These are some of the complex energy movements I feel in my body during the day and night over any 24 hour period. I can also feel a sucking or a draining away like the sensation of water being pulled with great gravitational force down the drain in a bath. Sometimes the energy is moving in a centrifugal way..sometimes centripetal…clockwise and anti clockwise. According to Peter Levine this is normal for trauma survivors.
Nearly losing my life two times and having brief portions of my life erased means there are gaps of time during and immediately after the traumatic events that nearly took my life I only got to experience unconsciously. Waking brings hypervigilant scanning and all those suggestions and pulls. Lately I try to stay with my breath..to extend the exhalation and notice when I go into arrest/freeze. I don’t remember what it was like to have a day without this going on..sometimes the pressure is remorseless and after posting this I thought of how before I was born Mum held me inside for two hours while she finished tasks she was doing : bottling plum jam. I also think of how I sometimes fail to notice I am holding on and holding in and that I was often sent to my room alone to hold big feelings I did not really know how to cope with.
I went back to therapy this morning..there was so much to share in an hour. It was a challenge to hold it all for over 2 weeks..but what occurred to me sitting there and sharing and at times holding onto my head chest or other parts of my body speaking of the complex feelings of anger, sadness, pain and rejection I experience around my family was that my Mum never got this kind of holding as a small child so I am sure she had to hold a lot inside too and that would explain a lot of her outbursts.. This holding in or cutting off life theme replayed more with me never bringing a baby to term…and sad as that sometimes feels it was for the best. Nevertheless I was triggered reading the part of Glennon Doyle’s story of addiction recovery earlier which says her pregnancy was the prime motivator she needed to put down alcohol.
In her book Untamed she shares alot about her fears of being fully alive and embracing pain and life wholeheartedly and not being perfect. Her realistic take on life and sobriety is that life is tough and it is in facing up to the tough issues we grow. She had to work hard to find a sense of self and realise she was not really as broken as she initially believed..it is just that she learned to measure her self against unrealistic standards and to self reject as so many of us do fearing or annexing parts of ourselves. Learning to be less sacrificing and more full of Self was quite a journey and a lot had to burn away for her as it does for so many of us on the path of recovery.
Today it takes courage for me to move forward when a force so often tries to pin me in place and it takes courage to let go of what no longer serves my evolving life and must be allowed to burn. I often don’t get a choice other than to co-operate in this and clinging on to what hurts only ends up hurting me more. This occurred to me as I read her chapter Let It Burn both before and after therapy and cried deeply. So often love doesn’t come to us from those sources we most hope for it from. Rather the love for Self and others arises as we accept what must be wholeheartedly and unconditionally and then move forward with it, rather than remaining fixed in place at the site of the earlier injuries.. But this may take many years for some of us an a lot of holding in therapy as parts of us find a way to emerge from the shadows.
Kat discussed that anger may be particularly complex for me due to a fear of it.. and it occurs to me that not being allowed to know what angers us and use that knowledge for forward growth or to make healthier choices creates a lot of problems for us in later life.. We may learn to collapse and not run.. we may stay frozen in place at a site of earlier injury or unsafety. It may take time for us to find the courage to face and embody the fire we must use to move forward in life.. Fear of self assertion may cut us down for years, it may keep us locked in anti life activities or cycles going round and round in circles, but hopefully on the growth path such circles are spirals in which we do advance to more embrace more expanded visions of knowing.. visions in which we no longer negate the truth of forces that led us to become arrested in the first place.
Emerging From The Dark Night 