I happened upon an excellent blog for trauma survivors today. I have linked to a post from it in my previous blog post, but the following with resonate for trauma survivors like me who have struggle in their relationships. I identified with most of this comprehensive post.
Category: Complex PTSD
The soul in silence : reflections on solitude, trauma, wounding and healing
All the beautiful responses to my recent post/poem Trust in Silence have really got me thinking today of how important silence is to being able to be with and connected to depths of our soul. When we are struggling or suffering often we can be abused by being told we need to ‘get out of our own heads’, “get off our pity pot!’, (yes readers I have heard this one many times in 12 step meetings) or that we are ‘isolating’ and at times there can be some truth to that, sometimes when we need the loving touch or support of others or look for the gifts or message in a painful experience, but in world that find it hard to stomach or fathom certain truths, is it any wonder we learn to turn more and more towards the silence if we can, deep in that silence, find an inner source of soothing, calm and healing?
I know for myself the healing to be found in the warm of the sun, in sitting in a shady spot with doors open, Jasper at my feet just feeling the sense of connection with the moment that is awesome, magical, healing and mysterious and beyond words to fully describe (though I make stumbling attempts in poems). Then there are the times when the silence is more like a deep dark indigo ocean that almost squashes me, I feel myself subsumed or I feel the cresting of a wave of anger or grief or sorrow that wants to rise up and sweep through me, possibly even sweep away some debris from inside, memories or feelings I buried long ago, and if I just allow myself to surrender than I can expand rather than contract in response to that and feel the beauty of having touched base with my soul.
And lets face it, for many of us who have endured depths of loss and trauma others do not, have not and could never know the depths of we are not going to find that recognition or acceptance and allowing of our process from most people and my personal feeling is that therapists also don’t always know the territory themselves. I was told by astrologer Melanie Reinhardt 13 years ago after my last major accident which was a repeat of my near death one at age 17 that most therapists would not be able to fully understand the deeper spiritual dimensions of the wound of nearly losing my life as well as all the deeply Plutonian experiences that followed over the next 30 or so years for me. She directed me towards the work of Buddhist Nun Pema Chodron and said a soulful meditative practice would be the best therapy for me. Sadly I got into another relationship two years later with someone who saw my need for solitude as pathological. According to him I had agrophobia!!!! Anyway don’t really want to go back into the relationship today, it was a learning curve for me and I got some good things out of it and deeper understanding due to all the pain we both acted out on each other.
Lately I am learning to accept and validate more my need for soulful solitude. It is where I create from. It is where my deepest healing happens. I don’t feel that level of connection in may relationships in the world, in some I do. I feel it here because I feel here other trauma survivors and people in recovery are on the same page. Just connecting with you brings me SO MUCH HEALING. I was blown away yesterday by the love shown to me on a really tough day, coming out of a painful and challenging week.
I wanted actually to post another Thank You blog too as I was so grateful yesterday and today to open my page and see all the comments and love on here. As well as responses to other comments of mine where I am trying to support others going through trauma and meeting misunderstanding and woefully inadequate response to their Complex Trauma. I really see my life purpose to be as a Wounded Healer and it is what Melanie Reinhardt teaches about in her work on Chiron. Its really only us who have navigated the depths of trauma that fully understand and since all traumas are also different in some ways we wont understand everything as we all have our own unique journeys, but in time I want to set up some kind of site to offer help. If my journey and suffering and losses and gains can be used to help others that is what really makes me happy, it gives me a peace and feeling of wholeness that really lays so far beyond words.
But as I read this back I am mindful too that the healing for all of us lies both in connections with others, but more paramountly through the healing that comes from connection to our deepest soul. I feel collectively we are trying too, to heal a deep split from nature and instinct and the divine feminine. It is hard to articulate this in a post but there is a source of power that to me is Goddess like, I don’t find the concept of a male God as personally healing in my own journey unless I think of the Frank Lloyd Wright quote in which he says he believes in God but his God is nature. We are part of this mystery and so is our deepest soul and many of us are on a journey now to connect more to that source both within and without in order to find peace and love after years of separation, fear or trauma. And to recognise more deeply our essential kinship with all living beings as well as the deep silence.
On Immaturity and showing empathy to the Inner Child of self and others
I am getting more insight into when my inner child with her host of unresolved hopes and fears and pain is running the show lately. My abandonment wound has been triggered a lot in the past few days and it was easier to give away my power or alternatively become the ‘bad’ one again who is ‘withholding’ than to recognise that due to discomfort I am scrambling again for attention and love when contact is cut due to someone being upset with me because I am justifiably struggling with something.
