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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And it was when I learned how to tell the difference between "story" (little s) and "Story" (big S) that I began to understand the power of
Story.
"story" I came to view from a writers perspective as "backstory".
"story" lays the groundwork, tells who the players are, give atmosphere and lays a foundation for the ending, like in a novel.
Its the framework for a creative ending.
But - if the entire novel is written only about the "backstory" that lays the framework the last chapter never gets written.
We are stuck in WRITERS HELL....
That file on our hard drive that is never quite finished
and causing us all kinds of irritation
or distress.
It is when we move from laying the groundwork, setting the stage and telling the backstory to telling about the emotion, the experiences and the drama behind our feelings about the 'story", like when we
that we begin to see how the story might evolve and in time come to a conclusion worthy of a pulitzer...
so to speak:)
Throughout my journey, when I was stuck on "story" that focussed on what others had done or things that had happened TO me - I was stuck in anger, resentment, hatred and rumination...
not resolution.
I was stuck in the pain of the past.
In time, I learned to recognize this was where I was at by who and what my focus was on.
If the focus of my story was on the things that had happened; the people, the places, the things going on that I'd had no choice in - well, those were things that I could not change.
(God, grant me serenity....)
These were those things I was truly powerless over - people and past circumstances.
That was backstory; the details, the players...the who, what, when and where of my bigger "Story" and the framework for the final chapter.
It was in shifting my Story to be about me, my anger at being violated, my power and my choice taken from me, to feel both the anger and the grief, to tell why this was important to me that I was able to move myself into, through and out of the healing process and
give meaning to the backstory by telling MY story.
Getting entangled in "story" made it impossible to tell my "Story" and write that new ending where I am
no longer
a victim
and much more
than a survivor
where I am
creating and living my best life
each day....
in spite of the past I'd had.
See the post: It is Unwritten....(today is where your book begins:))
Part of this healing journey is having our our trauma experiences validated by others....
This week has been groundbreaking in the area of breaking the shame and the silence around sexual abuse. Oprah Winfrey invited 200 adult men to come forward and tell their stories.
Generation after generation of sexual abuse is happening around the world. Yet - the stories are often never told. In therapy many of us have been told that the past had nothing to do with our today, to just get over it, move on; we are often labeled and medicated.
Our very being is denied when these life changing experiences are dismissed as inconsequential and unimportant by others.
Today, abuse of all forms are still not freely shared or discussed
yet...
it is in the telling of the story and having it validated as horrible by another human being that allows us to finally begin to move on and begin to create a life beyond this kind of life experience.
There is a time to put the past to rest, to move on, to create the life we want for ourselves but when we are denied this part of the healing process and forced to carry these burdens alone in time our pain will surface in a myriad of symptoms and very often become a distraction to the real issues that are overlooked.
The only way out
is through.
With that said; this broadcast may be triggering to those who have survived childhood sexual abuse yet at the same time there are great hints at how to begin this healing journey.
Please make sure you are in a safe, supportive place if you are concerned that you may be triggered...
Please follow the link below to watch this in its entirety on Oprah.com
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.
