to make sense of what happened, language the unspeakable, and witness ourselves from a slight distance—not to dissociate, but to understand. To place our pain inside a larger frame.
And yet, the nervous system’s flight toward Air, the up-up-up and away from self can be a disappearance. Sometimes, we float too far. Thinking becomes overthinking. Insight becomes overwhelm. The strategies that protected us—narrating, analyzing, reframing—may be what keeps us from feeling what needs to be felt.
Healing invites us to find the sweet spot between taking space and spacing out, between speaking the truth and needing to explain it all. When Air emerges from a regulated state, it becomes medicine. Breath, imagination, and memory—all governed by Air—become tools of reconnection and help us make meaning. Not to impose a narrative, but to uncover one. One that honors our reality, reclaims complexity, and invites possibility.
Air helps us find vision after rupture.
It reminds us that insight is not the same as escape.
That telling the truth (when we’re ready) can set us free.
Rituals and Practices for Expanding with Air
Air is about spaciousness, breath, and meaning. These practices are invitations to reconnect with your inner witness and soften the mental static without silencing the mind. May you find room for your own lived experience here.
Play with sound. Chant. Hum. Sing. Let vibration move through your chest and throat.
Practice sacred silence. Sit in stillness. Let the urge to fill space arise. Witness it with love.
Write stream-of-consciousness. No censoring. Let the airways of your mind clear themselves.
Reclaim old stories. Take a memory that has haunted you. Write it again from a place of power.
Name the thought, not the truth. Instead of “I am a failure,” try “A part of me believes I’ve failed.”
Ask a question. Then wait. Don’t rush the answer. See what arises over the next day or so. Let meaning unfold.
Breathe intentionally. Inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for six. Let your body remember: you are not in danger.
Light incense or diffuse essential oils. Let scent open your inner world. Let the air carry feeling through your senses.
Journal Prompts for Air
What do I long to say—but don’t?
What am I afraid might happen if I slow down and listen?
Where in my life do I need more space? What kind of space?
What stories have I told to survive? Are they still serving me?
What truths live in my body that my mind isn’t ready to know?
What is my relationship to silence? To speech? To being heard?
What has helped me find clarity in the past? What helps me feel less alone in my experience?
What thoughts do I return to over and over? What might they be trying to protect me from feeling?
Air Is Not Just Movement—It’s Meaning
After we find our ground (Earth), we can begin to rise, notice, discern, speak truth. Healing continues with Air.
It’s how we name what was once unspeakable. How we make sense of the scattered pieces. So, let yourself breathe now.
You do not have to know everything. You can be curious.
You do not have to name it perfectly. You can speak what’s true.
Your breath is your birthright. Your mind is not the enemy. You belong here, too.
The wind will not break you.
It will carry you—if you let it.
