Overcome

I’m terribly overcome with emotion today. It’s the anniversary of the Saturday I had my accident all those years ago in 1979 today and so the past is very much on my mind, but I also just sat down and shed a tear as I realised how much I can hold onto the past and keep recreating it in my mind.  I know we get a lot of advice not to do this.  We are told to live in the present moment and when it offers a new happiness or new chance for life so we should.  However the power or force of trauma is also magnetising and gravitational and if the boundaries of the body are compromised or pierced as they were in my accident which saw car parts come inside my body and cuts that were very deep, lost teeth and a pierced lung cut open by a rib that then bled fluid inside making it impossible to breathe, then the impact or residue of that vibration does live on deep within the body and this is what a lot of people do not understand when they say “well that happened years ago, why would it still be having an effect, just get over it!!”

In his work with trauma sufferers Peter Levine uses a technique which he calls pendulation where he tries to keep the person’s focus moving between present time and the vibrant energy of the instant moment that is pure open and clear and the darker more laden trauma memories and sensations that still live in the body and capture and possess the trauma sufferer in a kind of cascade that can be so hard to escape out from under or being captured by or focused upon.

Because my own trauma involved such a long period of immobilisation (I was trapped in the car for over an hour while they worked to cut me out and attend to my punctured lung and then spent three months pinned to a hospital bed in skeletal traction unable to move out), that sense of profound overpowering and immobilisation is with me on a constant basis in the morning when awakening and moving between unconsciousness (or partial sleep consciousness) and consciousness. I actually had a second accident years later which was similar to the first when I was trying to work through the impact in therapy (which as I look back was in many ways counterproductive for as an astrologer with an experience of near death trauma told me after it, sometimes leaving our wounds alone and shifting our focus onto something more life giving and affirming it better therapy for trauma victims.  We cannot change the past, we can only find ways to live with the impact and other ways to not let it affect us as much, but maybe this is easier after we have become more familiar with the nature of our own wound which in many ways is a call to healing and forgiveness for us.

The overwhelm of emotion I am also feeling today is also as a result of love texts received from Scott last night and in the early hours of this morning in which he offers his love and protection of me as it is likely that we will finally be meeting in a few weeks time.  I get scared at times of being overpowered by others and I am working through and exploring this in my therapy a lot.  It may be hard for me to accept that love will come without the kind of control that others have tried to have over me in the past and as an empath part of my fear comes from the fact that I do intuitively pick up and reflect others suppressed emotions.

I also know that in this relationship my boundaries are usually respected, so why am I feeling such fear and overwhelm?  It is just that I have lived alone so long now with my trauma condition I wonder how my body will cope and I am not some fragile piece of glass that needs protection but I am reading a book on male female relationships at the moment which explains that men as hunters wish to protect and provide for us, that is just the natural order of things and it does not necessarily mean that a woman’s power will be stolen.

I will probably be fine and as my therapist says it will be an ongoing work in progress to negotiate boundaries in any relationship as well as fully open a heart to giving and receiving love from another who is a different sex to me, so almost another species in some ways (although not in others).

My Dad’s birthday is in 5 days time too and lately I am conscious of all the connections in my life that have passed, especially family ones.  The loss of loved ones leaves a void but if the relationships were problematic maybe the loss provides a liberation of sorts as well.  For myself I never had a close and intimate relationship with my Dad, as he thwarted my needs and wishes so many times and didn’t seem to be able to see deeper inside me.   I have learned in my recovery and therapy how important it is for us to be seen and heard in childhood, such seeing and hearing is essential to the establishment of a secure identity and this is something I never got, as well as to trust in other relationships.   If we weren’t seen or heard it can be difficult to know it consciously until a long way down the track and much inner work and if we cant truly trust, real deep intimacy is not possible and instead we use defences.

What I now practice though more and more is seeing and hearing my true self.  At times its hard as the parental introjects always argue against what I feel, see, want or need.  They question and argue everything and it then can get tiring to fully see and know and feel what is truly wanted and needed for a happy life by me.

Its a lot to cry about and to realise about yourself, however the crying for me is never useless but contains more of a recognition of sorts so is a healing and liberation too.  Its only when I acknowledge my sadness over losses that I can grieve and release and free myself for something else.  One of my favourite quotes is from John Gray : “You cannot heal, what you cannot feel”.  I also love John Bradshaw’s quote :  “Grieving is the healing feeling”.

I have learned over time that my emotions are given to me for a reason.  In a family where emotions were often not allowed or recognised or in which some masqueraded hidden under others (for example for my Mum grief was often expressed as anger and fear) it can take a long time to unpack them and begin to be able to use them as authentic guides to spirit.  My therapist told me on Thursday the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby said that the babies cry is his or her salvation.  The word NOOOO  is the first cry of the authentic self, if our Nois not heard or is invalidated or rejected and disrespected we never learn good self esteem and to understand the value and validity of our needs and emotions.

I was also reading in a book by Louise Hay and Robert Holden last night that children actually hear the word No far more times than the word yes and early on we are taught to deny our inner wisdom which includes the power of our authentic Yes and No.  They have this to say :

We are infused with natural wisdom.  Our being is the knowledge of the universe.  We each experience it in our own way and we may call it by another name, such as (our) inner ding, inner teacher, Mister God, Holy Spirit or divine guidance.  We carry the truth within us.  In Robert Browning’s poem “Paracelsus” he writes.

Truth is within ourselves it takes no rise from

from outward things, whatever you may believe.

There is an inner most centre in us all,

Where truth abides in fullness, and around

Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,

This perfect, clear perception – which is Truth.

Somehow we forget about this truth, but it does not forget about us.  Early on, we experience a loss of guidance.  The GPS of our soul is in perfect working order but we act as if it is broken.  We learn to depend on the ego and our intellect for navigation.   This is good for short journeys, but not for the journey that is our true path.  Much of our life is spent trying to recover our inner wisdom – the inner ding.  WE have memory of it , and this spurs us on.

Losing our way to our own truth is the deepest heartbreak to my mind and I think the most profound cause of anxiety and depression.  I think of myself as I lay in that hospital bed all those years ago and see that although my accident was tough, it also removed me for a time from the mundane world of conditioning and so I had a deep dive inwards at that time but with enduring a trauma that for years was hard to integrate with the two other major traumas that followed and about 5 other more minor ones.  Trauma affected my world view making it quite negative and yet I still had my own inner life to find and live.

So perhaps today I was overcome because at times the enormity of the journey just does that to us (or at least to me). I often just get down on my knees and weep and pray to God or higher power but at those moments I also know a clearing is opening up with in me, to see truths and attain realisations I could not see before, to become aware of and shed limiting beliefs or fears that are holding me back.   And most of the time those watershed moments feel a lot like being pierced wide open by the power of Universal love and truth, a power that surrounds me always but is not always so deeply and profoundly physically or emotionally felt.  Our darkest moments truly do contain such light.