Growing Up at Last

Well I had another healing crisis over christmas lasting into February and it seems to have done the trick…that and some medication anyhow.  My values have had an enormous shift into the spiritual realm and I have stopped chasing this and that.  I no longer seem driven by my desires to have more and more.  I am resting in my soul.  Trusting in God, the Universal Source, and life…well with trust life is SSSOOOOOO much easier.

I feel fully in my body and grounded and rooted into my boots.  I have never felt like this…and let me tell you it feels great.

I’m no longer running away from myself…or from God.  In fact my mantra at the moment is “I rest safely in God and in God I am forever safe”.

I have been exploring judgement of which I have had a big fear and I have realised this week that for me judgement means rejection and rejection means I dont fit in which then becomes a survival issue for me.  If I dont fit in that threatens my survival.  Of course this is the attitude of a child and I am no longer a child.  I plan to hold a ceremony for my childhood and release the patterns from my past in a fire ritual.  It is time to do a whole host of letting go.  Letting go of my woundology beliefs, letting go of my need to fit in, letting go of the child I was and becoming fully the woman I am.  I want to honour the child I was in this way because she taught me so much and I love her but it is time to lay the past to rest be the strong, sensitive woman God has made me into.

Letting go of the need to fit in and instead having a preference to fit in feels like it has brought a big shift for me.  I do NOT have to fit with EVERYBODY and if I dislike some people well so be it and if they dislike me well so be that.  It’s okay.  I haven’t got to fix or alter myself to try to fit.  I can be me and just walk away and that’s okay.  Swans, and hens and cats just do not go together and that too is OKAY!

And what’s more I have found my true voice.  My voice.  I have always been swayed by other people who had stronger personalities than me and noticed myself try to adopt their voice in writing.  Thinking their way was better than mine and if I adopted their way I would fit in. I think maybe I was attracted to their power.  How silly of me lol.  Obviously I was disowning my own power, and projecting it onto others and not allowing the power of my own voice to shine through.  Shine on.

*breathe*

womanonfire

Giving the Inner Child Talking Space

I recently introduced family meetings into our home. We hold them every Sunday night at 6.00 or there abouts. My husband grumbles “Oh I get enough meetings in work” but he still attends, bless him. (My crazy wife is at it again). My daughter is thriving on them. We have a talking stone that we hold to talk and we all respect the space of the talker until they release the stone.

I realised today that my inner family would benefit from having “talking space”. When I have had emotions come up today I have been treating them as messages from one of my inner children and inviting them onto my lap and allowing myself to be present with them whilst I allow full expression of the feeling, and open my ears to hear all the thoughts that come with the feeling. I wrote them in my journal. I validated the feelings and valued the thoughts that came up and allowed them to pass. I soothed my inner child and showered her with approval and love and honoured her input. I had to do some “seed sorting” to work out which information belonged in the past and which was valuable, useful information for now. I then worked out how I would apply the learning. It has proved a very interesting experience. I have been left with a powerful satisfied inner feeling of having been heard. Cradling the emotion “in my lap” and allowing it full expressing leaves me feeling as the adult without becoming overwhelmed by the “child”. C’est tres bien!

Just writing that is a little epiphany. I have had a bee in bonnet earlier this year about not being heard by others. God dang. I know now I should have asked of myself “Which part/s of me need to be heard and how am I not listening to them?”. Hindsights a wonderful thing, foresight is preferrable please (asking within).

Getting Back in the Saddle…

I did my counselling training over two years ago now but getting lost in the re-creation of my past traumas and having to deal with my own shit kinda put me back to square one in the learning arena. I saw the fences, I tried my best to jump them but darn it, if I didn’t go and fall off and break my damn legs (metaphorically speaking). I lost confidence in the skills and abilities I had learned and so decided to put back on my student shoes (are they ever really off in this big school of life), climb back on the horse and learn to walk on before I break once again into a steady trot (somewhere in my future I am already riding Pegasus, I swear it). So I signed myself up for level two counselling training three weeks ago and have just come back from my third class tonight.

I am a bit like an empty vessel waiting to be filled again. All the learning that has gone before seems to be suspended somewhere in my subconscious poised for the trigger words that will bring remembering into play. I am already finding the learning style of this course preferrable to me than the previous course I did. The style is person centred. The tutor is very willing to model and demonstrate counselling skills in action and I didn’t feel I got that from my last course. I realise now that by seeing an experienced person actually demonstrating the skills I can draw on the memory of them doing so and this helps me to develop and have confidence in my own abilities. It is part of the way I learn. I think it’s because I then have an internal reference point of expetise that I can compare my own performance to initially.
The tutor is very transparent, open, respectful and genuine…a way of being that I aspire to. I feel thankful that I have found a good role model in him. He walks his talk!

