Some thoughts on fear, trauma, wounding, healing and separation

What makes us separate from each other? I think it is fear, as the Course in Mirackes teaches. What makes us always look for the differences, the incapacity to accept and embrace each other’s vulnerability and have insight into and empathy for humanity?.. Surely we do need our individuality and our sense of individual definition but when I finally ended up in AA in 1993, I was told to look for the common threads that bound me to the other people there, being reminded the effects of the dis-ease or my distorted thinking could at times in trying to keep me separate keep me sick. In those rooms I saw people from all walks of life, just like me struggling to live and feeling like they had to hide that struggle, no.longer wanting to identify only with externals, or otherwise feeling in the words of the AA Big Book ‘so far from human aid’ they could identify with and perhaps trust no one, most especially them selves. Unpacking all of this self and other negation of Complex PTSD has taken me over 28 years now. I am still not totally clear at times.

I was so glad at that meeting to hear other’s owning their mistakes and struggles. In time though, I wanted to know what the common theme that united us was, often it was hidden trauma and emotionally problems in being helped as kids to find ways to deal with emotions. Over time as my own buried feelings began to emerge, I found often active drinkers were going to shame or exile me for being human and emotional. They may be threatened by the fact I had put alcohol or drugs down and started to access those oh so problematic human emotions which I have heard described in one Al Anon reading as having been put into bottles on a shelf with no labels.

Working through all of my feelings in sobriety taking time and understanding and a lot of conflict and therapy. Learning to differentate too when they are about facts and when not, because how we think about our feelings and make sense of them can lead both to judgments of self and others that may not serve our growth. Defenses we erect too against feelings may keep us separate. Also learning to differentiate when and what is and is not appropriate or helpful to express, and with whom is taking time.. Since I was so neglected emotionally as a youngster..

Now I know that it does not matter who you are, what you possess, how many degrees you have, the amount of money in the bank as a human you are neither better nor worse than me, but you may be more unconscious or less according to your past and your trauma may be buried which means you will not always welcome me exploring my own or expressing my own.. John Lee deals with this subject in several of his books claiming some therapists even cannot help us move through certain emotions..

What I have learned over the next 28 years is that the struggle to separate all of this out as well as our false from true selves does come with pain and feelings of being set apart but that the truth is when I find my home within the wholeness I split off I no longer need to feel as upset. If others judge me, so be it, that only becomes a problem when I am no longer standing on my own solid ground or allowing others to erode or define it in other words when I feel pressure to become someone else just to fit in and belong and self abandon. That said as a member of the human race there is also a time to reign in my own wounded ego and take responsibility for not projecting all of that on others, nor taking on their demands or projections.

I loved that short video with Brene Brown I shared recently which spoke of our need to become the wilderness.. I heard an interesting interview with writer Charlotte McConaghy author of the novel Once There Were Wolves on the Radio National science show last Saturday. She spoke of how humans fear of wolves is unfounded and that we have a mistaken belief they are aggressive animals which is just not true..Wolves will not attack humans unless under threat. How sad that our own fear of them and misconception have led humans to the decimation of a creature that is both gentle and extremely family oriented, more often in fear of humans rather than hell bent on destroying us.. It made me realize once again what a poison fear is to love, empathy gentleness and beauty and how the amped up hypervigilance of Complex PTSD can lead us to overactive fear/flight/fight responses.. I heard an expert on the neurology of sleep interviewed to day on Life Matters on ABC radio and he said that these days many of us live on such a high alert trigger we find it impossible to wind down easily into sleep. I can identify with this.

It also seems to me to be true, as my first therapist Wendy Bratherton pointed out to me that the softer and most vulnerable person you were inside when early damage, neglect, betrayal or losses occurred, the harder your defense comes when hurt.. So that then all people see of you is either a seemingly cold and hard, excessively rationally split off human or alternative a raging beast which does not help many to empathize with what lies hidden underneath.. These earlier injuries may never be acknowledged but may lead to symptoms which plague a person or draw them closer to those with mirror traumas of wounding or neglect.. Not ever truly acknowledging not only the wounding you or the other person carried. Your complex struggle may lead parts of you to die off or you may try to kill those parts of others but always there is a reason why.

Someone I follow on WordPress and have become good friends with over the past few years often speaks to me of how his own violent trauma made him a citizen of the darkness. In that dark place feelings of anger and rage at his violation can possess him on a bodily level but dissociated from awareness. Underlying all of that is a deeper sadness (expressed in anger projected) that does not seem to be able to see the light of day in relationship with many.. The person often gets judged as violent and hard but he is not that is just this defense. Sharing about it with my therapist she spoke to me about identification with the aggressor which may be a way of denying exactly how vulnerable the person so often feels. Kudos to my dear friend, he acknowledges this but sometimes the kinds of conspiracies he speaks of make me question what is going on. And as my therapist Kat has pointed out, often those traumatized in childhood become very obsessed with terror or horror or violent crimes of some kind which they enjoy to watch to experience underground emotions and conflicts vicarious.

Knowing what he went through I understand the depth of his inner wound. He was confined in a space and subjected to a lot of violence and his father traveled away so he also felt abandoned by him. I do not feel this person would hurt someone who allowed him to be real but God help the person who tried to overpower him as he was once overpowered.. Lately I sense inside his heart such an infinitely deep softness and tenderness but he cannot let it live, sees that as some kind of weakness so identifies with aggressors whose motives to me seem highly suspect. I try not to judge but sometimes seeing how much his own buried pain keeps him separate to others my heart does ache for him and I question the, too, some of my own defensive projections that come out of past hurt, pain and trauma.

I hope he does not mind me sharing this.. With my own past trauma I do all I can do to support others and myself through the healing, owning my own suppressed violent inclinations has taken time but as Kat my therapist always reminds me the fight or rebel response at one time kept us alive, later in life though it may keep or ego or vital alive self imprisoned in some way.. We surely need those who understand the depth of that wounding and struggle to show us compassion so we can also learn to mirror this for ourselves.. And only by knowing our own darkness can we really show empathy for those of others, we may never condone it at all, as we should not but we can be humble and grounded enough to know that damage is caused by damage and then goes on to replay and repeat if the urges and problematic emotional bondings and severings underlying it are not more fully and deeply accessed, understood and gently bought to consciousness.