Whenever a follower makes a supportive or helpful comment on my blog it gives my heart a lift. One of the worst aspects of suffering trauma is the feeling of being so alone in it and having all of these wounds and symptoms and not being understood, or even believed or worse, told you are making too much of it. Not being able to find validation for our pain or feel we had any where at all to turn to find warmth or emotional connection and engagement, both in our trauma, as well as with caregivers in our young years, leaves us with an aching emptiness that may be hard to articulate the causes of .. we just feel this terrible void deep inside and an emotional hunger. The stone walling of unfeeling narcissism can turn many of our hearts and souls to ice.
Lately having felt the full impact of all my body endured from a young age I see how my upbringing set me up for that crash at 17 in which I nearly lost my life and suffered horrendous injuries.. Coming at that age my therapist has explained why it left me reeling and caused developmental arrests especially considering all the other traumas that followed. My mother was never a nurturer, we we raised steeped in fear and did not know it.. Using substances to dull feelings down seemed to offer the only escape.. There was no understanding or empathy or softness shown and so, it has always been hard for me to show to myself the tenderness, empathy, insight and self compassion I craved, since I had no template for it.
I feel grateful to have such a warm engaged therapist, that said, sometimes even the emotional distance and objectivity of therapy can feel harsh if we are highly sensitive and not knowing that bear it as a kind of wound rather than realising it is a gift. In our culture the traumas to the sensitive self are not widely acknowledged at all… especially here in Australia.. there is a toughen up aspect to our cultural inheritance here (and this is not to deny the need for inner strength, just to say it is more grounded and ‘real’ when we have the capacity to embrace our vulnerabilities and shadow.).. These social expectations can make it hard for many of us to show our true selves.
Instead, often we learn instead to live in shame, feel we should be doing better, comparing ourselves to others and by standards not geared towards the unique evolutionary path of our own souls. One of my favorite sayings from AA is : “do not compare your insides with others outsides.” If we were not even known as our true selves in childhood or even given permission to feel the full force of our emotional selves it can be very difficult to have all of that, all of those complex feelings then lie jumbled up, buried deep inside or hidden under a veneer.
It was in AA that I was first able to take my veneer off. Getting help with the emotional feeling wounds would have to take me OUTSIDE of the rooms. As one of my early counsellors said to me “You won’t see many of those in AA”, pointing at a tissue box. This was back in 1994 and since then I have been in meetings and cried and tissues have been on hand but its rare to have someone there reach out to give you a hug… That said our feelings are our own, but what makes us most human is our ability to connect with the feelings and suffering of others, even though it can be a fine line between feeling them and taking them on.
In fact in the midst of writing this I went out to get a pie for lunch and a cup of coffee and outside the supermarket was a young homeless man, he looked at me with eyes full of need and I felt the full weight of compassion for him. Compassion will sometimes be the fuel to motivate our engagement but we cannot take on the full burden of feeling for the entire world all of the time. Feeling for ourselves in our own suffering may be enough at times for those of us who have undergone emotional neglect and trauma.
I am grateful for the big breakthrough of feeling I had in therapy on Thursday afternoon, the emotions I released felt like they had been brewing for a long long time… It has taken two and half days to move them out of my body, I felt my organs discharging and had some massive energy surges and spins as well as vibrational trauma discharge especially during my sleep on Thursday night..
I am also moving through my trust issues and realising that God is always looking out for me.. I had the thought today of how maybe even when Dad died he along with the angels was close to me when I went to London all alone after Jim my boyfriend I was supposed to be travelling with decided to break it off with me.. It was a weird case of synchronicity that after the long flight my Mum forced me to take and arriving at Heathrow to board the tube to central London that on arrival I got into a taxi and the driver chose to take me to a hotel where sitting on the reception desk was a girl I knew really well from a place we used to holiday on the South Coast of Australia. At that stage I felt so so bereft and alone and it was mid winter…
Also later that year , at the time I needed emotional support after reconnecting with Jim by ‘accident’ in the American Express office in Athens and being dumped again, one of my good friends from Australia decided to travel to the island where we were visiting… I also had support from the pension owner at that time, who saw what emotionally unsupportive person my ex partner was…
As I write this I think of all of that history of loneliness. How it felt inside and how lost and alone I so often felt, but all along some kind of plan was working out… I got into AA at a time when I needed that support and there at one of the earliest meetings was a girl I knew from my most recent job, these kind of synchronicities have been too powerful for me to think they may have only happened ‘by chance’, and I do believe that once we say yes to the path of healing and opening to our true selves, the Universe sends people and lessons along the way.
God knows at midlife the unintegrated past energies and our unformed of arrested self can rise up, seeking understanding and asking us to build new capacities within as we liberate the influence of old painful events which stymied us. We may have to do many years of spiral rounds as we revisit each significant trauma or turning point upon the wheel of each year we have lived.
Today this quote by Carl Jung came to mind is says that there is no such thing as a linear progression in an awakened life, only circumnavigation of the Self. Our soul and self are very real entities and have their own energetic imprints and the things that happen to, and affect us, need to be known by us. If we do not understand and release them they can fester and cause all kinds of problems for us… undergoing this process it is helpful to have a person who will help you to build a container within which these charges can emerge for liberation…. building a strong container for those of us traumatised as children takes time.. We cannot release until we feel safe enough and ‘held’ enough.
I am beginning to realise that holding is in fact everything on the path of growing through knowing our soul… The body holds onto everything and our emotions and wounds are very real on a bodily level, we cannot just think or will them away.. In time we can gain some kind of objective distance once the affect is liberated, but the truth is if we continue to deny what we force the body and unconscious to carry no healing is possible.. And healing is arduous work…for what we contain is not only ours, it is our mothers and fathers and grandparents and great grandparents too… We can only emerge from these ‘eggs’ over time as we shed the patterns and become aware of the vibrations we absorbed and are being asked to liberate, recognise and transform.
Trauma does not need to be the final word in our lives.. Trauma can come into our life to shake us up and wake us up in often painful and difficult ways. How we use and what we make of what happened to us, what steps and action we take to regain some form of wisdom, inner knowing and power will help to decide if we do in time manage to emerge through trauma. We can use the trapped energy of each wound or hurting place as a messenger of what we need to do or what actions to take… Healing comes through finding a way not beyond but through, in order that we can engage more deeply while holding the charge in such a way that it, as well as our buried feelings and imprints can alchemise. How each of us do this is a unique process, with no set timetable and no special formula, it is an individual matter of the encounter with our own soul which has the capacity to help us evolve, transform and birth wisdom, as well as each one of those ‘divine’ (even if painful) encounters and relationships with other souls we meet along the path.
Emerging From The Dark Night 