When I go to class my inner child let’s me know she feels vulnerable by giving me feelings of anxiety. They are not overwhelming feelings, more like a nudge to say, “I worry about being judged and rejected here if I show myself”. I reasure her almost automatically now. It really is like I am carrying around a child with me at the moment! I think before my child and adult part of me were enmeshed together and I didn’t know what was past (child) part of me and what is now. I find that separating them out and defining them as separate helps me see with more clarity what is past and what is now. I am curious as to how this works…do I need to separate the part to get to know it fully so that I can learn what it needs in order to heal before it can reintegrate with the whole me? I know when I have experienced inner archetypes that it has been a process of getting to know their energies and qualities before integrating with them.

We were asked in class today “when are you completely and genuinely yourself?”
My answer was “when I feel safe”. I am completely myself when I feel safe to be and that’s my truth. I am working on linking into that safe place within myself as often as possible so that I can always carry that safe feeling with me (and encourage my inner child to link into it) and then I can choose to be as genuine as I want to be rather than not being genuine because I am afraid to be.

Eternal Mothering

This picture just captures the essence of my inner and outer worlds at the moment. I love it!

Picture from Herbisorbis.typepad.com

Dealing with Misinterpretations – Tool 1

One of my biggest challenges in dealing with the fallout of an abusive childhood is the tendency to filter events and actions through the shit-filled goggles of my past and misinterpret them big time! I’m so gooood at this. A simple frown off a person can suddenly become “Oh she thinks what I said is stupid, she’s bound to reject me now.” when actually she might have been trying not to fart for all I know! Or failure to reply to my text can become, “What have I done, I must have done something, (spend about an hour going over and over the last conversation and text to see if I can find anything I did or said “wrong”), they don’t want to know me now”…when in reality people DO have a life outside their text phone and DO usually reply later. Of course my logical head can easily see how this relates to my stepmother’s treatment of me…her failure to reply to me often did mean she was mad at something she felt I had done “wrong” (I was a good kid…I just wasn’t perfect “enough” for her) and that I would be rejected by her…again.

But what to do about such a problem. One way I have found to deal with this is to keep an evidence journal so that my inner child can clearly see her misinterpretations and false expectations and can learn to form new expectations of events and people. It is laid out like this:

Event/Behaviour / My Interpretation / Evidence for / Evidence Against

When recording the event avoid adding an interpretation to it and instead only write down the observation. For example an event/behaviour might be:

When I was talking in class I noticed my tutor look down, her eyebrows wrinkled and she looked away from me.

Then I will write down how I interpreted this at the time. So my interpretation might read:

I interpreted this to mean she was didn’t agree with what I said. She obviously thinks I am stupid. She will think less of me now and won’t want to talk with me again.

Then I will explore my evidence. Did my tutor talk to me again? Could her wrinkling her eyebrows and looking away from me have meant something else? What other interpretations for this behaviour might there be? Sometimes if I need more evidence I will ask directly of the person if what they did, meant what I thought it did.

I am finding big time that I have more evidence to support that my interpretations are not correct for NOW and that they are definitely expectations formed from events that took place in the past. Doing this helps me lay the misinterpretations and expectations to rest in the past where they belong. It is a handy record to have to remind my inner child that not everyone is going to behave like stepmother and school bullies did in the past and that she can learn to trust me to protect her. More and more I am learning that when I experience these misinterpretations that this is a signal from my inner child that she is feeling unsafe and needs my reassurance, approval and protection. “Hey my little cherub, I’m here to give you all that and more. You can trust me to protect you and keep you safe now.”

Sometimes, of course you will find your interpretation of the event was correct. This is the time to reassure your inner child that you can deal with the situation and that she is SAFE and you are CAPABLE.

If you decide to try this evidence journalling I hope you will experience as much success as I have. Seeing it in actual black and white sends a poweful message to the inner child and helps calm her nervous disposition considerably.

God Bless

Inner Child Healing – Part 2

Healing for my inner child

She is so loved.

Inner Child Healing – Part 1

“There was an old woman who lived in a shoe, she had so many children she didn’t know what to do”.

