The Power Within

Photo Credit

It was when I stopped seeking for my solutions outside of myself that I found the power within myself to create the change that changed my life by owning my own power to overcome the symptoms of distress instead of coping, managing, medicating and in general avoiding it.


I know, I know...what is all this about "The Power Within"? This sounds more like a motivational tag line for an upcoming Tony Robbins seminar than anything useful.


Well, yeah. 


Until I actually discovered that the key to my living beyond the emotional and cognitive distress that haunted me and influenced my life-after-trauma-and-all-bad-things


really did come from within myself


not anyone or anything


not a tip


a trick


or a really great therapist.


But from within myself. 


Don't get me wrong...


Tips, tricks and a good therapy relationship...those external resources we seek out and find are very often helpful in our journey from


there (darkness)


to 


here (living in the light:))


but they are not the solution


the "fix"


or the 


source


of our healing or our peace. 


The thing is that these external resources were useless to me without this insight and I stayed mired in the bog of 


nightmares


flashbacks


resentments, panic, anxiety, depression, dissociation, physical illness, pain, distress and in general 


I felt hopeless that anything could be different


and


helpless that I could change anything about my life.


I felt and believed I was completely powerless.


I had no clue as to why I could not find my way out of that dark place. 


I could see there was a light shining at the end of that dark tunnel.


But I didn't know how to get there.


Until I discovered that I held the power to free myself from the pain of the past by learning to pull my 


thoughts and feelings


out of the past and into today.


This did not happen all at once. 


There were no bells and whistles that went off, no celebration telling me that I'd arrived...


"Yay! You are now done!"


There was no magic wand that anyone could wave over me to say 


"it is done"


in a deep wizardy kind of voice:)


No.


There was me, myself and I


practicing catching the thoughts that said things like


I'm scared


I'm stupid


What the hell...life sucks and then you die 


so why bother?


Give it up


I can't do this any more


and learning to identify those thoughts as coming from the source of the bad things in my life and that I had adopted those thoughts as my truth..


my belief system that my entire being and life was based on.


I had firmly believed that I was worthless and powerless to change my life or choose who I wanted to be each day.


And no amount of "you shouldn't think like that" could change that belief without some effort on my part.


It's very much like reprogramming a computer that was infected by a virus...sometimes the virus can be hidden but when we realize that something is wrong with out output we can follow the symptoms back to the source of the problem to the operating system and clean up the hard drive and we get new output...we get new results when we remove it instead of just masking it, avoiding dealing with it or pretending it never happened. 


And so it is in this journey from


there


to here


we don't arrive all at once, there is no software program to run, no pill, no therapist that can wipe our hard drive clean for us. They can guide us but when it comes down to it we find our own power to catch the virus


clean and rewrite the hard drive


and we don't do it all at once


but by


putting one foot in front of the other


one day at a time.