You are worthy

I really should be getting my act together to walk my dog but I feel compelled to write this after spooling through my reader to read other follower’s blogs I follow.  It makes me so sad to read of the self rejection and even self hatred people can have for themselves in their lives when they are struggling with Post Traumatic Stress or any other kind of heavy emotional burden.  I personally know how much it crushes your soul (to say nothing of the effect is had on your spirit) when you try to express painful truths others don’t want to hear and try to silence in you.  Narcissists by their very nature will never own the fact that anything they did ended up wounding you.  In fact they get the shits that you dare to say they hurt you and in fact can’t you see how much you are hurting them by daring to even bring the subject up? How could you do this to me! Yawn.

My advice. Get the hell away from that shit.  Your pain needs to heard, it is real, you aren’t making it up.  You are not a malingerer for suffering from trauma.  You are not worth less or worthless. Your soul and body have been injured and scarred. That said are you going to beat yourself up all over again and treat yourself unkindly?  Please DONT DO IT!  Tell the inner and outer critics to take a hike and get off of your case.  In fact though in the end you find yourself letting go because when you argue you realise you are already off the side of self compassion and radical acceptance.  What do you have to prove??  Don’t keep beating your head against that brick wall.  It doesn’t know much about love!

You are not unworthy for suffering trauma.  You didn’t bring it on yourself.  You may however caused yourself more trauma by running in the wrong direction or seeking healing in the wrong places and that in itself is to my mind a sad symptom of emotional neglect, betrayal, abandonment and abuse.  And is the single agony fact behind why and how we get so stuck and some people never escape.  They end up going mad or killing themselves if they cannot get the truth out there or feel the feelings that others find too problematic due to being shut down themselves! Or else invested, for their own reasons in the can of worms being kept shut!

I do often wonder, much as the internet is criticised how so many of us would have survived as well if we did not have this medium and platform for self expression. Sadly it is a bit of a remote medium in that we don’t get to physically touch each other when we share and being touched, held, received, welcomed in our entire being and body is SO IMPORTANT in healing from trauma.  However we do get to voice it and that is a huge thing.  We get validation.  We get to know our pain is real. We get to express and not repress or depress it any more.

The only draw back may be that at times we go over and over and over the old wounds which may have the effect of making them deeper if we don’t at the same time have some love poured into those wounds. You know how a wound often smarts and stings just after it is fresh after you put some antiseptic on it.  It is singing out its pain as cells move into do the healing and ignite the inflammatory response.  Trauma is a super sonic kind of inflammation and one that can burn and burn and burn, but the burning in hurting is also a big part of the healing.  We are in the healing crisis of toxic repair.  We have to go through some pain and then we have to let the wound alone for a time so forces can work under the cover of darkness to repair.  Yes in the end we have a scar that bears a testament to what occurred and what we suffered. We then become what Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls ‘members of the scar clan’.  We bear our wounds and we can become the wound or we can decide that the wound is something we suffered and now bear the memory and evidence of but does not totally divine the deeper spirit in us which bears testament to it.  And its a fine line and in the end involves a conscious or unconscious decision about how we respond to the injuries.  No one outside of you can determine that outcome which is the result of a unique blend of factors that make you, you.

In my own case I would now rather say I have these wounds but there is more to me than them.  I would rather not keep running the wound over and over and over again.   I personally see where it takes me when that happens and its not into a good place and yet I still accept that to run the wound over and over is also a valid response to trauma. Part of the healing process involves going over and over what happened and experiencing the associated emotions and reactions until they transform or alchemise.

Whatever the case though, this is something I now know so deeply and powerfully that I must shout it out.  Whoever you are, whatever you have suffered, no matter what wounds, you are worthy, you deserve love.  You have a right to exist and be seen, and by God show yourself the respect and love you deserve by not allowing negative voices to take the power of this truth away from you.  For you are a beloved by life and to deny that love is to believe in a lie.