The Old Woman and the Shoe

Sometimes I feel like the old woman, her shoe is my body and there are so many children in there, that sometimes, I have to admit, I really don’t know what to do with them. I’m sad to say it but I think for years I have “whipped them all soundly and sent them to bed” and turned a deaf ear to their cries. No, I haven’t been a good parent to them. I have treated them the same way I was treated. Well you know what they say about “habits of a lifetime”.

Lately one of my children has been rebelling, shouting loudly at me through the behaviours of lack of motivation, wanting to sleep ALL the time and refusal to do simple household tasks. So I finally had to pick up my pen and listen. It turns out this is the child part of me who had to take all the responsibility for my survival as a child and right now she is completely worn out and just wants to rest and rest and rest and rest. She went through so much as a child she sure as hell deserves that rest. I guess I have still been letting her take responsibility for me and that sure ain’t no job for a wee child. “Time for me to take care of you now, my darling”.

It’s amazing how much compassion and love I am finding within myself for my child parts lately. I am so glad; it as been a long time coming and I haven’t found it easy I must say.

Finally, Anger!

I had quite a terrififying childhood where I suffered daily emotional/verbal abuse, emotional neglect and some physical abuse.  I remember being scared everyday.  I had the classic wicked stepmother and was bullied at school and by so-called friends.  My reaction to the overwhelming fear was to split into pieces, live in silence and get on with the business of surviving.  I have been dealing with the fallout of this ever since!

Over the past five years I seem to have created the same circumstances in a couple of areas of my life, especially work.  My last job left me scarred and terrorised once again, although I have to say it has taught me loads! I had two stress breakdowns with psychotic symtoms (hypervigilence gone hyperactive) that were pretty damn scarey and had to deal with Post Natal Depression on top of that. I have self diagnosed myself with complex PTSD.  It has been a relief to find normality in the way I think and act through learning the symptoms and experiences of ptsd.   

Every now and again I get these little eruptions of rage (common with PSTD) and have to take myself off to punch hell out of my bed! Well last week I had a breakthrough.  I finally felt anger towards my Dad!  I have never felt anger towards my Dad as such before, I’ve always made excuses for him and I am coming to realise the reason I did that was because he was all I had left!  I also think unconsciously I have always though of anger as a bad thing, something never to be felt.  Well no more excuses for my Dad.  Here was the guy who’s job it was to PROTECT ME and what did he do…he did nothing that’s what.  He stood by in silence and let her abuse me and did nothing.  He made what she did all right because he never said “enough” or “leave her alone”. 

And I can so see this in my own life.  The times I have smiled through my pain whilst I allowed other people to overstep my boundaries and dole out abuse and never realised I had the right to say “enough”, “stop”, “leave me alone”.  I have stayed silent allowing others to abuse me, hell I have stayed silent in my own head whilst I allowed my own self talk to abuse me! And why!  Because the person who  should have stood up for me, who should have been my role model for standing up for myself, stayed silent.  I need a punch bag with his photo on GRRRR!

I am holding onto this anger now.  I can’t let it slip away again.  I need to FEEL that what she did AND he did was wong.  I need to FEEL the injustice of it.  I FEEL the rage has birthed something new in my psyche.  It has birthed a part of me who can stand up for myself.  Who no longer is going to stand by in silence and watch whilst I allow abuse either in or out of my head. 

And I am damn angry, it is directed anger at last and it is God damn justified anger and I’m okay with feeling this anger.  I think I believed that feeling this anger towards my Dad would make me hate him.  I don’t feel hate…hell I can feel a part of me that has already forgiven him. 

I realise the protection that my Dad never taught me how to do has been what’s missing in my psyche.  Peeling away my defenses over the last few years and not realising I needed to put protection in place for my terrified inner child only served to put me back in a place of sheer terror.  I see it easily now…if part of me feels unsafe of course it needs another part of me to be there to protect it, I just didn’t know how. Such terror I probably never allowed myself to fully feel as a child but have sure as hell felt it now.  As Clarissa Pinkola Estes says, “You cannot heal what you will not feel”.

Getting in touch with my anger and rage has been a revelation to me.  It has wholed me more.  I feel more rounded inside me.  My protector is young and needs to be nurtured…ho to the assertiveness and conflict management course I will be attending shortly.

So what’s missing in your psyche? What was never nurtured, was never role-modelled so never grew? How can you grow it now?

Check out what Ruth King says on healing rage…see link on right of page