I just know when I act from my inner adult I feel a greater sense of strength and solidity within myself and that requires recognising the far younger more vulnerable part that lies hidden or covered by defences. It can be painful when abandonment anxiety and depression strike as both create in my body and psyche so often a potent chemical cocktail that at times pushes me to the brink of available resources to contain.
Pete Walker addresses the issue of the ‘abandonment depression’ a lot in his own work and book on Complex PTSD. Much as all as it can feel hard to be left ‘all alone’, I have heard it said that in adulthood we cannot be abandoned by someone, only left. That said I do think there are times our emotions need to be empathised with and understood by friends, family and partners otherwise if we are judged for certain things and not empathised with, on one level we are abandoned on an emotional level.
It’s an issue Alain de Botton addresses in his wonderful book The Course of Love which tells the story of a mythical couple Rabih and Kirsten in which he delves into the host of insecurities and psychological defences that can plague a couple’s intimate relationships as it develops over a course of years. In the book the tale of the relationship iw told in normal type face is interspersed with sections in italics in which de Botton highlights the underground issues affecting the couple. I particularly enjoyed the following paragraphs.
We would ideally remain able to laugh, in the gentlest way, when we are made the special target of a sulker’s fury. We would recognise the touching paradox. The sulker may be six foot one and holding down adult employment, but the real message is poignantly retrogressive : ‘Deep inside, I remain an infant, and right now I need you to be my parent. I need you to correctly guess what is ailing me, as people did (or rather failed to do) when I was a baby, when my ideas of love first formed.
We do our sulking lovers the greatest possible favour when we are able to regard their tantrums as we would those of an infant. We are so alive to the idea that it’s patronising to be thought of as younger than we are, we forget that it is also, at times, the greatest privilege for someone to look beyond our adult self in order to engage with – and forgive – the disappointed, furious, inarticulate child within.
In a more evolved world, one a little more alive to the Greek ideal of love, we would perhaps know how to be a bit less clumsy, scared and aggressive when wanting to point something out, and rather less combative and sensitive when receiving feedback. The concept of education within a relationship would then lose some of its unnecessarily eerie and negative connotations. We would accept that in responsible hands, both projects, teaching and being taught (in love), calling attention to another’s faults and letting ourselves be critiqued – might after all be loyal to the true purpose of love.
There is something about love and vulnerability and hidden need that can cause us to age regress and be taken back to that painful time we stood all alone longing for the attention and love that was not available due to the absence, withdrawal or inattention of others, so much needed for us to feel hold, loved, contained and seen. Learning to hold ourselves in this state takes some considerable time for those of us with anxious and/or avoidant attachment issues. Its a work in progress being honest with ourselves, learning to extend ourselves in empathy into another hidden world and letting the unhealed child that so longs for attention or consideration been seen, held, accepted, nurtured and loved.
Shedding
You shed these tears
With layers of years
As the pool of sorrow around you grows
There in that ocean where you swim
Flotsam and jetsam
And a million other things
Lap around you
As the water swells and you find yourself
Buffeted about
Tidal pull back to the past
Fills your heart with such unrequited longing
For the arms that never held you
Until the death nell
Refrains of songs
Bring intimations of the past
The big house he built
Looking for security
Chasing god know what dream
That ended in ruin
And as the explosions came
Everything detonated
Leaving only wreckage
And now you are that wreckage
But not only wreckage
As mosaic pieces begin cluster
You sort through all the precious things she left
With a heavy heart
As tears swell
And your head remembers the explosions
Of spring and summer
At times the grief feels too large to contain
But then there is the part of you that sees and knows
It is not the whole of you
She is in the room with you now
Holding all the younger selves
That struggled so hard to grow
And you know as the deep cries rock you
Without a doubt
That you are shedding
But also integrating
What everyone in ignorance
Said you needed to leave behind
Oh God why don’t they know
The past will never fully leave you
Only release its powerful hold
In time and with grieving
As it becomes the very thing
You bend willingly to accept
And surrender to
Because you finally forgive
Knowing the cost
Of holding on too tight
Will only lead in death
(Remember that this place into which you are dissolving
is a place of intense creativity. Of creation itself.)
