Love your heart : you are strong

I had a few tears a moment ago thinking of what it takes to survive on this path were we get so devalued and ignored and learn to internalize self blame.. A major key to recovering from this came reading a book on Emotional Neglect that focused on how victims of it having no healthy reference point tend to turn upon and blame themselves, it also pointed out that often in a family a sensitive sibling suffers more and that was most certainly my own experience.

Another highlight was reading Peter Levine’s work on how immobilization trauma in childhood could lock PTSD in the body..When I think of a friend who went through so much abuse and was the put in a psyche ward where he threw chairs around and got sidelined by therapists this makes sense, part of his trauma was being immobilized.

When we cannot fight back against immobilization trauma or other invasion on many levels of our being then we may go into freeze or collapse as a permanent state.. Dissociation accompanies this, we have to escape into a world of imagination to find the love or protection somehow and we may fight off any kind of connection if the betrayal trauma component of attachment wounding is strong. In his work on trauma therapist Donald Kalsched explains how inner protectors formed out of this kind of trauma may even become a suicidal impulse if the pain is strong and deep enough.. He calls this complex the self care system except it can then tell the person they need to die as the world is so hurtful and unsafe.. How many of us trauma survivors identify with that at those times of profound suicidal ideation.

Levine speaks of the childhood trauma that occurred to the Unibomber in one of his books which involved him being held down and forceably restrained, I think the book in question is called In An Unspoken Voice. In his work Levine helps the child to act out some kind of escape even if it is with toy figures and in other words he tries to get survivors to come out of immobilization by using running movements.. He also tries to shift the focus to something positive, lovely and life affirming which is often hard for us if we have not a lot of positive memories to draw on.

Breaking the idea that we are somehow weak for being affected is also important work. In fact we are so strong for having survived.. There is also an idea that we are broken but the breaking came from the hostile forces around us that wanted to shatter us on some level who knows why.. possibly we reminded them of something they did not want to face that is deeply unconscious as reading a post on Chateau Cherie a while ago Cherie mentioned that a lot of school bullies after the time do not recall being mean or even why they chose to bully a certain target.

She also spoke about not becoming a victim.. We must see we were strong for surviving and that we do have life urge or spark of vibrant fire deep within us that knows on some level we are not bad, defective or wrong.. To break that identification of being these IS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT WORK OF RECOVERY.. I was so sad last night to hear a friend say he feels he is a burden to loved ones, there is not a kind word for him from an ex partner who takes aim at him for his state which in actual fact is not often under his conscious control.

Let us give encouragement to ourselves if we have come through trauma and bullying or been the target of other’s meanness and insensitivity.. Christ endured so much before he was crucified, people making false accusations, shaming and ridiculing him on the cross.. I think Christ should perhaps have been angrier but maybe he understood somewhere deep inside as a deeply intelligent wise and sensitive person the the bulk of humanity can be on a low vibration in so many ways.. caught up in an ignorant blindness they see not what they do and continue to protest their innocence when in fact they are anything but.