Authentic power

I am starting to think a lot more about how important an authentic balanced sense of our own power and sense of agency is to our spiritual health in life.  I am beginning to see that I grew up with the false belief that I really did not have a lot of power, that I had to look around externally to try to find a source of power from outside of myself that would sustain me. I never got to develop trust or implicit acknowledgement of my legitimate emotions, wants and needs and so instead of acting from the inner self to reach and manifest with the gifts I had, I learned to turn within and to substances and certain behaviours to give me comfort.

And I would hear an inner voice that others were not to be trusted, and could never possibly accept nor understand me as I was. Of course I was just projecting my young experience onto the world outside of myself, I see that now. I carried so much insecurity, fear and doubt, a heightened sense of what in AA they called self centred fear.

I am sure a lot of it came about from being the youngest in a far older family where everyone was really too busy elsewhere and engaged in other things and never mirrored me back to myself. I was not guided when I needed it. I was not taught to understand or use my feelings in good ways, I was not taught an authentic sense of power.

Along with this I witnessed and suffered a heap of traumas of a bodily and emotional kind in my family. I was wounded and injured due to parental numbness or inattention severely on at least 5 significant occasions. And then I witnessed how adults could crash and burn when they were trying to express and be powerful in the world. I turned my deep confusion inwards and became addicted to a secret inner life that I could only express once out of my head on alcohol or drugs. And buried all the sadness and confusion over all of the losses, injuries and wounds inside and of course like a lot of emotional neglect, trauma or abuse sufferers I blamed myself.

I also witnessed two sisters going through control and invalidation/disrecognition with psychiatrists using drugs which disempowered them more and I swore after I got into sobriety I would not travel down that path but seek therapy instead. Through this and my emotional recovery I began to learn that it is up to us to discover all we can about ourselves and the impact of our conditioned past in order to find where our authentic power and a sense of true self was lost, thwarted, hidden, buried or frozen. For me I got frozen most particularly at the age of 17 when I crashed and was torn to pieces and crushed up in that blue car on the brink of leaving school. In many ways that trauma laid buried deep inside me only to awaken again in sobriety when I went into therapy to deal with it.

Looking back I see maybe if I didn’t have the body work session that day that took me deep into the MVA accident trauma I would not have crashed and burned again. But I did and that was 15 years ago now and I am still suffering from it neurologically in my brain and body and gut, I got very very stuck for at least 13 of those years.

Yet I am thankful enough to be able to say that on many days now I am connected to a sense of my own joy, agency and power in a way I was never before, even though at the same time I still lead with a punishing and voracious inner critic or true self slayer inside telling me how ‘not enough’ I really am. Those of us subjected to psychic murder by parents or siblings will probably suffer with these kinds of voices for most of our lives but with therapy and inner work we can learn to no longer let such voices paralyse us as much nor cut us off in our full engagement with and self expression through life.  IT TAKES A HELL OF A LOT OF WORK…. BUT WE MUST NOT EVER GIVE UP. IT CAN BE DONE WHEN WE LEARN TO TRUST OUR PAST AND TRUST OUR JOURNEY AND NO LONGER LET OURSELVES BE LEAD ASTRAY BY KILLER VOICES IN SOCIETY OR IN OUR WOUNDED SUBCONSCIOUS.