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People with different languages, cultures and religious understanding refer to a Supreme Being by many names, but I most simply rely on this single short word – God.  I believe God creates each individual soul of a person at the moment of conception because God loves each and every person who has ever lived.  I also believe once a soul is created it is sent, like an arrow out of a bow, into a forever future of destiny.  I found this in a book about parenting:  When We Grow Up by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani

“The journey of the soul is a long one, which begins at conception when the ‘spirit encircles the body…in the womb’ [reference].  And while its end is to reflect with faithfulness the light of God, that light being eternal makes the journey endless also.  What a joy therefore to discover companions on the way, to discover that these to whom we were entrusted in the first stages of the journey are moving with us step by step.  Through sunshine to the light of God we go, parents and children both.  And no matter what our age or education, no matter what the differences between us, the soul within us being ageless and cultureless travels onward, conscious only of direction.  Though we are all ultimately alone before our God, we catch the echoes of parallel footsteps continually, and rejoice in the companionship we find between the generations.” (pages 59-60 – I added bold type emphasis)

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As I work for the first time in my 60 year long life to put my memories of my childhood into a sequential line covering those 18 years of abuse, so far I am mainly conscious of one part of my experience AS A CHILD surviving abuse and continuing to endure THAT IS THE SAME as what I experience as an adult:  I always instinctively moved forward.

The soul, which by the way is also genderless although by nature connected to a gendered body in this material world, must have this innate characteristic.  That’s what enduring and surviving seems to be:  Moving forward no matter what.

Humans, as members of a social species, are designed to benefit from companionship.  Our beginning physical journey happens because of the companionship between mother and fetus.  Humans follow a long course of development post-birth.  During these early stages we are absolutely dependent upon caregivers for our life.  We are also dependent on these caregivers to train us in good ways and to provide for our education.

Infant and child abuse is NOT what God and nature intended.  As I locate myself in my memories in the time and place of my childhood experiences I can always see that some part of ME continued forward.  I am only now beginning to be able to recognize that this ME was my SOUL me.

Because my Borderline Personality Disordered mother was SO severely, psychotically ill, she could not – and DID NOT – allow me to take possession of my body, my self, my personality, my self awareness, my ability to choose to be me – in any way if she could prevent it.  I see now that ALL of my mother’s abuse had this single end goal:  To prevent Linda from ever being born as an individual self.

I also now increasingly understand (as I discover this in my book writing and see how these patterns worked) that my mother needed ME to be her stand-in for the evil-bad-child the devil was coming to get.  Her need, and how she met this need, take so-called ‘splitting’ and ‘projection’ to such an extreme level it would be nearly impossible to comprehend the comprehensiveness of HOW she met this need by torturing and traumatizing me if I hadn’t been there in her inner Borderline core of hell.

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At the same time I am tracking how hard Mother had to work to maintain her patterns of obliterating ME as a person-and-as a person separate from her, I see that the physical developmental stages and physiological changes I was destined to go through as a living, developing child, CHALLENGED Mother to work harder and harder and HARDER to make sure I as a person was never born.  This meant that the abuse had to escalate on all levels right along with my growth stages.

The ME that WAS still alive as an individual WAS my soul.  It is very eerie for me to look back, inside, through into myself as a child and recognize my soul.  Personally, it would be very nice if ALL humans were able to pass from their initial pure innocent stages into increasingly more ‘human’ ones of involvement in this material life while at the SAME TIME being able to maintain clear contact with the eternal element of who God created us to be:  Our soul.

But I don’t think – no, I KNOW that what I experienced was extremely, extraordinarily NOT NORMAL.  I therefore was deprived of the opportunity to grow through my childhood in anything like a NORMAL way.  This NORMAL way, at least in mainstream American culture, would have created a rift between my experience of the culturally-all-important EGO SELF and my true SOUL SELF.

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As I worked through the difficult process of identifying what happened to me in my age-10 memory of abuse, I recognized that my EGO self ‘came to’ during the weeks covered by this memory stage of my development.  I awoke as a conscious self – and if I had not acquiesced to Mother’s will at this time, I would not have lived past this age of 10.

So acquiesce I did – and live I did.

I believe that all of the religions God has provided to mankind over the span of our evolution have each served to illuminate the way to keep our two wings of being human in balance and in harmony.  Our spiritual nature and our material (ego-self) nature exist only as we start our soul journey here, but not once our body dies and our soul moves forward into other worlds of God.  Yet our soul has opportunities in this lifetime to grow and to learn because we have free will here – and only here.

If my conscious, thinking choice decision making self had remained awake and alive past this event I experienced of abuse by Mother when I was ten, she would have killed me.

My soul chose.

My soul willed me to keep my body alive.  My conscious self thus had to go back to sleep and stayed asleep for a very long time.

I cannot make any sense of myself in childhood or of myself as an adult without trying to learn what my soul has always known.  If I lived in a culture truly steeped in common knowledge about the truth of the life of the soul my journey would be easier now.  But, no, I live in a culture more than steeped in the hubris of the ego self.

Yet I also know that trauma challenges shallow understandings of life.  When I watched the two movies mentioned in my last posts — +PLEASE. NO MORE WAR – A MOVIE WORTH WATCHING and +”MAKE ART NOT WAR” – ANOTHER GREAT TRUE MOVIE – I can very clearly see stars of these movies are struggling with concerns related to BOTH their soul and their ego-material nature.

Trauma awakens the depth of the soul in ways that I believe only survivors of horrendous traumas can truly comprehend.  Companionship, connection of humans with humans, is the way that the soul and the ego self can put together into one-whole the truth of experiences that MUST be shared with others to be healed.

I also believe that on profound levels the SOUL knows it has the keys to healing at the same time the ego-self knows that it alone does NOT have these keys.  Physiological diseases such as BPD can block the soul’s ability to access the truth of what is needed for healing.  In addition, as these two movies demonstrate, it takes companionship of souls with other souls to move forward with healing on this plane of existence as very real steps of progress are made to enable the WHOLE person to heal.

As a child I had no companionship.  While I was cared for by God and the angels I had no conscious awareness of this fact.  Consciousness was a luxury I did not have.  Yet my soul has always desired to move forward, always forward, and that was and is exactly what I have always done, just as the stars of these two movies did.

BEING alive can happen without consciousness, but I don’t believe that THRIVING while being alive can.  I stayed alive as a child but nothing in my world allowed me to thrive.  Both of the stars of these movies remained alive in the face of massive traumas, but as the movie shows, it was sharing companionship with others that provided the opportunity for both ‘the soul and the ego-self’ to find ways to thrive — which is what healing is all about.

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