Still need to work through early trauma

[Gaining Strength]

Skeptikal - I love your musings. I honestly don't know what it is.  But I find your thoughts interesting.

I get your pint on looking inward. It can be counterproductive at times. But I am confidant that I need to look inward at this time. Part of the problem for me is that I am totally stuck and unable to move forward. It just isn't happening. In truth, I'm writing down what I am looking at to make sence is it.  And some things that sense has been made of has been freeing.  It is a subtle balance. 

[Gaining Strength]

Thanks Hops. One of the things I discovered in his recent process is that disconnect or dissonance when i tried to say or write "I love you." It opened up a cavernous insight to one of the huge blocks to healing and then all these memories and insights followed. 

More will come no doubt.

[Gaining Strength]

Synchronistically, when I was with a friend yesterday, I picked up a book she was reading and it was all about positive mind sets. 

I'm being patient and determined.  Wishing things were popping open more quickly but glad it is summer and that I am able to have the time.  I have no doubt there will be a breakthrough, a major one, one that will at long last allow me to participate in life.

I do have. Lifetime of repressed condemnation that became internalized and habituated.  Now I am consciously adapting a different message. As I go along the ways this new message clashes with that repressed condemnation shows up.  It gives me an opportunity to work against it.

Yesterday my child and I struck out to get the dogs bathed. Our old place was closed. The traffic was bad. Two friends were trying to coordinate blueberry picking.  I found myself driving from pillar to post , missing phone calls getting behind schedule etc., etc.  and in the midst of it all, the old stuff popped up, giving me opportunities to see what is at work underneath it all.  I saw self-condemnation at work and saw how for most of my life it lead me to be reactive and constantly irritable. 

Then I got this powerful perspective on my father who (being OCDPD) was relentless I criticism and hostility, bearing down on every action and inaction, creating so much angst and anxiety and anger. Voila -there it was on a platter. I could see it.

So I am getting these powerful insights and then, without warning, I am back at what feels like step one.  It isn't step one but it is. It isn't because I have made profess but it is because the feelings are the same but I have more work to do.  And this is where I must be very, patient and have faith that I am making progress..this is also where I find it imperative to dial into a higher energy.

Believing  in the process is critical for me because the feelings tell me that I am making no progress. The day I am longing for is the one that I am free from this dark cloud dread that I have seldom been without.

[Hopalong]

Okay...I'm on a roll (and a beer).

Here is your father. We are going to take him to the dog wash.
We do not care how much he is whining and snarling and barking...we (you, GS, in the present, since he's just an old ghost) HAVE THE LEASH.

That's right, Dad. UP. No, you do not have a choice. Hush. UP.
Right here, into the big sink.

Sorry you don't like suds. Here they come.

Rub rub brush brush. SIT!

Too bad. Water gets in the eyes, that's life.

Tough nuts. You had fleas and I'm washing them out.

No, not for you. I just don't want your fleas.

You gonna keep barking? NO BISCUIT!
Think about that. Just think.

Hush. I'm rinsing you.

I don't care if you think water torture is cruel.
You're DIRTY.

Very
very
very
DIRTY.

Tough.

You're a DOG.

And I'm holding your leash.

Get over it.

[Gaining Strength]

You are definitely on a roll hops!

[Gaining Strength]

Shame is like a cancerous lesion.  It is attached to everything . Sometimes I think I have made progress and other times it seems that the shame is reproducing at a greater rate than I am conquering it.

But I am more encouraged by believing that there is just a lot of it and that my daily battles will one day give way to a critical mass and then the work will be easy peasy.

I have so much work to do. But there is no reason to not do it. And I will triumph. 

[Gaining Strength]

There are levels of the. I am moving through levels of this.  I have just heard my voice say that the shame is paralyzingly. This doesn't sound like an epiphany and yet it is because it came not out of reasoning but out of something deeper and that ISS where the changes comes from.

More later. It is coming up.