Melissa LaFlamme
Being kind and patient with ourselves
Sadly in our society so few of us learn to be kind and soft towards ourselves. We may equate this with an attitude that won’t help us to get far or achieve our goals but if we suffer from a remorseless inner critic that won’t let up (most common to suffers of PTSD and Complex PTSD or childhood trauma), its going to be harder to reach any goals anyway.
Sadly some of us were not encouraged in our childhood, we may have been shamed or blamed. We may have learned to pretend or to put on masks, we may never have been rewarded for authenticity. In my own childhood I was stomped on many times, or just left alone and ignored and in adulthood I have learned holding onto resentment about it isn’t going to help and if I don’t change that same internalised attitude of being too critical of myself or others I am not going to get far, in fact my perfectionism will make me too weak to even start.
So it was with a smile I read the following reading from Tian Dayton last night about patience. Patience may be a disregarded or maligned quality in modern society but if it’s well done patience can get us much further and bring our closer to our dreams. The following reading is about self love too and today I am sharing it as the Sun starts to move through critical Virgo and we are drawn toward noticing the earthly practical dimensions of our experience and how far we have come or not come, let’s be kind to ourselves.
Patience
Today I will be patient with myself. When I do not do as well as I wish I would I will not make that a reason to get down on myself. I will instead recognise that the fastest way to bring myself out of a painful funk is through understanding and being good to myself. I get caught in my own cycle of shame, resentment and blame. If a child is upset, I comfort it because I understand that that is what will make things better. Calling a child names will increase its hurt and shame. I will not call myself names either. Rather, I will show love and patience in every way I can.
I am patient with myself.
Patience accomplishes its object, while hurry speeds to its ruin.
Sa’di
A wall of fire
Walking through trauma and waking up inside a nightmare that has formerly been repressed is so so hard. I do not think anyone truly understands trauma unless they have lived trauma. That said some therapists try and have sufficient insight, others don’t in my experience. I often get stymied trying to explain my complex body symptoms to my psychoanalyst, Kat. She does not know how my nights are, the struggle I go through daily and nightly as I feel I am drowning and get fixed on past imprints. I survive as best I can by putting structure in my day and a daily connection with nature is essential to me.
That said reading of how others are also struggling to express to those they love who can sadly not understand brings back key incidents from my own struggle for recognition. My husband got very jealous of my therapy and sided with my Mum in trying to pull me back in line, that said I know he cared for me and didnt want me to be struggling but as a trauma survivor I was and lack of empathy ended up triggering me to take flight again and smash up on the other side of the world all alone. My by then ex husband came to the hospital but gave me no support, told me I needed to go home and he would give me no help with residency (which I eventually got alone) even though I supported him with Australian residency when we met as well as setting up his business. He wanted back “the happy girl I married”, what was the message in that, please put all this sadness behind you if you want us to survive. Its the same message I got in the next relationship I sadly went into 3 years after my ex husband and I separated.
To be dumped when you are already foundering is killing. I honestly dont know how I survived. After the accident overseas I did come home and ended up living alone at the coast for years, no therapy and that was a big mistake but by then my trust was shattered. Luckily I have now been back in therapy for just over 4 years but only really found my last best therapist 3 years ago.
Walking through trauma is like walking through a wall of fire, it is that painful. Along the way you will be told all kinds of shit by others who have not a clue of what you live through on a daily basis. For me a lot of the way I coped was to pretend I was okay and put on as good a front as I could to be accepted but when I finally crashed and burned after coming home I started to get honest and yes, even scream at times, which lost me ‘friends’ but not the people who truly understood and cared. Being deluged with trauma visions as stuff starts to uncover is fucking hard and you need support, sadly there is no way out but through it and sadly until recently truths about trauma and the body were not fully understood, apart from in shamanic cultures and disciplines and those reactions were only understood to be ‘irrational’ but they are not really irrational when you know what a soul has endured but all a part of a valid response to PTSD or Complex PTSD. I have said it before in this blog and I will say it again. You are not abnormal for having a normal response to the overwhelm of trauma. By its very nature trauma overwhelms us and learning to contain that charge takes a lot of time and has to be done slowly over time with those who can help us to hold it and release it little by little by little, a lot like letting air out of a balloon. Wounds to the soul, as D H Lawrence reminded us cannot be cured over night and they will always leave us different, marked in ways that others who have not endured trauma can and will never fully understand.
Holding to our boundary?
