Insight

I had a powerful insight this morning. I see that I can remain trapped within my mind through the powerful stories I keep repeating of the past. My therapist said to me on Monday that living in my family was a lot like being pulled in endlessly by a rip, my ex partner used to call my family a vortex. When my older sister was alive in the care home there were constant crises and calls for help. I remember one night one of the carers called me at about 8 pm to say my sister wasn’t responding. It was the anniversary of my Dad’s death, I remember that. I told them I would go over immediately and I did. I sat with her and held her hand and that time she came back from where ever she went to in her mind. Her body was in complete lockdown for years as she became more and more medicated and given less help to push the trauma out of her system. Who knows if her brain injury could ever have been helped past the point where all support was torn away by her ex husband?

I do think movement and vocalisation would have helped my sister. I do feel that a lot of medication numbs us out and locks things inside. I have shared before that when my second sister tried to take her life in 2013 after the trauma of being involuntarily committed by her oldest son, after a panic call from my mother, she was on about 6 different meds. I was given the pile of things taken from the bathroom where she collapsed in April of that year. When I googled many of them (sorry I don’t remember the names) they said things like side affects : may cause anxiety and suicidal thoughts. WTF!!!!!!

Later in the hospital where she was swollen up like a fucking balloon… (no an overdose suicide attempt is bloody ugly) the nurses asked me “why the hell is your sister on anti convulsives?” Well I will tell you our upbringing was convulsive it was like an electric shock. I nearly screamed the ICU down I told the nurse of our multigenerational trauma/addiction history. I also told them of what Peter Levine says of letting the body spasm and convulse so it can throw off its trauma. I thought the men with white coats would come but they did not. They stopped a lot of the medication.

These days I am very serious about the need to move my body. There was a point at my lowest point after my accident and the following emotional abuse by my ex that I was hardly moving my body. I could not wake up, I had ongoing panic attacks (and I still can but lately I am seeing them more as a sign of repressed life energy trying to move forward and encountering blockages within my own psyche imported during my upbringing.) These days I try to shake it off.

If I stay permanently locked in my trauma story it is indeed a form of paralysis, but still I need to give voice to my trauma in order to move it out of my body. I just don’t want to be identified permanently as a ‘victim’ of trauma or neglect. If I keep the stories of trapped victim going then I will never be free. This is the insight I had on my morning walk with Jasper and hour or so ago. I have to watch my fearful stories that I tell myself. Some of them are that I am not seen, not loved, that I am a fuck up, that my life has not amounted to much, in some way the later story may be partly true as due to trauma I have either been blocked or blocked my own way forward so many times. Maybe its an old family script or curse who knows, but in any case right now I want to be free of it. I wonder if there is a way to honour the past without being permanently trapped in it. I pray every day that I find that balance, maybe I already am, maybe all this blogging and telling of my story is a part of it?