++++

I am thinking about healing and telling our life story – especially about what the purpose is of conveying to self and to others our his- and her-stories of trauma and abuse.  Before I don my dirt-covered working and clothes and head out into my yard to dig around in mud, work with stone, make creative use of a big hole I made digging out soil to make adobe blocks, preparing for new animals to come into my life this fall, I want to take a moment here to write about healing from my ever-changing point of view.

I was conversing with one of my favorite friends on the telephone yesterday, and yet again realized how much I need to verbalize in spoken words my process and my progress through life.  As I was talking I came to understand that perhaps the fact I stopped dead in my book-writing work last October is actually a very GOOD sign that reflects the success of my healing efforts from my 18-year infancy and childhood of terrible abuse and trauma.

In the posts I wrote yesterday I spoke of how I conceptualize healing from traumas in words that belong to the telling of our abuse stories.  I conferred with another local wise friend yesterday about my ideas.  She affirmed my thoughts by saying that in her thinking, the verbalizing of trauma – not once, but over and over again (in the right settings to the right people with the right motives) – heals the affects of trauma on our lives and souls.

FEARING our trauma histories keeps a lack of love present – and therefore keeps the negative power active in our lives.

Our goal is to deactivate the power that fear had over us while we were under attack at the most important and vulnerable stages of our development, and also to now assert the great power of love in every way that we can TODAY.

All emotions tied to trauma histories came from the past.  Yet the fact that our body will never forget any of the negative feelings we experienced during attacks and brutalizations leaves us vulnerable in our present lives to re-experiencing these emotions any time we turn toward healing the impact that those traumas had upon us.

How do we have it both ways?  How do we remain positive in the present at the same time that approaching memories of trauma in our past brings with it the very real risk – and often the reality – of awakening those sleeping emotional giants within our body?

Tricky business beyond belief, I would say!  Be very careful!  But do not avoid healing work out of fear of what happened to us in the past!

Easier said than done.

It was exactly at the point in my book-writing work last fall when I came face-to-face with a terrific body memory that appeared ‘out of nowhere’ that caused me to re-experience at age 60 a terrific beating I received from Mother when I was 22 months old.

My writing has stopped dead in its tracks because I do fear being brought in my present back to my past should I get any closer to the final writing of my abuse memories for my book.

I do not want to risk any more body memories like THAT ONE appearing NOW!  My solution?  Leave it all alone.

++

Yet as I spoke on the telephone with my far-northern friend yesterday it came to me in talking that perhaps I have accomplished ALREADY the best of what my healing work was intended to do all along!

Perhaps there really is no reason whatsoever – other than the completion of my book – to go any closer to my abuse memories.  Perhaps I have already won the race.  Why keep on running?

Perhaps I have won the battle against the ugly darkness of my past – why keep on fighting?

What I might have already done is exactly what I wrote about in yesterday’s posts.  Perhaps I have so cleared away the horrors on every level of my abuse and so clearly located and rescued my own perfect beautiful soul-self from those horrors caused by my abusers that there is nothing else to be accomplished by ever returning to work on my memories again!

++

Hum!  Something to consider!

If what I am suspecting to be true IS TRUE – that means that NOW is the first time in my life I have been able to live, finally, without the shadow of the threat of fear – both of my past and of remembering my past.

True, I will always be coping with the changes trauma caused in my body as I developed under conditions of extreme traumatic stress.  My PTSD (so-called) for example, will never leave me.  In my present I learn every moment what that means.  I am like a sculptor working with the raw materials I have on hand (in my body-brain).  This in NO WAY means that I am limited in the amount of beauty I can create and maintain in myself and in my life.

++

Once we face our memories – every single dang one of them that our soul has, for whatever reason, CHOSEN to keep for us, and deactivate the fear and sorrow, pain, suffering — stripping all negativity away from OUR SELF that never belonged to us in the first place — we are then free to accept love into every corner of our being-life in every way that we can.

How do we do this?

We absolutely honor our stories!  We put our life story into perfect order.

OUR STORY!

It is extremely helpful, and because of this I believe necessary, to know as much about the history of our family as we can as we work to put our story together – beautifully.

It is helpful to completely understand that the transmission of trauma through past generations is part of the much bigger picture of how – and why – abuse and trauma came to be heaped onto us.