I guess every victim of emotional neglect or abuse has a struggle knowing what’s what, who is really harmful and better not to be around. Feeling anxious when we receive a call from one of our ‘triggers’ can be a trigger, but due to our past holes in development we don’t alway feel we have the right not to take the call. I just read a post on unconditional love and part of me thought, yeah, I am not sure that I believe in that any more. Giving people the benefit of the doubt or trying to be stronger or a bigger person is what a Good Guy with the feeling we dont have a right to legitimate needs or boundaries is taught to do by conditioning.
When love is absent and real care and empathy, where do we go? What we experience is a terrible numbness, emptiness or void, a soul pain that often is not understood intellectually but since our body is really the home of our soul, somewhere inside our bodies know and yet for a child in this situation what can we do. When we cannot leave physically, we choose a form of dissociation, its something I have been thinking a lot about while reading writer Jeanette Winterson’s autobiography. Many of us escape into books or tv or we start to write from a young age. Like me Jeanette never had her boundaries respected, her adoptive mother violated them and read her diaries, she threw out and burned all of her books. Jeanette wrote in the quote I posted yesterday that she learned early on that anything could be taken, and the only thing that could not was her what was inside, her capacity to express and to create. For some of us, however, if our insides are invalidated and we are told we are bad or selfish it can be hard to hold onto the internal reality, too.
The abuser who wants control over us wants to destroy our reality as well as our understanding of them as a perpetrator so they turn it around on us, we are the ones who are selfish or too vulnerable or too sensitive for just feeling normal feelings that any caring emotionally connected person would. I had a commenter on one of my blogs yesterday tell me that feelings will get us in trouble, yes if we dont know how to use them as internal messaging systems and I dont think the person really got the jist of the post. This does not apply to feeling ‘bad’ which is a feeling that may be grown by thoughts that we are incompetent in some way when really that is just a form of depression or an introjected voice talking to us inside our heads.
Dissociation for many of us was a way to survive trauma. It was a way of preserving the inner self, the problem comes when we turn self protection and externalised fear into global concepts where we feel the entire world is bad and not to be trusted. As survivors we will always be wary and we need good boundaries. We need to know what hurt us was valid and not just all in our imagination as we will often be told by gaslighters. We need to trust our feelings not fear them and then put them to good use. We may also not ever need to forgive certain abuse and this need to forgive may be something that is forced on us by moralistic people. Abuse is not okay, its not okay to trammel a sensitive person and lead them to believe their reality is skewed when they are trying to be who they are and express their true and real selves. I had to leave one Al Anon group when two members told me I was not allowed to express anger over my Mum’s abandonment of me as a child. While I know my Mum went through something similar she never allowed herself to be angry at her own mother and as a result she never had good emotional awareness or strong boundaries later in life. The pain meds she was on in the end ruined the last years of her life.
I have watched two siblings struggle with anger and self assertion. I have seen them cut down when they were trying to break free but also I have seen them become manic with the unresolved fear and anxiety we all absorbed in our family home was not contained or made sense of in therapy only treated medically with a cocktail of drugs. I’ll be damned if I will shut up about it. I makes me angry and so, so sad. My living sister is not able to be emotionally and assertively present in any way these days and she is collapsed as a person. In the end she could not break out of her feeling wounded prison. It makes me cry, especially leading up the anniversary of my older sister’s death which occured on Easter Sunday in 2014.
Knowing who we are. Holding to our boundary. Knowing what we feel makes perfect sense these things can only come out of the long hard painstaking work of emotional recovery and these things are not given to us we have to earn our right to boundaries over and over again and we struggle so remorsefully with self doubt as our ego strength was never encouraged. As children we were not helped to develop a heathy ego or good boundaries, in fact we were conversely actively stymied in our emotional education and so we have work extra hard now. And we cannot afford to open once again to emotional invalidation from those who would try to convince us our boundaries are wrong or there is something wrong with us for protesting neglect, abuse or betrayal, that it is wrong to have an ego and that we should come to love everyone unconditionally. Yes hurt people hurt people and we can have compassion but if that means we lose our own passion for rigourous emotional health and self care that kind of over compassion can be dangerous.
How the inner critic hinders grieving (and anger)
The greatest hindrance to effective grieving is typically the inner critic. When the critic is especially toxic, grieving may be counter productive and contraindicated in early recovery. Those who were repeatedly pathologised and punished for emoting in childhood may experience grieving as exacerbating their flashbacks rather than relieving them.
