Complaining

When I started looking inward for my solutions I realized that "complaining" was my immature way of saying "I don't know what to do to fix this problem for myself". 

The empowering solution?

Lie in learning to look for what I could do to set things right for myself instead of what I wanted others to do to make things right FOR me.




Seek Knowledge, find Wisdom, live your Truth!™

 

Creating My Best Life; Emotional Awareness

Seek Knowledge, find Wisdom, live your Truth!

Recently on the Empowering Solutions Community page I'd posted this: "Avoiding my emotions created a teapot effect where I would blow up or boil dry. ~SusanKs". 


The way I described myself in the past was as having 2 emotions; angry to the point of rage and sadness/depression that would debilitate me. In between I lived in a state of numbness where I didn't feel anything. 


Emotional extremes and swings from one extreme to the other was my normal until I understood that I could learn to connect with my body and my physical responses to my life experiences aka my emotions and...


...that there was a full range of emotional experiences not just the highs and lows I was accustomed to.


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Going Through...

In the journey of life there are going to be times of stress; triggers of memories and feelings that take us to that place we'd rather not go. 


The thing is - when we resist those memories, the thoughts and feelings that crop up is when we find ourselves feeling irritable, angry, touchy. Or we might feel down, depressed and dissociated from ourselves. 


The key is to recognize this in ourselves, bow to the experience and embrace the feelings that we might go through them to finally live beyond them. 
~


I Believed


Tears Wash the Soul Free

Seek Knowledge, find Wisdom, live your Truth!

Pain is Pain

To Heal is a Journey...not an event

In my journey, I've personally experienced a broad range of trauma. I've also had chance to meet and talk with other survivors-of-bad-things. And while our stories are varied, our experiences different, very often our healing journey's are very similar.....

Pain is pain.

It doesn't matter the source of the pain - something hurts.

Healing takes place in the same way, no matter the sources of the injury; there is a natural healing process. An order. 

Wounds look different - a broken bone looks different than a cut. But still the healing process is the same for each. 

It is vital that this wound be protected; time, tenderness, dress the wound, set the break. Rest and compassion for the injury; don't overtax ourselves. 

Emotional trauma is trauma, regardless of the source; the wounds look different, the source of the injury is often different, varied. But the healing process is very often the same regardless of the type of or source of pain, I've found.**

Telling my story about what I survived is vital; but I learned to tell only to those who will treasure it and validate my experience and my pain without trying to offer fixes or worse - denying or dismissing my experience. 

It is vital that this wound be protected; time, tenderness and kindness for our soul and our spirit. Rest and compassion; don't overtax ourselves. 

Feel the anger; throw rocks at the mountain, pound the sand, scream, run...then be open to the tears and the grief at what was lost and what will never be.  

Journal, write, draw....whatever comes to mind to tell your story and allow the pain to escape your body. 

And be willing to do it over and over...

Until it is done.

I learned to not expect myself to be able to just "get over it" without attending to this pain. 

Avoiding it and attempting to go on as if nothing has happened was likely to cause this wound to become bigger; in time the untended wound may fester, take over our lives and cripple us as a physical wound left untended might.  

Or perhaps we go along, thinking all is well and the wound has healed, unaware that it was not completely healed from within and that we unwittingly left ourselves fragile. The next storm might toss us back into the throes of the original pain - or much worse as the waves of hopelessness overtakes us once again.

I found that this is the healing journey; the hard work and the healing path. 

Sometimes a physical injury hurts as it heals. 

Emotional healing is very similar. There is no short cut. There is no easy way around it. 

To heal from the wound, I learned I must go through the pain in order to finally get out of it...

and live free from it. 

~

The Natural Elixir of Emotional Healing

Onions Make Me Cry

The Power Within

**Note: the complex issues of child abuse create the additional need to address not only the trauma experience, but the interpersonal/developmental issues/life skills that are often related to the trauma experience. For more information on Developmental Trauma issues visit the Trauma Center developed by Dr. Van Der Kolk.

For more information about the unique issues faced by survivors of parental abuse and neglect visit my friend Amy at Guess What Normal Is 

 Seek Knowledge, find Wisdom, live your Truth!
~

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

~