Voicelessness and Emotional Survival > Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board
Still need to work through early trauma
sea storm:
Dear Gainiing Strength
That one memory encapulates the ignorance and sadism of your parents who were not equipped to love a little girl in a healthy way. It is just so sick and so tragic that you feel the shame instead of them. If I was there I would speak up just as you would.
The work of remembering the past to free you is so hard but it no longer needs to be an endless agonizing slog uphill. I agree that EMDR is a wonderful way of deleting these memories that bring us to our knees. I have found that even moving the eyes rapidly from left to right about 15 times will help with panic attacks. For me that has been a huge help. I know it sounds whacky but it does make sense when one realizes that the brain cannot work through extreme trauma like what you describe.
I worked as a children's therapist and came to have huge respect for children because they often were so ok and their parents were maliciously cruel and stupid. I dealt with the most severely abused children and one's who were scapegoated as the sick one in the family. What i wonder now is how did you survive it? Where does that strength come from at such an early age. God bless the child in you who somehow managed to survive that insanity. It wasn't yours it was theirs. As a child you HAD to believe they were ok or you would be swamped by fear and vulnerablilty. This is what is true........ You were completely lovable and anything else was a LIE. Those cruel caretakers in the past are dust and you are now. You know how to gain strength even from ashes.
It seems rare for someone to even embark on the kind of journey you are willing to take in order to be fully alive. I celebrate your courage and hope you feel you are heard and people here care. Even hearing that story about when you were four was hard to read and it keeps coming back to me, so living it must have been ... overwhelming. You can go back there and visit that little girl and be her ally and witness. This is the beauty of God's time, not "real time".
Lots of love,
Sea storm
Hopalong:
OH, the shame spiral.
I am sorry, GS...it's the core enemy.
Ales, hypnotherapy saved my life.
Literally. It was the only way to break a
two-decade smoking habit that had twined
its black roots all through me and was going
to kill me. But I had failed a hundred times.
After, I also worked with the hypnotherapist
on my fear of paperwork and my procrastination.
This was pre- ADD diagnosis, but it helped a lot.
And I would like to do it again sometime.
Hops
Gaining Strength:
Sea Storm - your validation so perfectly expressed in your first sentence is just a pure gift. thank you. I love your suggestions of the simple EMDR technique. I will add it to my repertoire. I have come to learn about the amazing connection between the body and healing. Even holding the body in positive postures or holding a positive facial expression has a therapeutic effect on the brain. The effects can be very subtle but i am convinced that they are accumulative.
I love hearing that you worked with children. What a gift you must have brought to so many. I so often think of Alice Walker's work in understanding that the child needs someone to hear and care, to understand. To be heard, affirmed, understood. That is the child's greatest longing - the human need. That need does not abate with time. I believe that child which has the profound need to be heard, believed and affirmed must be satisfied for the healing to take place. For me that 4 year old and so many more moments of childhood needed, needs to be heard.
Hearing, affirming, believing - those are gifts which restore the voice to the voiceless.
You so clearly are a vessel of healing. I imagine that has been a gift to many. I hope that has brought you some comfort as well. Thanks for hearing my voice and acknowledging my story. That little four year old rests in your compassion.
Gaining Strength:
Hopalong - you are so right about that shame - it is such a stealthy, insidious thief. It wears so many faces - even when we think we have called it by name and slain that dragon it rears yet another head and blindsides us from behind. Shame, once instilled at an early age, is so easily triggered by people and incidents that have no such intention. It has a long, long life.
I am glad to read you have had such good results from hypnotherapy. It must be a great relief.
Gaining Strength:
I recognize that bitterness has taken a toll on me my whole life. I know the source of it. I am taking the lid off of the repression of it with some reluctance and some trepidation. I went to Alice Miller site and found this and found it helpful.
AM: I totally disagree with this theory and think like you that it shows indeed traces of poisonous pedagogy as the rage and anger are condemned by all religions. However, these emotions are the most natural, healthy and logical reactions to endured pain. Since these emotions are forbidden for children, they must be suppressed (in contrast to sadness which is allowed). Neither in family nor in school are these IMPORTANT and life-protecting emotions allowed to be felt and expressed in words. They must thus stay blocked in our bodies and produce corporal symptoms in order to be heard. If they are taken seriously in adulthood, these emotions can be felt in therapy and then the symptoms may disappear. Because their only one concern was to REBEL AGAINST INJUSTICE, cruelty, perversion, hypocrisy, lies and the lack of love. All this bitterness was locked in the body without any outlet. Now, in therapy, they must be respected by a therapist who is not afraid of them. If, instead, clients should believe that their rage is only a defense against sadness and an illusion of “false power,” they will – again – be hindered to admit exactly this emotion that blocks the functioning of their bodies and whose liberation would be healthy for the adult.
Apparently the FEAR of the little child of the next blow that still lives within us penetrates also many concepts of therapy, primal therapy not excluded. We prefer to stay good, obedient children of the Kindergarten who rather do dare to cry without end, than to become adults who can feel the endless injustice they had to endure in their childhood and rebel against it. In my opinion, the adult must dare exactly that.
This is so painful for me. I may be repetitive but the double bind of not even being allowed to say that I felt mistreated caused an extra booster of resentment. Lifelong I have found that when others express their emotions and people gather round to empathize I boil with bitterness. My reactions left me rejected and isolated - the very states I most feared. It took me decades to recognize the self-perpetuating cycle and even longer to own it. Because of the message, "You get what you deserve" that was drummed into me daily both covertly and overtly. I longed to heard and affirmed and empathized with but was denied even at the very youngest of age.
My mother loved to tell the story of a time when I was an infant and some friends of hers had come to visit. The nurse was dressing me and I held my breath until I turned purple. The doctor rushed over and announced that there was nothing wrong but that I was strong willed and resisting being dressed for company. But I recognize that there was great hurt already experienced, hurt that my mother never understood and could never, through her dying day, acknowledge. Lifelong, my mother turned her back on my pain. So when I have seen others being lifted up and supported I experienced great psychic pain. I now know the source of the trigger and am working to no longer react to it or repress it. But I am still stuck in the "shut down" reaction and that is what I must learn to transform to an empowerment reaction. That is where I am. I must learn to stay with the pain rather than alleviate it, stay with it and acknowledge the source. It is so great.
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