I have worked with numerous survivors whose tears immediately triggered them into toxic shame. Their own potentially soothing tears elicited terrible self attacks. “I’m so pathetic! No wonder nobody can stand me!” “God, I’m so unlovable when I snivel like this!” “I f@ckup then make myself more of a loser by whining about it!” “What good is crying for yourself – it only makes you weaker!”
This later response is particularly ironic, for once grieving is protected from the critic, nothing can restore a person’s inner strength and coping capacity like a good cry. I have defused active suicidality on dozens of occasions by simply eliciting the suffering person’s tears.
Angering can also immediately trigger the survivor into toxic shame. This is often true of instances when there is only an angry thought or fantasy. Dysfunctional parents, typically reserve their worst punishments for a child’s anger. This then traps the child’s anger inside.
In the dysfunctional family however, the traumatising parent soon eradicates the child’s capacity to emote. The child becomes afraid and ashamed of her own tears and anger. Tears get shut off and anger gets trapped inside and is eventually turned against the self as self attack, self hate, self disgust and self rejection. Self hate is the most grievous reenactment of parental abandonment…
Over time anger becomes fuel for the critic.. creating an increasingly dangerous internal environment. Anything the survivor says, thinks, feels, imagines or wishes for is subjected to an intimidating inner attack.
When we greet our own tears with self acceptance, crying awakens our developmentally arrested instinct of self compassion. Once we establish self compassion through consistent and repeated practice, it becomes the cornerstone of an increasing self esteem. When an attitude of self compassion becomes habitual, it can instantly antidote the self abandonment that so characterises a flashback.
(copywrite) Pete Walker : extracts from : Complex PTSD : From Surviving to Thriving
Insights into trauma induced co-dependency, a bill of rights and dealing with the issue of over listening/ receptivity
The following extracts from Pete Walker’s book Complex PTSD : From Surviving to Thriving may help you develop insight if you were led through parental neglect to deny your own needs, wants and desires leading to a state of codependency which Walker names “trauma induced codependency” :
Trauma induced codependency (is) a symptom of self abandonment and self abnegation. Codependency is a fear based inability to express rights, needs and boundaries in a relationship. It is a disorder of assertiveness, characterized by a dormant fight response and a susceptibility to being exploited, abused, and/or neglected.
Servitude, ingratiation, and obsequiousness become important survival strategies. She clearly forfeits all needs that might inconvenience her parents. She stops having preferences and opinions that might anger them. Boundaries of every kind are surrendered to molify her parents, who repudiate their duty of caring for her…. All this loss of self begins before the child has many words, and certainly no insight. For the budding codependent, all hints of danger soon immediately trigger servile behaviours and abdication of rights and needs.
(people influenced by trauma induced codependency) seek safety and acceptance in relationship through listening and eliciting. They invite the others to talk rather than risk exposing their thoughts, views and feelings. They ask questions to keep the attention off themselves, because their parents taught then talking was dangerous and that in their world their parents would inevitably prove them guilty of feeling unworthy…. they (feel) its is safer (1) to listen than to talk. (2) to agree than to dissent. (3) to offer care than to ask for help. (4) to elicit the other than to express yourself and (5) to leave choices to the other rather than to express preferences. Sadly, the closest that the unrecovered fawn type comes to getting his needs met is vicariously through helping others. Fawn types generally enhance their recovery by memorizing the following list of rights :
- I have the right to be treated with respect.
- I have the right to say no.
- I have the right to make mistakes
- I have the right to reject unsolicited advice or feedback.
- I have the right to negotiate for change.
- I have the right to change my mind or my plans
- I have the right to change my circumstances or course of action.
- I have the right to my own feelings, beliefs, opinions, preferences, etc.
- I have the right to protest sarcasm, destructive criticism, or unfair treatment.
- I have the right to feel angry and to express it non-abusively.
- I have the right to refuse to take responsibility for anyone else’s problems.
- I have the right to refuse to take responsibility for anyone’s bad behaviour.
- I have the right to feel ambivalent and to occasionally be inconsistent.
- I have the right to play, waste time and not always be productive.
- I have the right to occasionally be childlike and immature.
- I have the right to complain about life’s unfairness and injustices.
- I have the right to occasionally be irrational in safe ways.
- I have the right to seek healthy and mutually supportive relationships.
- I have the right to ask friends for a modicum of help and emotional support.
- I have the right to complain and verbally ventilate in moderation.
- I have a right to grow, evolve and prosper.
