Trauma is healed by releasing it. Letting it go. The practice is to let go, let go, let go.
This is what I mean by unconditioning yourself. It takes true awareness and daily application. You are regularly, habitually extricating yourself from your focus on what was wrong in the past by choosing to focus on something beneficial…or something other than this trauma.
No justification, no empathetic pain. No conscious recollection of painful memories of past events. This isn’t suppression or denial. You won’t forget. It’s not dealing with the shock of beach ball thoughts that pop up unannounced. It’s releasing whatever pops up with objectivity and sovereignty, offering it no further energy.
Attention equals value. You attend to what you value.
It’s in this restriction, in denial, where even pleasant thoughts and good memories become sad. We describe it as nostalgia, that wistful yearning for a bygone era that gets triggered through reminiscences that act like lullabies.
We are so traumatized by the burdens we’ve collected that we deeply mourn a past where we felt lighter, innocent of these charges. The burden of years gets relieved through nostalgic recollections, if only for a few seconds. But consider what a single drop of water does for a person Dying of thirst—it’s gratefully welcomed but doesn’t change a single thing.
For those who wrestle with the demons of the past – those flashbacks to the horror enacted upon us-our recollection does indeed create an endless loop of agony: Touch it, recoil, suffer, recover just enough to touch it again. The scar tissue that forms creates a false sense of healing.
True healing can only happen when the individual stops identifying with the memory as a victim.
Survival is the first step. Without survival, there is no point in any discussion about it. However, victimology continues to run the show if we keep identifying with the act of surviving the trauma, and then announcing it with such passion that you self-identify through it. That’s when you become the one who survived.
When your thoughts, words, and activities align with a thriver, you’ve stopped being the survivor. You are no longer someone’s or something’s victim. You can let it go and leave the past where you’ve dropped that label.
You’ve also taken a step towards the refreshment of pure freedom.
I didn’t just survive the traumatic events of my life; I’m now, for the most part, thriving. I understand that if I don’t value that hard work enough, there will never be enough attention, confirmation, and validation for me to stop declaring that I survived. I will not be enough without it. If I’m still re-collecting those memories that I’ve chosen to disperse, I’m still living in the past.
The sense of identity we formed around ourselves is super strong at this point. Others activate those memories, and empathetic pain is the result.
We identify with those whose stories are as tragic as our own.
It’s more valiant to hold space for others’ pain, to validate it, than it is to share your release from it. Also, there’s much less pushback and attack that comes your way when you simply allow others to air their traumas.
The reality is we haven’t released enough to make any difference inside; we’ve simply learned to live with those wraiths by calling them by another name, by seeking them reflected back by others because they are familiar. State knows state. This is what is meant by the statement, We teach what we need to learn.
Guide, guide thyself.
Yet, this dynamic does not stop at individual social circles; it permeates the structures designed to offer care.
Falling on an ancient, rusty sword by mutual agreement is what happens when we invite others to share their trauma with us. It’s an acceptable form of self-flagellation that we value more than life itself, because it’s obvious to someone outside looking in that you are trying to heal your wounds through the pain of others. A pain we know.
What also is obvious is the futility of that activity. It’s a cry for help, of trying to understand, by attempting to assemble the crumbs back into a loaf of bread.
Viewed through this lens, it’s clear but so painful that we attack to defend the wounds that we have kept open and bloody. We cannot accept our confusion and despair at not being able to let it go.
Anyone in the helping professions, as well as parents, fall victim to their own trauma, but insist on carrying others as we limp through ours.
We seek confirmation of our goodness through taking on the pain of others and calling it helping.
What admitting this means is unique to everyone, but it is the first step to tending to our own wounds.
Is it reasonable to conclude that individuals who gravitate to the healing professions have deep and unresolved painful bodies of memory? That focusing on the heroic act of empathy and helping is an expression of unresolved victimhood, a state that they desperately want to escape? Are these therapeutic alliances a primal wounding Love fest?
So what remedial action can be taken that works?
Awareness and the desire to express is a beneficial avenue. Get it out. State it clearly. Cover it from every angle through Contemplative Writing.
This is where thoughts become things that you can observe and then leave where they sit. It is an act of recovering your sovereignty. Then you will find – when you’ve written it out to that last drop – that it can’t affect you anymore. They are now simply words.
Everything you write, you write for yourself first.
Contemplative Writing is the ultimate process of unconditioning. Unconditioning is intimate, vulnerable, messy, scary business because, Surprise! it reveals everything you’ve punched down.
Contemplative Writing helps to not only clear the slate but to dismantle it, reducing it to its natural elements.
This clearing is what we can describe as a flow state, because thoughts and tears flow unrestricted, carried by the energy of words. I describe this space as sacred because it is where I’ve experienced extended periods of peace.
This is where I have come to understand the pain that was embedded in me long ago, and where I can sit with it and work through all the roles of my life – female, daughter, child, teenager, adult, woman, aunt, wife, mother, grandmother, friend…and allow myself as a human being to drop the baggage I’ve accumulated through each of these intimate identities.
What I’ve learned from my years of practice is that Grief plays a pivotal part. Mourning loss – of people, animals, things, places, states of being, but most of all the loss of my innocence, the memory of before the conditioning that was forced upon me through others and circumstances and my own follies changed the way I look at the world. I think that is why we mourn the loss of our youth with so much intensity. Even if we’d not choose to go back, we still remember a time when we were free of the intensity of those memories.
Contemplative Writing helps the weary traveler to drop the burdens that don’t serve us. An elegant mind travels light – treading lightly upon the earth and her peoples, and lightly upon itself.
As I see it, forgiveness isn’t a religious term. It offers compassion to your very next thought. You are fore-giving yourself compassion before the thought occurs and reconciling it with the fact that, in this lifetime, you will always be working through the next level of self-compassion.
As the creator Beyond the Veil 2 reminds us, the mirror cannot smile before you do.
Healer, heal thyself.
Originally Published on https://akasha111blog.wordpress.com/
