Dissolve the Past

"When I almost died in May 2016, something changed. One minute, I had once again spread my notebooks across the attic floor. The next moment, I understood that I was to burn them all." (Introduction, Dissolve the Past)



Dissolve the Past: Finishing Your Incomplete Act of Escape marks the captivating third installment of Robbie Grayson's Feels Like Anaphylaxis pocketbook pictogram series. On this leg of the journey, Grayson navigates readers out of their heads and into their bodies, offering an abbreviated trek through a process of trauma recovery on discharging the freeze.



With a masterful blend of visual illustrations and practical examples, each pictogram serves as a window into the psyche, simplifying the complex emotions and experiences that accompany the physical sensations of trauma, often ignored subconsciously. From the initial acknowledgment that past wounds manifest as excess neurological energy requiring physical discharge for release, Grayson presents a consolidated perspective on the delicate terrain of trauma recovery. Influenced by works such as Robert Scaer's The Body Bears the Burden, Peter Levine's Waking the Tiger, and Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score, Grayson's Dissolve the Past offers a physiological approach to an often-psychologized problem.