It is helpful to know of the histories of our abusers so that we can more clearly take OUR story back from what (as yesterday’s posts mention) was NEVER a part of our story in the first place.  NEVER OURS!

We are building walls and fences, sculpting moats around our self-home —  as we sort out whose stuff was/is whose!

We have our life.  Everyone else has their life.  We have no use whatsoever for anything on our side of the fence-wall-moat that belongs to our abusers.

We only want what we love on our side!

We do not want pain, sorrow, suffering, fear, terror, hate, rage……. etc!

True, we are claiming power over our self in our healing journey and that exactly means that we empower our self by making increasingly conscious choices and decisions about what is GOOD for us and what is BAD for us.

Love is good.  Peace and calm and joy and forgiveness and much, much letting go is good for us.

Someone mentioned to me the other day that I sure am free to feel angry at my mother!

NOPE!  Why on earth would I CHOOSE to be angry at my mother?  She was in the ‘nearly sickest on earth’ group – and I KNOW that now.  I am not going to intentionally – or even unintentionally if I can help it – ever walk backward in my healing journey.

++

When I listen to others speak of their traumas I most often very strongly battle with my temptation to despise, hate and condemn other abuser’s actions toward the person I am listening to.

Here again I am serving no good purpose by allowing myself to experience negative thoughts or emotions related to any person’s trauma history I hear.

Negative is negative, and it is the biggest part of goodness that we absolutely know the difference between right and wrong, between what exists on the side of truth and what exists on the side of the lie-evil.

I want no part of the darkness myself – and I choose not to want any part of the darkness related to anybody else’s trauma history, either.

I always have to consciously monitor and make wise, good choices any time I am near the ‘issue’ of horrible traumas done by people to people – especially done to little people!

++

Once the darkness has been clearly recognized and identified as we work to heal by telling our stories of trauma to self and others – we are then moving ever closer to letting all that is harmful and hurtful simple GO!  Those who believe in God – whatever name, whatever spiritual pathway one might have connected to that recognition of a Supreme Unknowable Creator that has always sent Teachers to humanity – can release all that’s dark in that direction and walk away!

In other words, the goal of healing requires of us that we do not fear our past in any way.  We are only hunting for and gathering up what is good, and we increasingly learn how to leave what is rotten and bad alone!  Simply LEAVE IT ALONE!

Which is why at this point I realize OF COURSE I don’t want to work any more on my own book!  Go figure!

I also realize that as I make my own best choices it is entirely possible that I will simply will my intellectual property – every word I have written in blog form and in book draft form – to my three children.  I especially have one daughter who is a professional expert in writing and editing important thoughts into common-sense form.

If this is the way the future plays out, someday when she has time – with the input of my other two children – she can compose books to publish from what I have said, am saying, and will continue to say for the rest of my life about severe early trauma – and how to heal from it.  If destiny requires this, it will happen.

Meanwhile, I am under spiritual obligation to honor what feels good and not bad to me NOW.  If book writing feels bad to me, for whatever reason, then I simply choose not to feel bad!

++

Life is fascinating.  Survivors have a far more interesting story to tell than most.  Too bad?  Yes, in many ways.  But I am absolutely NOT a fan of self-pity and I am so NOT a fan of whining and complaining!  If something in life needs to be taken care of, then we simply need to do the best that we can at turning in the direction of solving a problem – and get to work!

We can increase the beauty in our life!  We didn’t want those horrors that happened to us THEN – why on earth do we want them NOW?  As we heal we are learning to trust our own self – and in doing so we are in the process of loving our self more and more.  Once we do the work of identifying all that is NOT GOOD – we send it off and then ignore it the best we can for the rest of our life.  ALL THAT IS GOOD AND TRUE AND BEAUTIFUL BELONGS TO US!

I say, “Get greedy!  One can never have too much good or too little bad in one’s life!”

Now, it’s off to beautify myself I go!!  Out to play in my yard!

Thank you for listening – and for being YOU!

++

Yesterday’s Posts:

+FREEDOM: HEALING SELF, HEALING OUR LIFE STORY, SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

+PRESERVING ONE’S SELF IN SILENCE

++++

Please click here to read or to Leave a Comment »

++++