Lately peace seems to me to be one of my most important assets when it is present and not ‘stolen’ by anxiety. I read a very good reading by Joyce Meyer yesterday on not allowing our peace to be taken in which she spoke of the devil trying to do all he can to destabilize us and take our peace.. I am not sure if I believe in that as the pure entity that steals place but there is a teaching in esoteric circles that the energy of Satan may have to do with negative thinking or thought forms. Sadly a history of neglect or being left at the mercy of overpowering inner sensations and feelings as babies and children has been shown to leave us vulnerable to inner ‘demons’, this is a subject psychotherapist Donald Kalsched addressed in his book The Inner World of Trauma when after years of practice he saw that some of his clients never were able to let in love or trust the empathy and care of the therapist and would do all they could to destroy or sabotage the forming of a more positive bond (or linkages as Highly Sensitive Person therapist Elaine Aaron calls them in her book The Devalued Self.). Kalsched uses the fairytale of Rapunzel in his book to explain how the witch as an inner force in that story keeps the love of the ‘prince’ from Rapanzel and works to destroy the potential of a more positive attachment.
If an inner witch is anything it may be a protective or even sabotaging thought form, it may be composed of both desire for love as well as rage over the child not really ever being able to receive that for being who they are. In cases of so called ‘borderline personality disorders’ often therapists will give up on clients with borderline rage if they cannot muster up sufficient empathy and skill for dealing the the rage. It is something that came to mind after someone I follow on this blog was sharing about a childhood in which he was put into a psychiatric research facility as a child, due to his mother’s lack of attunement and abuse… He then lashed out a lot at people there and they tried to medicate him, probably to calm him down.. I felt a lot of outrage hearing this.. and it called to mind my first therapist Brian Hunt sharing with me how he dealt with this sort of trauma by getting down on the floor with the person suffering and empathizing with their rage and inner emotional situation.
Being set up to think negatively about life and the people around us can have long ranging effects.. It can keep some of us locked in a repetition compulsion or alternatively it can use fear and negativity to keep us for reaching for something positive.. The only way to deal with these kinds of negative thought forms is to be aware of when they are being activated by inner attunement and then rewriting the script. Many of us may take a long time to overcome these attacks on ‘linking’ and connecting with our own therapists.
In that reading of Joyce’s I referred to earlier though she was also talking of she believes that often negative forces in the world intervene to stop good things happening.. She used an example from life which involved two out of four people being blocked from attending a lecture that her husband Dave and her were set to give on morality.. In the first case the man’s flight was cancelled in the second the man’s plane was keep waiting on the runway for some hours due only to minor rainfall. Joyce said she believed that in that case the devil had intervened to block something potentially good and to try and destabilize the two people concerned and take away their peace. I was not entirely sure what to think of this, knowing Joyce’s own troubled trauma history.
It may not always be easy to keep ourselves peaceful and stable in difficult circumstances. We may get triggered or lash out or start to feel our heart beating faster and/or our chest tightening with stress or fear.. this is the time we most need to work to calm ourselves down using some tools. In my book on anxious attachment Anxious in Love the authors Carolyn Daitch and Lissah Lorberbaum recommend using the four by four breathing technique, that was once given to me by an earlier therapist.. In this technique you concentrate on the breath counting to four on the inbreath, holding it for four, count to four on the outbreath and then holding it for four counts. I have been using this technique a lot lately when triggered and it seems to be helping.. At the same time we can say something soothing and positive such as All Is Well, This Will Pass, or I Am Safe In This Moment.. Feelings are not always facts with PTSD and often we actually are safe when anxiety hits its just something old has been triggered.
The authors of that book also recommend using a technique of making a fist and squeezing it while imagining all of the feelings that are coming up being held and then released as we let go.. .tensing muscles works to relax me and its better when I do it actively as my body is often unconsciously tensed in certain situations anyway but what I find is that actually clenching parts of my anatomy deliberately and then letting them go does help to relax me..
We can also practice thought stopping of negative thoughts.. Louise Hay reminds us that often our thoughts do end up magnetizing to us just what we are thinking so the more we affirm that things are painful, difficult or ‘bad’ the more they seem to be.. Even if the situation we are dealing with is tough we can still affirm ourselves in our capacity to handle it. Instead of saying “this is so awful, its just too tough for me”, we can say something like “this situation is difficult and challenging but I do have the capacity to manage or deal with it”, we can become solutions focused..
The more we validate the way we are feeling but also watch what thoughts are making those feelings more difficult or less difficult the more control we eventually do manage to get over our feelings and reactions.. These are just some of the things I have been trying lately that seem to be working they are probably things many of you know or practice but I thought to share them here today. It never is too late to find ways to stop the demons and devils of anti-life and disturbance or ‘stinking thinking’ from overtaking us.. We do have that power, as much as things in the outside world seem to be ‘out to get us’ or bent on disturbing our peace and solid sense of a good self.
Emerging From The Dark Night 