Making Peace with the Past

At Peace

I'd spent 17 years in America's mental health system, my history of trauma and abuse neglected and dismissed as unimportant. Yet it was only upon leaving this system that had denied my life experiences as having any impact on my life that I began to find healing and make peace with the past. I began to explore and understand the role of emotions in healing from the pain of the past and all that goes with it in human emotional pain and the physical response to cognitive distress. 


I knew I was making progress in my healing journey as I began to move from wanting and needing the  comfort of another and became able to finally sit with my own pain instead of striving to avoid it. 


Was this an easy thing to do?


Very simply...


Hell no. 


I was taught early on that my thoughts, feelings and choices were wrong and that to have an original thought or feeling of my own, to take any self initiated action would result in somehow being minimized and discredited, abused and left to understand that I was


unimportant.


So no; it was not easy to learn to sit with and face my past and the reality of what was my truth.


It was not easy to realize that no matter how hard I tried I could not create the perfect world today for myself where I was valuable and honored by striving to finally be accepted as good enough or that I had finally done something...anything...right enough.


It was not easy to fully face the reality that there was no 


quick fix


no magic pill 


to take away my pain


but that 

to heal from the loss of all that should have been and

that which will never be

is to embrace that which was

and is.

~


Today I Cried

~

From Stuck to Un-Stuck

Freedom

Finding myself in a "stuck" place where all I could do was talk about a life event or those involved in it became a signpost telling me where I was in my journey.


I've learned that I could get myself "un-stuck" if I could shift to talking and thinking in terms of how the event affected me instead of what others have done, didn't do or should have done...


Very often the first emotion I would feel around a particular life event that came up in my healing journey was anger, especially if my initial perceptions and feelings around this event had been denied by others in some way.


It was through learning to validate my own experiences and the emotional pain around it that I was able to make the mind shift from anger and rumination to acceptance and resolution. 

This is where I discovered what it meant to "go through" to "get out of" the pain of the past as I allowed the initial anger to be the door to grief and grief the key to my freedom. 

~

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Haiku: Tears wash the soul free


I Believed

~

Writing a New Ending to the Trauma Experience

Background photo credit here

This picture hangs on the wall by my front door. I created it as a part of my healing process to exemplify my experience of what it was like for me to "go through" the pain to "get out of" that dark place of shame and claim my "me-ness" which btw - was the exact place where I discovered that in spite of the past, the traumas, I could begin to create my best life each day. This is where I made the mind-shift to lay claim to one of my tag lines...

"No longer a victim and more than a survivor; creating and living my best life!"

Today let's take a look at part of the insight - those "aha!" moments - that led me down this path...

What's the diff between "story" and "story"?

What I've found along the way is that I would often get stuck in "story"...

the "reliving" of the past where nothing good ever came of the situation.

This is that place where I am literally "stuck" in the anger and injustice at the past.

Where I'm focussed on those people who wronged me

the situations and circumstances where I felt powerless and indeed may have been powerless - like a car accident, an abuse situation, or where I trusted someone and was betrayed.

This is "rumination".

This is where I lived in resentment

and grudges.

My anger was often justified at those things - those people places and things that I had put my trust in and in some way I was injured.

But I have since learned to use this anger to propel me through the healing journey.

How?

By recognizing "anger" as part of the natural human healing process

and

with intention

moving from the anger at the injustice and pain

through the emotional healing process

to reach the grief

the tears

the deep inner wounds

and let go

of the idea of finding justice where there may be none

accepting that I was truly powerless in this situation

that ruminating it over and over will not create a different outcome

or give me power to force justice for my pain

and in letting go of the "anger"

and telling the "story" over and over in my head and to anyone who would listen

I was able to get to my "story"

embrace and integrate the pain of the past

into my today

and allow the end to finally be written

in my tears.

