Voicelessness and Emotional Survival > Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board
Still need to work through early trauma
Gaining Strength:
Sea Storm - how generous of you to offer your pearls or wisdom. Let me not be a swine who tramples them.
I am ready for the psyche to unearth what is ready. I have done so much work for the past 30 years trying to understand "what is wrong with me?" It took me decades to understand, to name it (not really singular). I am interested to see how this unfolds.
--- Quote ---We are built to do that through dreams, writing and sharing with PEOPLE GOING THROUGH THE SAME THING>
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Sharing gives that voice, that healing voice that each infant looks to its mother's eyes to reflect back.
--- Quote ---Stop pushing yourself to meet unreasonable goals, do things you hate, be nice to people who are nasty, eat food that is good for you and that you don't like. Be kind to yourself before you head for the bad experiences mind shredding
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You are spot on. This is so important. Pushing for this things has always increased the shame and been more paralyzing. You are so right about this.
You are so kind to share. How comforting.
Twoapenny:
--- Quote from: Gaining Strength on May 28, 2014, 10:19:04 AM ---I had dream after dream last night in which I was shamed. I was in a room that was disgustingly dirty and I was paralyzed, unable to clean or I was in a group of people who were all going somewhere together - all except me. I was so deeply shamed as a child and I have found that shame turns in on itself - being shamed is shaming in itself, it stacks up and is so difficult to cut through, to heal, to alleviate.
I was shamed in order to be controlled. I was given chores and not given the necessary resources so that I would fail and then was shamed. When I was teased or belittled and I reacted I was humiliated and further shamed, and on and on. Now I can take these images and enter in them and be present with that child. I hope that in time being present will give way to something more proactive. I am still participating in the first step - naming it. In time, when naming it becomes natural and happens without thought the next step will come into place.
It would be nice to be able to explain to people what I am going through. Adults who have not lived the kind of shaming neglect cannot understand why another adult cannot act. It makes no sense. And that inability to understand has its own level of rejection, isolation and shaming. Shame begets shame, it turns in on itself and grows. Naming it and holding that shamed child may not yet not it down but it does stop the progression. In time, I will be able to move this thought process into real time.
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Aw, GS, I do know what you mean, it's virtually impossible to talk about things like this with people who've not been through similar. But the sense of relief when you do talk to someone who gets it is huge. It's taken me a really, really long time to be able to work through some of the things that happened (and it's very much still an ongoing process!). But you are right, naming it and recognising it is a really important part of it. And I found taking that shamed little girl, holding her, stroking her hair and telling her she did a really good job and tried her best really helped. I felt very silly doing it at first but it got easier over time.
I have found over the years that I have had to accept that I can't be 'real' with everyone I know, because some people just can't understand how I feel or think sometimes, and as you say, the rejection from that is too difficult to cope with. So I've found that probably the only person I can be really open with is a therapist, and then I have two friends who've had similar childhoods and get it, although even with them I don't go into too much detail.
What you are doing is so amazing now. You're so strong to do this and it will all come together for you, I'm sure xx
sea storm:
I was so touched by your dream. It was so terrifying and painful. The cruelty of allowing a child to feel that way is so clearly abusive and soul destroying. The narcissistic parents can do this without a second thought. Annihilate. You survived that. That must be some gift from a very sacred and untouchable part of you.
I used to have dreams like that for years. Dreams of being shunned. Shunning is reserved for very special victims and is designed to be one of the cruellest forms of punishment. Again the shunning people are some really whacked out bonehead dipshit bottom-feeders. You are explaining shame to me in a way that makes me really get it. Get what it does to your dreams, your heartbeats, your tears, your guts.Your ability to connect to the very people who could help you in the here and now.
I wondered how my psyche could be so mean when I was hanging on by my fingernails to live. The dreams were paralysing. I would wake up and they had been so huge and damning of me that I could barely get out of bed. To switch into a fast paced life.
Looking back a bit I can see that the fast paced life had something to do with the wicked, soul snatching dreams. This went on for years. Being hounded by my dreams and they told me I was worthless and scorned and excluded. That is how I felt at work and in my marriage. It became reality. I just got that now. Whew!
