Our own recognition : body/soul connection

Like it or not (and how can we really like it) a lot of people are not going to give us recognition of what we may have suffered in life.    Often the things that injured us are not obvious to others as they are not living inside our skin.  Trying to address the deeper impact of an injury with someone who caused it but would prefer to remain oblivious is bound to end in anger, resentment and tears.  Often what we learn through frustration of this desire to have that desired validation is about the limits of the other person and their own protections/defences.  That said I know certain confronations I have made have not been accepted but far later down the track I know what I have said or tried to express has had an impact with someone who might not have fully understood or been willing to own their part at the time.

On the healing pathway if we underwent a lot of emotional neglect (even of the benign kind) and emotional abuse or trauma we most definately need to find a good recovery buddy or professional therapist who can help us come to a full understanding and recognition of what we endured.   For many of us whose reality was negated this is essential as we long ago absorbed a lot of shame and came to believe we were somehow flawed or ‘bad’ for suffering as we did and not being able to achieve as much as those who got necessary affirmation, support and nurture.

Sadly I have spent years in 12 step groups where the depth of trauma or abuse was not fully validated or understood.  Family scapegoats become what therapst Sylvia Bretton Perrera has called scapegoat identified individuals.  In this situation our assertive impulses are disabled.  We may have been sidelined or shamed for fighting back or told we were bad or wrong for having certain reactions or feelings, most especially if we were sensitive, gifted and highly intuitive or attuned youngsters to ‘the family shadow’.  We may come to AA or other groups believing we are just ‘hopeless addicts or alcoholics’ which on some level is true, our hope was stolen from us when we were injured or traumatised and had to bury it because we could not speak of it in any articulate way.

Today my therapist Kat was speaking to me about ‘the wounds that are unspeakable’.  We were discussing the unconscious and I was telling her about the post I wrote yesterday saying I am my body and she was saying that the body basically is our unconscious.  What we suffered stays imprinted in cells and may even be communicated over generations.   Maybe if we attune to the body we realise there is a part of our conscious that can at times become separate enough to relate to body symptoms and reactions.

An excellent article I read on a companion blog site yesterday said how 12 percent of our brain is connected to conscious mind and 88 percent to the unconscious.  Trauma specialist Peter Levine reminds us that for every one nerve that travels from the brain to the gut 8 times as many travel back the other way.  So our guts are sending us messages all the time from an unconscious receiving station that lives there attuned to every movement in the outside world.

I seem to have veered of on tangent here, but bear with me.   After we find the therapeutic recognition and after we fail several or countless times at getting outside recognition we often find the truth that what we were most hungry for for all of our lost years was our own deeper recognition.  Once we have that, once we can learn to trust the truth of our psychic past, once we can begin to understand how and why we suffered, once we have begun to understand the problems that occur when we fail to attune to our own inner insides or gut instinct then we are in a position to get more on track with centred life, one in which we learn to look less towards the outside for the recognition that needs to come from within.

Once we have that we have our soul/self connection, one that can never again be broken.  And then, just maybe we are ready to be able to find others similarly connected with whom we can connect heart to heart and soul to soul.  And maybe we realise its then okay that certain people wont ever ‘get it’ or be meant to.