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No child on earth begins their life saying, “Gee, I hope the most important months and years of my life are absolutely horrible!  I want to spend my lifetime trying to heal from horrible things the people who were supposed to love me, cherish me, keep me safe and protect me from all harm did to hurt me when I was so small and vulnerable, so dependent, so young that I couldn’t understand words let alone the intent of harmful actions.  I want to spend my entire lifetime trying to fit into a world where there are lots and lots of people who never had these things done to them, with people who will never understand what my life is like from the INSIDE.  I want to get all kinds of diseases later on that are directly connected to how much stress my little growing body and brain experienced in my earliest life.  I want people to blame and shame me all of my life because I can’t quite seem to ‘get it together’ and ‘forget the past’ and ‘move on’.  I want to have trouble with all my relationships.  I want to be scared and angry and immobilized and confused inside for reasons I don’t understand.  And of all things in the end I want to find a way to be a good person so I never hurt anyone else the way the big people in my infancy and childhood so terribly hurt me.”

Nope.  We didn’t start our life this way.  But here we are, those of us who lived through hell when we were young, locked into a life that doesn’t ever seem like it totally belongs to us.  Here we are with memories that nobody should have to remember, let alone try to understand.  Here we are with a body and a brain that was so changed by the stress of the traumas we endured as we built our body and brain in the first place that we will never be able to process ANY information in exactly the same way as people who did not experience what we did can.

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I am thinking today about all the information I process while I am sleeping at night that I don’t understand when I wake up – mostly because I hardly EVER remember a dream any more.  I wake up knowing that all night long I have been grappling and wrestling with some aspect of my healing.

This is really OK.  Humans are SUPPOSED to spend their sleeping hours processing experiences from life so that we can integrate those experiences within our self so that we can use what we learn to life a better life in the future.  The changes that our ‘night work’ creates inside of us DO affect us – and I am willing to bet everything we process and learn in our sleep improves our well-being.  My gripe is that as severe early trauma survivors what we will ALWAYS be processing NOW is connected to the overwhelming traumas we experienced usually a long, long time ago.  There is simply WAY TOO MUCH INFORMATION still within us from the traumas we suffered through and survived.

So much of what healing seems to entail is just this:  We have to LET it happen.  We have to trust that our body including our brain is ALWAYS involved in healing work.  True, for early trauma survivors this healing work takes a CHUNK of our lifetime as we are living it NOW and as we hope to live it in the future – away from us.  There is only so much information a person can process!!

So how do we set our healing priorities?  I am willing to bet that if we have our heart set on healing much of what we actually do to heal stays outside our range of conscious awareness – or we wouldn’t have enough conscious awareness space left inside of us to greet each newborn day – let alone to live it and live it well.

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When I opened my eyes at 6 am this morning it seemed like whatever I was ‘working on’ last night as I slept crystallized itself immediately in a metaphor based on what I actually SAW.  There was the globe of the brilliant rising desert summer sun shining directly into my newly-opened eyes between the slats of the Venetian blind that covers the east window of my bedroom.

“NOT TOO PLEASANT!”  I thought to myself.  “Too much light!  I can’t deal with that bright a light as soon as I open my eyes!”

Because of what I must have been ‘working through’ and ‘working on’ in my sleep last night I immediately connected this experience with my work to understand how trauma has affected me in my life.  So the next thoughts I had were these:

“OK.  I can’t change where the sun is in the sky.  I can’t change where the window is in my room.  True, I could jump up and rearrange the furniture in the room.  I could get out of bed with my eyes shut to keep the brilliant light out.  But how about I just move my head – just a tiny bit in one direction or the other – and then open my eyes?”

Voila!  It worked!  I opened my eyes and stretched in far more leisure and comfort – without trying to change the whole world.  At the same time I thought, “Yes.  This IS how I work to deal with the overwhelming 18 years of trauma that built the body I live in from my birth.  I DECIDE HOW MUCH I WANT TO DEAL WITH AND HOW I WANT TO DEAL WITH IT.  I control ‘the direction of my thoughts’ and the impact of my emotions as much as I possibly can.  I make these choices today the best that I can – and this is my healing work.”

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The other bunch of trauma processing I was working on while I slept last night had to do, I know, even though I can’t remember the specifics but I know the thoughts I have this morning as a result of this work, has to do with survivors’ relationship with their abusers.

I am thinking ‘relationship’ being like the relationship I had this morning with the sun, with my window, with my blinds, with my room, my bed, my head, my eyes  — and with my power to CHOOSE how I as an individual being with life in me could adjust myself in relationship to all of life around me.

I refuse to villainize my abuse perpetrators.  As I work on my book I realize that just about every memory I retained from my childhood is a memory that is a WHOLE memory:  Both the good of who I was as a child and the good I felt and did is contained in each of these memories RIGHT ALONG WITH the abuse that ALSO happened at the same time.

I have evidently been on this path of keeping good and bad balanced with each other all of my life – instinctively.  I am coming to see that it is exactly because something happened to my mother very early in her life that made her brain SEPARATE the good and the bad in her life that led directly to what she did to me.  The 18 years of HORROR and abuse she perpetrated against me came directly from this fact:  Her brain did not remember herself in the middle of her early traumas as the good in HER was there exactly as the BAD was there in the people who harmed her.

But the other thought that was introduced to me yesterday has to do with how I have no memory of sexual abuse – and hence do not research it, think about it directly, understand it, or write about it.

This morning I think this is true to a large extent because I have TOO MUCH TRAUMA of my own to work my way through.  I simply don’t have room in my being to put something else on my proverbial plate.

At the same time I have to wonder about how our trauma healing journey is alike – or is it completely different?  I can only begin to understand something if I can imagine it – and I will NOT allow myself to add more to my trauma plate by trying to imagine what any kind of sexual abuse is like – or about.

But I do wonder about villainizing perpetrators – no matter who they are or what they did.  To me, that’s like my experience with the sunlight this morning.  I want to orient myself differently – as I honor the same life-processing I was doing from as far back as I remember.  I remembered the good and the bad TOGETHER (unlike how my mother remembered).

The great benefit I see to this ‘method’ I adopted from the time I was very tiny is that I can find ways to KEEP my own good in my own memories and let the BAD of what happened in those memories simply slide out of sight.  It was never mine.  There is nothing I can do to change who my perpetrators were or how they acted any more than I can move the sun.

I can change my perspective – inside of my own self – continually looking for my own comfort level as my guidance system for continued healing.  Anger is not comfortable to me.  Neither is ‘blame’ or ‘shame on them’ or hate or revenge.  I just want to find my own goodness and the goodness that was inside of me and in MY life – that had nothing to do with my parents or anyone else —  and stick with that!

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+EACH LIFE STORY IS PERFECT, NO MATTER WHAT

+AN EXAMPLE: ABUSE MEMORY AND FINDING OUR OWN GOODNESS

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