I was recreating my childhood in my worklife. Teachers are very, very conservative where I worked. They found me to be inexplicably weird and they were actually alarmed by what I said which was pretty basic for a child therapist. The reality was that I WAS excluded and shunned and I felt terrible about it and felt like I must give off a bad odor or something. I went from school to school and assessed situations with kids and gave explanations and helped create plans as well as worked with the children and their families. The job was impossible as I had four schools and over a thousand kids potentially to work with. Any crisis was my territory. So you can see that I was just like a ping pong ball in a bad storm. On top of that my dreams were beating the crap out of me. Scorn, shunning, failure, exclusion. My worst fears and dread.
For some reason I would not get that the job and my marriage were screwed up and instead of believing to my core that what the dreams said were true. Finally, I snapped. Could not do the marriage, was unable to walk ( really) , my whole body hurt like I had fibralmyalgia, and other things. I could tolerate no more cruelty and had NOTHING to give.
As an insightful person I think you get my drift. Yup, right over the cliff.
My life had to change and I was lost. My body knew what was going on and so did my dreams. I was more terrified of losing the man I loved and my profession. Oh yes, and I was targeted by a narcissist boss relentlessly. Good god, I don't know how I did it.
So the dreams went on and on for years. What they were telling me was to GET OUT. Run from this nightmare. Don't try to fix it as it is too much, impossible. Just get out. Be a bag lady, join the circus, put up a table on the street with a sign that says free hugs, anything but just get out. I had created my childhood circumstances but I didn't know it. I didn't have to know it maybe.
I did not have the strength or insight to stop being tortured by work, husband, boss, renovations, fish boat, fishing. I might as well of been carrying the fishboat on my back for all the work and money it cost. Oh throw in a philandering spouse who acted like life was set to music. Good grief. How to you just step away from all that.
Here is how...... your health goes sideways. You have staggeringly awful dreams where you are deserted and shunned and shamed.
Somewhere in there some light has to get in. It takes a series of small miracles. Something tells me you have had the small miracles too. That place that is your higher power in you, the shy quiet heart like a violet. You take a step to be kind to yourself because no one else is, you start to write in Voicelessness and read the stories of other survivors. You hear the stories of the trapped ones. Who gets out and who stays in. I am all mixed up about which one is you and which one is me now.
I remember those punishing dreams. They were saying that my life was like the dream. Also the dreams described my childhood as an unwanted and neglected child who could not get out and had no escape. I relived that reality in my dreams and they were like punishment from hell. So I hope you know that I get what you are going through and it is godawful. Blessings to you. I hold you in my heart. You deserved better. You deserve to be loved. If there is no one to love you then you just have to love yourself somehow. Even in little ways. Go to where people are kind. There is a roadmap in your intuition. You are here.
I have probably said to much in my desire to help you. Somewhere in the middle it started to unravell and become my story too. Thank you for opening up so much. You have helped me a great deal with your story. A lot of things fell into place.
Lots of love to you,
Sea storm
Gaining Strength:
Twoapenny - Thanks for your kind words.
I relate to your point about being real. It took me so long to understand that. I think I was hoping to connect, to heal that gaping wound. I didn't work. Now I try to hold my cards close to my vest. It is so tricky to get this healing done. Each person's path is so different so there is little standing on another's shoulders. But compassion and empathy do go a long way to strengthen one another.
Gaining Strength:
Sea Storm -
--- Quote ---The dreams were paralysing. I would wake up and they had been so huge and damning of me that I could barely get out of bed. To switch into a fast paced life.
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I think that a fast paced life can take the edge off the shaming. The body is active and busy. It is in the quiet, the night, the times alone when the shame that goes to the core comes out to haunt. That is why it is so important to heal down to the core - so important but so much easier to say than to do.
I suspect your work with those children and families was such a god-send to them. Those teachers didn't get their students - they couldn't have gotten you. It would have meant they had to own their own weakness which only a strong person can. It sounds like you bore the pain for them. As a mother I have seen that children who don't fit the mold are shunned 1st by the teachers. That kind of shunning costs a child dearly.
--- Quote ---unable to walk ( really) , my whole body hurt like I had fibromyalgia
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Our bodies hold our trauma; our bodies, our brains hold it. I am finding that therapies that go to the body and to the brain, the neurology are more effective that talking. But there is a play off - the body and brain hold the memories and the adult brain systhesizes, reorders and creates understanding. But the worst part seems to be that the pain has to be re-lived.
--- Quote ---I am all mixed up about which one is you and which one is me now.
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Ha, ha - I so get it. It can be so topsy-turvy.
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