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Saturday, June 4, 2016. Someone recently gifted me with an almost 100-year-old small newsletter from which I copied the quote on healing presented below. I wish to make a few trauma altered development, high ACE score comments about this piece here at the beginning first.
I read a little about the woman who gave the talk this quote was taken from and found nothing to suggest that her background was less than OK. Unlike my early experiences and those of many of this blog’s reader, there were probably no high risk patterns that prevented her from going along through her life in at least a ‘good enough’ fashion.
I now know as I approach my 65th birthday, having spent more than half of my life now working on healing from my severe early traumas, that I was NEVER able to ‘be a child’ in any ordinary way (as described in my book noted at the end of this post). This means for me I was NEVER truly healthy – never – from my first breath on this earth. I was not allowed to be healthy. The environment I grew up in was nearly the epitome of dis-ease.
It’s important in my life journey for me to realize, according to my beliefs, that God created me – my soul self that will live forever – at the moment of my conception. It really struck me the other night in a rather strange sort of epiphany instant as I was drifting off to sleep – really for the first time so clearly – that my parents were NEVER my parents.
God is my parent. He has ALWAYS been my parent. He MADE me!
My earth parents hurt me. Terribly. It is now possible to feel just a little bit freer of the constrictions of thinking of myself as “my parents’ child.” I need to recognize that “restore both body and soul” is, for me, a two part process.
While my body itself was healthy before I was born into trauma – that was the ONLY time that trauma did not influence my physiology.
However, my SOUL restoration is an entirely different thing. I have long recognized in my healing journey that Mother could NOT touch ME – my soul. She could not and she did not.
Making this distinction matters greatly to me, especially as I experience ever-more serious consequences of the stress/distress/trauma alterations to my body that the continual horrors of the first 18 years of my life created in my body systems. I can take my “life awareness” including my healing journey to an entirely different level because of this clarify I have.
In this “old” quote I read some words that as a trauma altered person I put quotes around for myself in my own thinking: “Instead of dwelling upon your injury or your ailment, talking about it….” is a different thing for people like me who had no voice and no caregivers to protect us when we needed to be saved.
We DO need to talk when helpful about our reality – so I take those words in quotes to illuminate my need to be watchful of what I am telling MYSELF in my thoughts.
And most particularly I need to continually remind myself that nothing is hopeless! Life itself is a creative, miraculous, generative process. There is no end to the healing potentials around us, no matter who we are or what our early experiences were – or what they did to harm us.
But I think we need to be vigilant in the world of words so as to not invisibly bash ourselves for not being able to accomplish what non-traumatized people around us seem to be able to.
I am not sure that I have EVER “pitied” myself, for example. My suffering was and still is very, very real. I do need tools to help me get over the larger of the road bumps that appear sometimes. I found some of that help among the words in this quote below, enough so that I want to share this —
Healing quote
– published in Star of the West, August 1, 1916, Vol. VII, No. 8, p. 74
Segment of a talk given by Baha’i Mary Hanford Ford (1856-1937) while “on the Pacific Coast” on “The Bahai [sic] Movement and Spiritual Healing”
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“Deny injury and illness, and then lift yourself up to the Divine One, and thus bring yourself health and healing. Instead of dwelling upon your injury or your ailment, talking about it and pitying yourself, call upon God for strength, health, wisdom, ideals, courage and a renewal of the soul and body. The power of the spiritual belongs to the whole world, and not to a few. It is easily acquired, and will often restore both body and soul. One must become as a little child to receive the Kingdom of heaven into the heart.”
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Click here to read or to
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Story Without Words: How Did Child Abuse Break My Mother?
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Tags: adult attachment disorders, adult reactive attachment disorder, anxiety disorders,borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse,depression,derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder,dissociation,dissociative identity disorder, empathy, infant abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),protective factors, PTSD, resiliency, resiliency factors, risk factors, shame
Stop the Storm 