Voicelessness and Emotional Survival > Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board
Still need to work through early trauma
Gaining Strength:
So well said Hops.
Gaining Strength:
My work is to create space between my being and the shame and hatred that I internalized so long ago. I have confused that dark stuff with my being for a long time. This work is slow but I must keep returning my mind to the image of whole ness and success. For many, many years I felt obligated to receive and stew in the condemnation so it is quite a challenge to turn that all around.
My mind automatically goes to connect dots between bad things and my deserving them so now I have to become aware of that mind and manually rewrite it. At some point what takes considerable effort will become automatic. It seems to me to be akin to a stroke or injury victim learning to walk again, what had once been natural without thought now requires very concerted effort.
I vow not to relent, to stick to the battle plan, to know the steps seem difficult and the progress slow but it will come.
It took me years and years, decades to understand how I got where I am. That is a victory even though it did not solve things but now things are being healed. I am encouraging myself to have faith in this process and to not give up. Stay strong.
Gaining Strength:
Here is a link to one section of Pete Walker's page on healing cPTSD.
THIS IS HELPFUL AND PAINFUL BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY HOPEFUL. AND IT IS GEYOND COMFORTING TO NOW KNOW WHAT HAS BEEN PLAGUING ME MY WHOLE LIFE AND IT IS NOT BECAUSE I AN WORTHLESS.
(Sorry about the caps. I was typing without realizing.)
Now it is beginning to get easier for me to allow the stomach turning, physical response of shame to release and then use a thought process to find a place of comfort. This us hard, I would prefer to go into shut down but the work will produce healing and shut down won't.
I must continue to talk to myself about hang and having faith in this process. Feeling these feelings is extremely painful.
Gaining Strength:
--- Quote from: Gaining Strength on October 16, 2014, 10:49:43 AM ---I don't really think of him in any specific ways oddly enough. But I think of the effects of his behaviour on me and , perhaps the even more destructive phenomena that no one ever stood up and pointed out to me that his behaviour was outrageous and cruel. Because no one did and because it started from my birth, I always processed it as a flaw in my being. And that has been the great destructive force in my life.
So today, I am reorganizing how I see myself. I wish it were as easy as it writes.
I want to interject about how your daughters combination of afflictions explains so much about her inability to receive what you have for her. It is so much easier, though not easy in any way, to cut the ties with a rejecting, shaming parent than with a child who closes a door, no doubt.
*****
Yesterday I began the "safe place" phase of EMDR. I am back in "shame", dealing with "shame." I am thankful that I made the progress I did in early summer. It cleared away a seal that now exposes the shame that has controlled my life while taking the horrific edge off the pain of it. So now, at long last, I am opening up the shame yet again but in a new level.
So yesterday we talked about a handful of memories in which shame and rejection paralyzed me. These memories and me reaction to them touch where I am today. Shut down. BUT - now there is hope and there is understanding that this shame and rejection came on me not from my own doing and that they can be lifted and life can be renewed.
Years ago I recognized that I lived with GAD, that my anxiety had attached to everything. And that is true about shame as well. I hear something that has some level of shame, unrelated to me and I feel shame. Decades ago I recognized that I tuned into negative feelings around me. I was certainly trained to do this but I think I also was born probed to do that. But now, I am learning how to generate distance between myself and the excoriating, disabling pain that shuts me down. That is where the "desensitization" becomes powerful, allowing me to function in spite of the memories and associations.
--- End quote ---
Gaining Strength:
This is so painful to read because it is so spot on. I have never felt so fully understood and I have never even met this man. It gives me hope. Now I must tap into the fortitude necessary to withstand the pain.
http://www.pete-walker.com/managingAbandonDepression.htm
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