[Izzy_*now*]

You know, GS, my mothers favourite expression, it appears, was "Shame! Shame! Shame on you!" and I never knew what for! I think it was for everything that I hadn't done perfectly, therefore leaving Shame attached to everything!

Keep on Keeping on.
Iz

[Gaining Strength]

Izzy, how awful. I often heard "shame on you." As well but I made sure I never said that to my child.  I never wanted him to feel shame - guilt  when he had done wrong but never shame.

[Gaining Strength]

I had a day of learning yesterday. So much popped up before me opening my eyes to what has been controlling my life for so long.  Yet I am reluctant to get going again this morning.  I will chalk it up to habit - the long habit of fear of stepping into the shame.   I chose to believe good things will come today.  It is a totally different way of facing life. Up to now, I have been avoiding the nightmare of living. Hoping (vain hope) for the best but fearing the worst. Not today.

[Hopalong]

I believe you will create good things today, GS!
You've been loving your inner child and that allows the outer adult to tap into being alive.

If you feel engaged and active 5 minutes more than yesterday, it's a better day.

love
Hops

[Gaining Strength]

Twenty levels down into the earth goes the bunker of shame and rejection.  It is deep and it is protected.  I have spent so much time seeking out healing but the effects were like a bandaid on a puncture wound.

The remedies was weak and the shame and self-loathing were  so strong a barrier. Nothing penetrated into the depths before.

When a child aches and suffers those around often brush it off or try to smooth it over without acknowledging the depths of the pain. That wound festers into the core. As adults we expect one another to "get over it." The pain we see in one another reflects our own pain back to us and we cannot bear it so we brush it aside. The greater the pain the less tolerable it is. Another's pain is at times so intolerable for us that we cut the sufferer off and throw them to the wolves.

I had a vision last night that showed me how this pattern has repeated itself over and over in my life.  I see how people who claim to be healers are themselves often looking for simple, easy victories because they need to rejoice rather than be seared by the pain.

I saw the jealousy and resentment that burned at the core of my parents rejection and how others in my life felt the taint of those wounds and unconsciously steered clear, piling on the rejection. When the resentment set into my being the cycle was complete for alienation.

I saw that "I hate you." Was pointed to me for a state of being that would engender even more resentment and rejection and shaming from those two who brought me into this world..

This revelatory process is slow and painful.  It goes very deep and is layered.  Will it work? Will it release me? Will it be complete? I don't really know but I choose to believe , "Yes."

[Gaining Strength]

Hops thanks again for your encouragement.  I am finding a bit more of something each day - a little less shame and a bit more comfort.   I'm thinking hat this may continue until the balance has shifted and then I will have the strength to tackle the mess without facing the Fallon assault of shame that has been so deeply internalized.

That makes sense to me. Time will tell.

[Gaining Strength]

The everyday being of me is deeply shamed. I am healing that sad fact. I am aware of a good bit that has been lifted. I no longer see it as emanating from a flawed being but as a result of cruel training. So even though the feeling is still crippling for the first time in my life I am assigning that shame and loathsome ness not to myself but to an outside force.  This definitely helps.  It cuts out that entire process of shame being shaming. That must be huge. But it is not yet enough to lift the crippling aspect of the shame clean away. 

This will come - perhaps in a clean jerk or perhaps in fits and states. I'll tell you this - it is a great relief to actually feel compassion for myself rather than shame and hatred., to get able to look back and see and understand why I was so angry and resentful, to no longer be plagued by wondering, " What is wrong with me?" 

All of this has to lead to something even greater.

[Gaining Strength]

Because the shame is so deep and so extensive even when progress is made it feels like digging a hole in the beach. As each handful comes out the surrounding grains slide in to fill the space.  So I clear some shame and I pick up my foot to step in and the shame has filled the space again.  That is how it feels but when it examine things again I see that progress has been made.  I simply must continue forward knowing progress has been made.