Home within the self : some reflections

Home lives within you. It is a place of softness, allowing and compassion within which your loving inner Self can hold , bear witness to and help your wounded inner child to bring conscious awareness to all the hurts and injuries of your past.

Dissociation is a natural response to traumatic injuries we can not tolerate or process at the time. Dissociation functions to keep as safe and lessen the overwhelm of tramatic events but the effects and residues live on deep withhin us, most often triggered by reminders.

In her book Getting Through The Day therapist Nancy Napier gives techniques for tuning in and turning within so we can become receptive to memories, feelings and pain rather than running and dissociating. She makes the point that as necessary as therapy is in healing traumatic events that occur in the context of complex attachment bonds we must also heal ourselves or at least offer ourselves unconditional loving presence. As adults we must learn to take responsibility for our reactions too. Awareness of how and why and when we are triggered and reacting should lead us inward to ask questions of our younger self. We can also create safe internal spaces to go when we are triggered or overwhelmed. Nancy uses the idea of a garden we create in our imagination that has different sections or spaces that represent our unconscious. We can also connect to nature and animals or transpersonal spiritual sources too.

For those of us neglected, shamed, abused or hurt in childhood finding a home within so often seems impossible, we also often mistakenly feel its up to others to heal or understand us but sadly trauma often tends to attract towards us more trauma, emotional invalidation or abuse may invite even more of the same, until one day we realise we cannot take any more. It is only when we find ways of being self loving, self nurturing and healthily self protective that we start to feel happier in the now. For some the scars lay very deep but feeling and building a home inside where we can feel the full brunt of what happened in order to release these feelings as well as contain them is the healing key to starting to recover the capacity to separate past memories from present triggers and thereby move towards better responses.