The codependent (also) needs to understand how she gives herself away by over listening to others. Recovery involves shrinking her characteristic listening defense, as well as practising and broadening her verbal and emotional self expression.
I have seen numerous inveterate codependents becomes motivated to work on their assertiveness when they realise that even the thought of saying “no” triggers them into an emotional flashback. After a great deal of work, one client was shocked by how intensely he dissociated when he contemplated confronting his boss’s awful behavior. This shock then morphed into an epiphany of outrage about how dangerous it had been to protest anything in his family. This in turn aided him greatly in overcoming his resistance to role playing assertiveness in our future work together.
With considerable practice, this client learned to overcome the critic voices that immediately short circuited him from ever asserting himself. In the process, he remembered how he was repeatedly forced to stifle his individuality in childhood. Grieving these losses then helped him to work at reclaiming his developmentally arrested self expression.
The meaning we make of things : reflections on trauma, choice, recovery and inner power
The meaning we make of things has a huge influence and power over us and then there are the meanings other influences may project or teach, such as the belief in some spiritual, new age philosophies that we ‘chose’ to be here and experience all we are experiencing for some ‘higher purpose”. I am not as big a fan of this point of view these days although I do believe we are all being presented with evolutionary challenges all the time and that the attitude we take to our trials and tribulations does make huge difference, but this is different to being told we ‘chose’ something painful as a way to learn. I just don’t believe that any more.
I have had the thought a lot lately that I did not choose to be born. My parents conceived me as an unplanned child later in life and I didnt chose to be born into a much older family where a lot was already going down before I arrived on the scene. Later in my life and through much inner exploration I have been able to be more objective about what was happening subjectively, internally and implicitly for me as a young baby and child born into this much older business oriented family. I was listening to an excellent programme on Tuesday on the difference between trauma memory and other memoires. Trauma that happens to us before age of 2 is not consciously remembered as our hippocampus has not been formed yet so is encoded implicitly and is only available through sensation not as thought. It is known too that trauma that occurs after the hippocampus is formed affects the size and influence of this part of our brain on us.
I am only minimally educated in my understanding but I remember reading in Peter Levine’s books Waking The Tiger and In An Unspoken Voice how inaccesible to thought such trauma is and how sensation focused therapy which helps us to bear with and relate to pscyho-biological symptoms (which can be both intense and frightening) is the best kind of therapy to help us with healing, integrating, self soothing and containment of trauma. Also since trauma creates fractures in sensation and experience once such body memories are made conscious they can then be integrated into a narrative which helps us to make sense.
The other thing much on my mind this morning was how much self blame is a part of having undergone trauma. And to be told we ‘chose’ something gives us the illusion of some kind of power or control when really we had neither at the time and often found ourselves totally overwhelmed and disempowered. This is why Complex PTSD therapist Pete Walker and trauma specialist Judith Herman remind us how important it is that we who have been traumatised deal with the inner and external criticism and blame that can be heaped on us and how important it is that we develop good boundaries and the ability to fight back if part of the way we responded to trauma was to collapse, dissociate or go numb, or fall into a pararlysis (playing dead so as to escape the threat). Writing the last reation reminds me of how a wounded animal naturally retreats after a wound to try and heal itself by licking the wound, this kind of ‘licking’ for humans may involve repetitive thoughts or rumination which we play over and over again but if too internalised may keep us trapped. And then to be told we ‘chose” it, just adds insult to injury.
At the same time there is something we trauma survivors do have power and control over, that is the choices me make as to how to respond to being instinct injured or damaged emotionally. It may take a lot of time to find any form of power or control or free choice if we remain identified as victims. The truth is we WERE victims at the time of trauma but we do not have to keep allowing ourselves to be revictimised over and over again by telling ourselves things like “I chose it”, or “I deserve it”, or “this was all for my higher good”. In time as Peter Levine explains trauma does give us a gift of recognising how important the spiritual dimension of experience is. If we loose touch with the power of our spirit for life, light, joy and hope, we are disempowered, once we gain access to this power we may find an inner strength and wisdom that was lacking before. Then we can say that trauma had a purpose but not one we chose, still one the world so sorely needs to learn about and from. We trauma victims who have in some way recovered can then become voices for what lies unspoken in our cells and biology and may even, in some way, been inherited from our ancestors who passed it on when they chose or happened to give birth to us.
The link to the programme on trauma and memory can be found here :
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/trauma,-memory,-and-health/9547446
