Remembering to Heal

More Childhood Processing

Memories

I remember the sickening fear, anxiety, panic and dread I would regularly feel as a child around my parents. There was often an intense stabbing pain I would experience in my stomach and a feeling like I was going to vomit. I remember very distinctly thinking that my parents were insane and I had no idea how to cope with being around them.

For example each week before going to church, an opportunity to “be with our loving God,” my parents would get in these intense arguments with lots of yelling, screaming, slamming doors, threatening each other and my father abruptly leaving before the rest of us. It was so incredibly frightening and disturbing as a child to witness this. And then to watch them at church suddenly put on these fake smiles and pretend everything was fine. It was so disorienting and it went on for years.

I remember how I became hyper-vigilant, constantly watching for any little signs that my parents might be triggered, trying my best to stay invisible, being incredibly careful about what I say and do, constantly walking on eggshells, fearing that they might suddenly start yelling at me for some unknown reason.

I remember the intense overwhelming hatred and resentment I would feel towards them for creating a household full of aggression and fear. I didn’t know how to handle all the intensity I was experiencing. With this combination of anger and fear and no way to process it, the only way I knew how to cope was dissociation. The body felt unsafe, my feelings felt unsafe, my parents felt unsafe, other people felt unsafe, the world felt unsafe. I escaped into mental fantasy and shut down emotionally and physically.

Remembering to Heal

It has taken me years of intentional and conscious healing work before I was even able to remember certain aspects of childhood. And still, there are so many layers of repressed emotions and sensations in the body. My gut has been shut down ever since childhood. In the past few years, I’ve started to have that sickening nausea come back again and it’s been especially intense more recently. I woke up in the early hours of the morning today with this nausea and felt inspired to write to help process it.

It’s so incredibly uncomfortable to have these feelings and sensations return. I feel like a traumatized child stuck in an adult body. I feel like a part of me is still a child living in the past while another part of me is living in the present. It’s very confusing.

Yet there is an intuitive sense that this is part of the healing journey. Some aspect of myself feels a willingness to remember and feel again, to open up to the memories, to reconnect to the body, to welcome the inner child who was/is so overwhelmed with pain and discomfort and heartbreak.

There is a recognition that this goes beyond a personal “me,” that this is part of humanities healing journey, this is a transformation of the patterns of trauma that have been past down from generation to generation. Us humans are learning how to open our hearts to all the pain and suffering that has been shut down and repressed for millennia. By consciously feeling and remembering, by becoming aware of our response patterns, by investigating our true nature, we are creating an opportunity for a more holistic and healthy society to emerge.

Waking up from the Personal Identity

The innocent misunderstanding that caused so much suffering as a child was the belief that “there is a personal separate ‘me’ who is in this body who is responsible for the behavior of this body. And there is a separate ‘other’ person in my parent’s bodies who is responsible for their actions.” I believed life was separate, I believed that there was a helpless victim living in the body, I believed there was someone that needed to struggle really hard to appease his parents in order to be worthy of love and safety.

These beliefs seemed so incredibly true, as it appeared everyone else around me believed the same thing. It seemed like an undeniable reality that life was divided, separate, dual. Yet to my great surprise, these beliefs are crumbling.

An addict at rock-bottom eventually realizes they are powerless over their addiction. And so it is with me and all of my insane coping mechanisms I’ve been living with. Slowly the realization is unfolding that there never was a “me” who had any choice about how I reacted to my parents, there was never a “them” that had any control over their behaviors. There isn’t a “me” who could have or should have done things differently, there isn’t a “them” who could have done things differently, there isn’t a “me” or “them” who are suffering, who are lost, who are traumatized or who are even healing.

How incredibly healing to realize that there is no healing, that there was never a somebody who was broken! What a bizarre paradox.

Remembering Without a Rememberer

The memories keep coming back, the uncomfortable feelings still arise, the intense sensations in the body reemerge from the shadows and at the same time there is progressively a seeing that there is no one doing any of it. It appears like there is a choice to heal, like I have the ability to consciously meet my pain with patience, compassion and tenderness. Yet at the same time, it’s seen that my choices aren’t really my own.

All of this is Grace. My parents were innocent, I was innocent, humanity has been innocent this whole time, over all the centuries of violence and aggression and trauma. Our stories of separation, of suffering, of “good” and “bad” are being seen to just be mental projections, without any inherent reality to them. We are remembering that life doesn’t have a separate doer/experiencer, we are not separate from the Love and healing that we are seeking.

Grace is melting away these stories and projections and reminding us of the Wholeness that has never been lost. So many painful ideas of what life means and what is happening all being dissolved. We are arriving at the realization that there is no arriving, nowhere to get to, nothing to understand, nothing to heal, nothing to comprehend, nothing to gain - Wholeness already here now.

What a beautiful gift that we are giving to ourselves.