Trauma lives in our body : loving our inner child to heal

Gabor Mate makes this important point in many of his talks. Even if trauma happened in the past to our somatic body /mind it often feels like it is still happened or happened recently. Sadly, in our society we do not like to talk about this. We do not like to acknowledge it. There can be an implicit belief that if you cannot ‘get over’ traumatic experiences or pain, something is wrong with you. You may be told you are making too much of it by those who do not know or understand. But there is nothing wrong with you for having a natural response to bad trauma.

Trauma can make us feel angry. It can make us live on a hair trigger. Hurts we did not get to address still live on as do the complex feelings. For growth these need to be understood and dealt with, when the hurt or sense of outrage gets buried it can affect our immune systems, it can also make moving on happily and trusting difficult, not impossible, but very challenging.

I just read the following post from Don’t Lose Hope, it shows how we cannot just forget about trauma. It was very timely for me lately dealing with anniversary and trauma cascades.

https://sexaddictionpartners.wordpress.com/2023/01/07/why-we-cant-just-forget-the-past/

Once we are aware of how trauma is affecting us in flashbacks or memories we can learn techniques for dealing with it. We may also need to accept too though that for long periods we may get stuck or fixated on trauma. Noticing this is a pattern is work in and of itself and hopefully it makes us reach outside of ourselves for help and be fortunate enough to find healthy loving, validating witnesses. Our inner critic may try to function to shut down both our tears or anger from past pain. It may shame us and most especially it may try to block our attempts to reach out, link to others and heal. Healing means not allowing this to happen. The inner critic may think it is doing a good job keeping us safe by criticising us all of the time, this is why we need to have a good chat to it at times. We can thank the IC for trying to protect us now but say to it we need to find better ways to deal. Learning to hold ourselves or be held by safe others as we release and acknowledge trauma is very important healing work.

We can also make efforts to shift our focus off of the hurt after we have faced it. We can do something loving for ourselves and we can always remind our inner child or traumatized self they did not deserve what happened to them. Self blame can be one of the worst lingering effects of emotional neglect, trauma or abuse. We can never have had a happy childhood if we did not but we can also choose to let our inner child have good things now.

The inner child lives in our gut and wants to be connected to. Ask it daily what it needs and take the time to listen. Do not feed it lies but find a way to value and acknowledge its truth. The inner child which is not wounded is the best part of us and the most authentic. We can only be truly happy if we befriend it with a loving adult who has the intent to both learn from it and encourage the child to come out to play, relax, trust and be natural and spontaneous, especially if part of our complex trauma history involved the inner child being made to feel shame or guilt for existing.

On an astrological not to end this post, last week’s full Moon in Cancer for many may have triggered where we were we did not feel loved and nurtured, retrograde Mars currently turning direct may also be stirring up a lot of anger, frustration or disappointment around unmet needs. We have to, as adults, learn how to move through this and not let it block happiness. . I will end this with a quote from Sandeep Virdi’s post which I am also going to share after this. It seems timely for what I chose to write about today.

True healing happens when we understand that our beliefs and perception of past pains, wounds and issues shifts when we learn the lesson the universe wants us to understand about ourselves. If we take a step back and observe from our minds eye, we can see the lesson. Once we feel this lesson and shift our belief of the situation, only then can we find true forgiveness. This is the power of transmutation we all hold within ourselves. The programming of relying on something ‘outside’ of us to fix us, heal us or whatever the woke culture determines, must change. This is not a year we rely on external sources to give us power. This is the time where we integrate the lessons and empower ourselves to take the responsibility of our own healing and life experience.