"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the kings horses and all the kings men couldn't put Humpty together again."
No one escapes childhood without some sort of emotional trauma.
No one escapes childhood without some sort of emotional trauma.
You may disagree with that premise, but before you do consider the following from Helpguide:
Traumatic experiences often involve a threat to life or safety, but any situation that leaves you feeling overwhelmed and alone can be traumatic, even if it doesn’t involve physical harm. It’s not the objective facts that determine whether an event is traumatic, but your subjective emotional experience of the event. The more frightened and helpless you feel, the more likely you are to be traumatized.
How can it be that we don't escape childhood unscathed by trauma? First, our parents could not protect us from everything. Second, our parents no matter how well intentioned did not always treat us in the way we needed to be treated. Third, as children, we did not come wired with all the core life skills needed to make sense of or cope with various situations or understand, let alone fully express, our emotions. Fourth, while childhood experiences may have taught us many of those core life skills, particularly if we had understanding adults to help guide us, understanding adults may not have been available or the available adults may not have been able to meet our needs for every instance where life dealt us a harsh blow (subjectively speaking). Fifth, we may have thought, for whatever reason, that it was best if we handled what happened to us on our own.
Why is it important to know this?
Our childhood hurts that have not been fully felt or grieved can affect our mood, behaviors, and relationships well into--if not throughout--our adult lives. Indeed, our painful experiences as children may have taught us to be afraid of, bury, and/or deny our emotions and run from our fears, and we may have carried those lessons with us into adulthood. I have heard friends say, "I'm afraid if I started to cry, I'd never stop. The pit seems bottomless." We might believe that if we ever turned to face our deepest fears, our deepest feelings, we'd be swallowed by darkness.
Muting or denying our feelings, a defensive strategy that might have been adaptive when we were kids, does not serve us well as adults. In fact, denying our fears and our feelings, and failing to grieve our losses, diminishes our life experience because if we don't face our fears, if we don't feel our "negative" feelings fully, it makes it difficult to fully experience "positive" feelings and to make choices in spite or in light of our fears. That is, if we cannot stay present long enough to cope with our negative feelings in the moment (or soon there after) and face our own truths, how can we ever expect to stay present enough to fully experience the positives life has to offer?
To shield ourselves from our truths, whether past or present, we may also employ strategies of distraction such as worrying needlessly about the future, keeping ourselves in a constant state of busy, projecting our own fears and emotions onto others, drinking excessively, making ourselves responsible for saving others so as to avoid facing ourselves, and so on. Having learned to be less than honest with ourselves about how we feel and what we need could also cause us to unintentionally harm ourselves and/or others. For example, ignoring how we feel and what we need can lead us to neglect the emotional self care needed to manage stress, say one thing while doing another, and engage in activities that conflict with our core values and harm important relationships.
Rather than engaging with life out of a sense of who we are (the light and the dark) and what we need to feel at home with ourselves, we might simply react to most life events by fighting, fleeing, or freezing. We might damage our character by saying words or doing deeds we wish we could take back, we might diminish our self respect by running from problems when we sense that mustering courage would be the best response, and we might let circumstance choose our life's path by freezing. Heck, if we don't take the time to look within on a regular basis and when hard or uncomfortable feelings arise, we might not even know who we are or what we need or even why we feel what we feel.
For all the reasons noted above and more, I "Walk Toward the Pain." Walking toward the pain involves my walking toward my own pain and my own fears to uncover, discover, and recover myself.
In my mind's eye, I picture myself walking toward home, a deep place in the woods where my heart resides. Walking through the heartland has revealed the following personal truths:
1. Walking toward the pain is scary... at first. When I began my practice of walking toward the pain, I stumbled a lot. That led me to this "lost in the woods" mantra: "Stumble On!"
2. Walking toward the pain gets less scary with practice over time (except when it isn't) because the path becomes worn, less difficult to traverse--in part because I have learned to breathe and calm myself as I walk, and my fear of facing my fears has diminished as my brain has learned that I will survive the trip into my heart of darkness. My feet pretty much know the way now even when I feel alone and lost.
3. Once home, no matter how much unpacking I’ve done in the past, there will be some boxes that need unpacking. During my very first trips home, the boxes were piled high and in disarray; they filled up the place. They also blocked the windows and diminished the light. Over time, as boxes have been unpacked and sorted, I find that there's more light and fewer obstructions to the widows of the world, I can see more clearly, and I am more comfortable. I experience more peace.
4. The boxes contain a jumble of feelings and experiences, both old and new, and are intertwined in ways that look impossible to sort.
5. At times, I'm tempted to let the boxes be and flee, to leave the work of sorting things out to someone else. However, there's no one else who can unpack my boxes, grieve my losses, face my fears, or figure out what I want in life.
6. The more I unpack my pain and suffering, feel my feelings and face my fears, the more compassion I have for myself and for others. Moreover, when there's no one else to offer me compassionate support, I have discovered I can provide it for myself.
7. With each trip, each box unpacked, I make more room for joy to enter my life.
8. Every time I make the trip home and face my feelings and deal with my fears, I increase my average length of stay, and the more I stay, the more familiar I become with my surroundings. I am able to see the wild flowers in bloom, hear the birds sing, note the habits of the other inhabitants. Along with the struggle and the strife, I see beauty and I am awe struck by the opportunity I have to simply be alive and experience life. More and more, I find myself engaging with life from a place of greater comfort IN THE PRESENT MOMENT. I have a clearer sense of who I am, what I need, and how I want to be in the world right now. (I am not simply trying to be who others want me to be as a substitution for knowing my own needs and desires.)
9. While engaging life from a place of great comfort is preferable, I've found it’s nearly impossible to stay forever and always in the comfort of my home. I fall out of my home the way Dorothy's house fell out of the sky in the Wizard of Oz. Life can come at me unexpectedly, upending me and reminding me that nothing is certain. Overwhelmed, I may be tempted to fight, flee, or freeze. And yet, if I pick myself up and point myself in the right direction, I'll arrive home soon enough (or at least eventually).
10. Truly, there's no place like home. There's also no endpoint to the number of boxes I might find when I get there. Although my perception is that the number, but not necessarily the content, is becoming easier to manage as I've taken the time to work through the traumas of my youth.
Self-discovery, finding my heart's desire, and feeling more whole and becoming more comfortable in my own skin is a life-long process. No one else possesses the key to my heart (i.e., the way home is not found through my possession of magical ruby slippers). It's my home and my journey to make. I think this may be a universal truth. Try it on for size.
No one can make you open your heart and commit to the journey; you make that choice. And so if you find yourself not sharing your feelings and fears with your partner (either about yourself or the relationship), if you consistently find yourself in the "act" of saving or avoiding your partner, you may be avoiding yourself. And unfortunately, if you don't share, you're partner may get the message that you don't care.
"Sharing is the art of caring, caring is the art of giving, giving is the art of living, living is the art of loving, loving is the art of sharing." (Words from a greeting card that my mother sent me many years ago on my birthday... a non-birthday card birthday card.)
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(¸.·´ (¸.·´)¸¸.·¨¯`·.ClaireliciousDesigns
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STUMBLE ON! Tee
Bravo, Eau Claire!
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