Haiku

Listen in to how I learned to use anger to fuel my healing and find freedom from the pain of the past Empowering Solutions: Letting Go of the Battle

Q: How have you made that shift from "story" to creating the ending, finding closure and creating your best life in spite of past traumas?

Learning to Live Beyond the Pain of the Past

Photo Credit

For the longest time I struggled with doing whatever I had to do to avoid facing the pain of the past. I had learned to "don't think, don't talk, don't feel"...to avoid anything that had anything to do with being "me" or expressing any of my own thoughts, feelings or even making my own choices.

From the recent archives, here is a post about making that mind shift from living in avoidance of the past to learning to embrace it - and finding freedom from it...

And this is the conundrum we seem to face in this discussion. (((Conundrum: a difficult question, a riddle)))

Each of us who is on this journey of healing has their own story, their own pain, their own suffering.

Each of us has found in our journey different ways of coping, surviving, healing.

The one commonality seems to be that most of us agree on what Ellen so eloquently yet simply stated: The first part of healing it - is feeling it.

You can read the entire post here.

And here is a post from the archives about making that mind-shift from coping, managing and surviving to living in freedom from the pain of the past...making that mind-shift from being a victim or surviving day to day by "managing" symptoms to learning to live in freedom....and creating my best life each day...finding my way "though" the pain of the past in order to find my way "out of" the pain of the past...

This is where the knowledge of the emotional healing process came into play. As I gradually moved from talking "story" and on to "processing" emotion - the darkness began to lift. The pain began to subside inside me.

Things that had been horrible triggers for me began to be things I could experience with intention. I began to see how events and situations that in the past would send me off the deep end were identifying opportunities for healing, grieving - that here I could go through to get out of the connected avoidance and pain.

I no longer had to hide from the world because I could now become a part of the world.

You can read the entire article here "I DON'T want to talk about it".

Q: How has avoidance affected your ability to move beyond the past? How have you overcome this to find your way through the pain to get beyond it?

"Shame on You"

Collage by Susan 2008

"Freedom"

Something to think about today...

"Remorse" is feeling guilty for something I've done or said.

"Shame" on the other hand is feeling guilty for who I am, that I even exist.

Remorse is that thing that indicates that we understand how the things we have said or done have adversely affected someone else's life; remorse leads to a healthy society where we are considerate of others yet are able to separate ourselves from others (being "individual" in an "interdependent" society)

For example - I would feel "remorse" if my behavior of texting while driving resulted in injury to someone else in some way. (Is your car a "No Phone Zone"?)

I would feel bad and then have the motivation to change this behavior.

But "shame" is a whole different thing.

"Shame" would have me prostate on the floor begging for forgiveness or lashing out at others, defending myself and trying laying blame on someone or something else, searching out that I am still "ok" from someone else....

"He.....should have.....did this.....said that.....not my fault....I didn't mean to...."

DISTRAUGHT.

I would be experiencing the overwhelming emotional and cognitive distress that comes with living in

"Shame".

Where my value is defined by people places and things outside of myself.

Where I am apologizing for my very existence and feeling completely hopeless and helpless to feel any different and can easily find myself engaging in self harm behaviors or escaping in avoidance behaviors like addiction or dissociation as I cannot tolerate this innate sense of

worthlessness.

"Shame"

comes from a core belief that I am somehow defective, bad, wrong...that I in myself hold no value, can do nothing "right enough" or "good enough" and

unable to see myself as separate from others requiring validation that I am "ok" because I do not have that sense of intrinsic value that I am inherently "good" enough

just because

I

exist.

And IMHO...

The labels of "mental illness"...

reinforces this for many who seem to be "stuck" in their pain and unable to move forward, to get beyond it as the lens to the world is colored with words like

"disorder" and "disease"

which imply

"wrong"

"not good enough"

"sick"

and fuels hopelessness and dependence in finding value in being defined by others and that someone, somewhere will be able to "fix" me and "make me" feel

worthy

if I can just do what others tell me I need to "do"

right enough.