A friend
of mine in a lot of pain came to me recently to talk about what she was going
through. After telling me her story, she asked me:
Do you think I'm totally crazy?
And I replied:
No, I don't think you're totally crazy. I think you're having
totally healthy, normal, appropriate pain in response to really terrible stuff
that happened to you when you were too young for it to be safe for you to feel
these healthy, normal, appropriate reactions and still survive into adulthood.
So now you're having healthy normal appropriate feelings that feel utterly
awful in the present moment. But if you're willing to live through these
feelings, learn new healing tools and connect with kind people, your healthy,
normal reactions to your history will give way to healthy, normal engagement
with life in the present. And it may even feel good if you're not too careful.
I love this notion! People are healthy and normal when they
feel terrible in response to trauma. We're supposed to feel grief and pain as
part of a healing process. But when traumas happen to children, their nervous
systems literally don't have the developmental maturity to handle the trauma
experience. Instead, the most
resourceful children (aka the survivors), create physical blocks to the
emotions coursing through their bodies through addictions and other compulsive
behaviors. As these behaviors get peeled away in adulthood, it becomes our task
to re-connect our own physical capacity to feel these feelings, allow ourselves
to express the full emotional weight of the old traumas and begin to release
these stuck emotions, memories and self-sabotaging behaviors.
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