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It takes no time at all for ongoing comments and replies on this blog to disappear into the past.  They unfortunately appear on the side bar of the main page only for the briefest of time.  I am currently in thought about comments and replies at these posts – I hope these links here will go to those words:

alchemynow on+WHEN ONE’S WORLD E…

alchemynow on+SOMETIMES THERE IS CRAP

alchemynow on+WHEN THE GOODNESS APPEARS IN …

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When it comes to memory retrieval, the experience of remembering especially NEW and powerfully traumatic memories of terrible things we have lived through – I will forever in this lifetime recommend extreme caution!

Those experiences in hell that happened to us when we were very small and most pure, innocent and vulnerable (which for me was a state that lasted for me long after I left home into my early 30s), DO NEED TO BE REMEMBERED.

At the same time it is important to understand that what we are looking for is positive change – HEALING.

Anyone who ‘is attendance’ at this Stop the Storm blog is here for a reason.  It is my task to be as honest as I can be in every ongoing moment of time that leads me – and this blog – through each ongoing moment of time into the future.

In doing this I will again say here right now that the creation of as an exact a time line of your history as you can possibly create is necessary for working with new – and with older, more familiar trauma memories — BEFORE you begin to let information from ‘raw’ contaminated and toxic memories into your current ongoing experience of conscious reality.

Trauma wrecks a person’s ability to tell a coherent narrative of their life.  This is NOT a simple task – to heal our story as we heal the telling of our story.

Why are we doing this work?

What do we hope to accomplish?  What are we aiming for?  What are our hopes?

What is contributing to ‘pressure’ to do this work NOW?

Who are our support people?

What are the questions you would personally add to this list?

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I am 3 weeks away from my 61st birthday.   Who I am today – and what I would tell of my life story is different now than it has ever been before.  Life is a guarantee of change.

Unresolved trauma most often manifests its presence in a kind of mantra, a litany, a chanting to self and/or others of repetitive motifs that we recognize as OUR STORY — and therefore connect most deeply and personally to our ongoing senses of self (and often of multiple selves).

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A true story is appropriately told in a fluid and beautiful manner.

How do we take experiences of hellacious content, of very real overwhelmingly terrifying and painful things that were done to us – and make a beautiful story of our very own life?

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I do not want to hear myself tell myself about the really bad things that happened to me.  I at my current age have done the work so that I know my memories inside and out, backwards and forwards, and – most importantly – they NO LONGER HAVE ANY NEGATIVE HOLD OVER ME.

Yes, occasionally a twinge might appear of sadness, of confusion, of rage, of whatever FEELING might be connected to memories I KNOW – but it is the memories I DON”T KNOW that have really saved me (in my opinion).

Knowing about myself, and trusting about myself, that I remembered exactly what I CHOSE to remember – for a very good reason – lets me pat myself on the back in cheerful, self-affirming and self-sustaining ways.  What I chose not to remember no doubt is about horrors that serve me absolutely NO good purpose to remember.

At the same time, as I have written here before, within the memories I do have, which are awful enough, I was taught to understand what my healing process is all about.

I named the trauma, named the wreckage as NOT MINE in any possible way (not then, not now).  The horrible parts of my story belonged to the adults (alive and dead) who acted out their unresolved trauma in really bad ways against me.

Yes I suffered, etc.  Most importantly I LIVED THROUGH those experiences without dragging hatred along with me, but rather a great curiosity about how this all happened to me in the first place.

My goal has always been about gaining informed compassion for self and for perpetrators.

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My memories do seem to exist in a darkened sphere of shadow and twilight, half light, gray – sometimes when I locate my OWN self in the middle of these memories I see glorious colors!  But NEVER do I ‘wallow in’ those memories.  I made it through those experiences.  The trauma I experienced changed my physiological development in many critically important ways.

But when I consider any memory I have connected to traumas in my earliest years (18 of them) – I MOVE as I approach those memories with a kind of freedom that happened to me gradually as I began to line those experiences up — and the memories that contain them — along the time line of my growing-up years where they belong.

This kind of ‘remote ordering and organizing’ heals our insecure attachment patterns in our body brain in important ways.  It is NOT enough to randomly entrance our self with the trauma drama included in our memories.  Once we know the facts, we are free in important ways to explore the deeper reasons we have chosen to keep these memories.

We are looking for our perfect beautiful SELF inside the wreckage and the rubble (as I have said before).  The horror of what happened was NEVER ours – and is not ours now (in my thinking).  That trauma was ugly then.  It is ugly now.  I want nothing to do with it.

This is ultimately what detoxifying and decontaminating trauma encapsulated in memory is all about.  This is resolving trauma – which is our ultimate goal.

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