Voicelessness and Emotional Survival > Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board
Still need to work through early trauma
Gaining Strength:
Morning - looking for that "switch" to move from avoidance, fear, memory to action, life.
Gaining Strength:
After a lifetime of fighting a wretched feeling I have been learning and coming to understand so much that is behind it in these past few months. That understanding alone has not freed me. But I believe the work I have done in the past 15 years has prepared me to move forward now.
Early in the summer I thought things were popping quickly and by summers end I would be walking in freedom. That didn't happen. But I am more aware of the right work to be done. While I walk a razors edge teetering above a depressive abyss, I am finding myself able to stay above. I see in profound clarity how my mindset has trapped me. I have several sets of tools for shifting my thoughts out of condemnation and rejection but it is not as simple as flipping a switch.
All night long I awake with some kind of dark dream and all night I work to shift those thoughts. It is during the day that I had developed a practice of avoidance. I hate that place but I have to keep my perspective that it took me decades to even come to see that it is avoidance of severe psychic pain that is at work in this wretchedness of paralysis. Having that insight has given me yet again a renewed hope of overcoming it.
First I am thankful for this understanding. It goes towards lifting the self-blaming which carries its own costs. With this understanding I am able to more easily work towards hope. When I face this avoidance (over and over throughout each day) my unconscious reaction is to feel hopeless but now I am able to remind myself to reject that.
I am working hard to shift my constant being into a state of feeling love and acceptance. It takes an inordinate amount of effort and is not always successful. Yesterday I realized that this lack of obvious progress has caused me to give up for years. But now, because I believe that shifting my thoughts and bringing myself into a place of ole is the way, I am able to renew my focus over and over and over again.
I do not have this muscle yet. I want to develop it. And so I work on it without cease. I have nothing to lose.
A year or two ago I saw so clearly how I was trained to think darkly about myself. Now I am training my mind to think in a different way. I have already had many successes. I keep these in mind to help encourage myself.
I would like to figure out how to set goals so I can mark my achievements as I go along. I'll be thinking about this, something tangible like monitoring weight.
Of course I wish this were faster but honestly I am thankful for my progress - for the understanding I have developed and for the work I did for so long that has given me techniques to use to lift myself up.
Gaining Strength:
Even though I know what is causing this paralysis I still get stuck..
While I am looking forward to my EMDR appointment tomorrow, I see that I must work diligently at developing my mind muscle. I resist it, I'm not sure why. Perhaps the evidence of progress is not there. That will cause me to feel hopeless. That hopelessness is a double bind. I absolutely must commit to work harder.
Gaining Strength:
I have used these thought experiments to shift myself out of victim hood. That is no minor achievement. I was really stuck there and for years I knew it was not good but seemed impotent to shift. So that is an important, recent achievement. My awareness continues to expand. That is good.
I believe words have great power, so in times like now when I dont seem able to latch onto the ability to find the right frequency I am falling back onto the right words.
I am becoming increasingly aware of how subconscious memories work at putting me into a feeling of rejection and failure, it is very subtle and very painful. The pain is experienced as a constant irritant but when I look into the source and connect with it it is enormously painful. In the past week or so I have bee bombarded with memories of great pain from my 20/s. This is related to the way anxiety got attached to everything. So this pain is attached to everything. I see it replay like a nightmare.
To work on reducing the intensity of the pain is my initial goal. Let it emerge, no longer repress it. Talk to it.
When the pain occurred I processed it as evidence that I was a total failure and then I repressed that fear and became desparately. So now it is my job to talk to it, to recognize that that was a lie. It would have helped to have had someone who loved me help with that message but now I do have me. I finally have me to give that message.
Gaining Strength:
Two things: I am able to deal with the pain fairly well when I am not "doing" anything, while in the state of avoidance. That sounds of no value but actually it is. So one step I can take is to begin to be willing to be present to the pain rather than watching tv, surfing the internet, etc. that will be a strengthening exercise. With a bit more strength I can be present to the pain when facing the tasks.
Second, in the midst of pain it is time to face, it, examine it, and challenge it. Bit by bit.
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