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Witnessing Her Own Painful Memories with Detachment |
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Sunday, 21 December 2008 |
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I am 59. I have had a migraine since I was in my mid-twenties (poetic license!). Seventeen years ago I was diagnosed with the prelude to what has now evolved into Lupus. I have had this condition for 5 years - suffering stuff that I wrongly attributed to God knows what - until a major flare-up this year resulted in the diagnosis.
This year I have had one flare-up after another. I control one with steroids - get over it - another comes. I have been working with all kinds of techniques/therapies on my own (have a background in psychology) and then I hit the jackpot: relaxation, emotional protection, visualization.
I have moved 2000 k/metres from everyone I know…. have walked away from the environment in which I spent the whole of my damaged life as an abused child-person and the dreadful vortex of endless traps - psychological, spiritual and worst of all, that ever-vigilant physiological state…. Yep, a life on alert.
Over recent weeks I have started to feel that cellular activity starting, as Christmas came at me. For many months I seem to have been helpless against the flooding of memories that whirl through my mind and dreams like a movie theatre that never closes…. memories so long forgotten, of incidents that kept me in that constant state of alert without let-up, for all these years.
I started practising being very still and quiet, anywhere and everywhere. I started to be an observer of these memories without emotional attachment. I invented a visualization: I sit on a railway station platform and quietly watch a train go by. It is filled, carriage by carriage, with whoever and whatever from my life. I simply watch.
The story is long so I'll bring it to a close. As a result - for the first time in my life, I am, bit by bit, shedding the hooks that I have carried in me, joined to all these others by their chain or rope or line. For the first time in my life I have taken action to protect myself from the stimulus that will get that anxiety stirring deep inside. For the first Christmas that I can remember, i have felt something I think is moving toward peace and contentment.
I would like to work more on getting to the very cells of my body and soothing them - assuring them that there is nothing more to fight - I wonder whether this is possible?
[Ed. Note: Yes, it is.]
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My own post traumatic responses were re-activated in 2005 following an auto accident that lead to my needing knee surgery and major back surgery. I called in every tool I had, including hours of listening to Belleruth's guided imagery, and even more hours of witnessing things that I thought I'd healed come to the surface. I came to understand that they were coming up again so I could further clear my cells of those old memories, and I even thank the auto accident, followed by my father's death six weeks later, as each of these incidents showed me where I held on to emotions regarding the abuse and the anger I stilled carried.
I wish you the deep healing you are seeking, moments of that beautiful creativity that you use so well, and the quiet moments of peace you find as you release more and more of your memories and the accompanying emotions long held within.
Many blessings, and gratitude for your sharing of your story,
Lynne