A course to healing
There comes a time in life where we need to be the parents to ourselves that our parents could not be to us. That begins with sitting still for long enough to fully feel the pain of the wounds that have been festering just beneath the surface, beneath the mechanisms that we develop to cope with the pain. My mother tells me that I started crying before I had fully exited the womb, the world in which I was entering was a hostile environment for which I had already built a defensive armour. As a child anger was my shield beneath which the deep pain of rejection and abandonment was hidden, only to bury itself within the crevices of my body holding me in this static place until finally I developed the tools to dig them out. I carried a lot of shame about my inability to move forward, until my self-enquiry revealed to me the uniformity of the human condition.
We are all living, breathing, walking, talking, wounds, our afflictions bleeding over into all we do. Inflamed and bruised from unresolved traumas; left gaping, and susceptible to further injury because the original lesion was never healed. I spent most of my life trying to fill the void within with the thin gauze of love and validation from others, repeating the cycle of rejection by unconsciously inflicting it upon myself. Once localised my pain began to spread like a bacteria, forming a personality made of defence mechanisms, colouring my perception, and fuelling my actions; metastasising to every area of my life until it could no longer be ignored. The cavity of one who has experienced rejection deeply can never be filled by the world, and will only grow until this plain truth is realised: there is a self in here to be regarded.. by me.
The stories that we tell ourselves about what our childhood needs not being met mean become the prism through which we experience the world, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our traumas, the emotional response resulting from an external event, cause a disassociation from self and the fracturing of the psyche. These we lug around, forming the basis of our personality, coagulating into physical dis-ease, and building a nest inside the body. But the traumas that live within us are not only our own. We carry the DNA of our ancestors laden with the traumas that lived within them, ready to be passed down to our progeny, until we heal. We are the plurality of emotional injuries that live within us. We are a multiplicity of selves waiting to be made whole.
Healing begins with developing the patience to sit in silence with yourself, and look. Look with the inner eye and confront all that you have been trying to hide. Peel the layers of armour concealing the truth. Cry. Cry for the self lost, the self you once were; and give gratitude to the pain. The pain is where the traumatised self is waiting, waiting to be acknowledged by you. My pain brought me to wounds that my mind had forgotten, but that my body had memorised. My healing, ongoing, lies in my willingness to tap into my inner resources to get me through. It’s a long arduous journey and I pray that the hardships of life will only make me softer. I trust that they will.
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