Willing to Heal

I felt a niggling thought in the back of my mind to write about how one heals.

How do we heal from emotional trauma like abuse – any kind of abuse?

I feel like the answer to that is as multifaceted and diverse as the survivors of abuse are.

So I will speak on my perspective on it – although I think each survivor does it a bit differently, I do feel like there are certain unifying themes of truth that undergird any kind of healing process.

The most important one to me is being willing to heal.

Might seem like a no-brainer but the truth is, it’s very tempting and very easy to stay mired down in misery. It becomes a tight, dark, safe-feeling little cave because, at least for me and others I’ve spoken to, the trauma and all its accompanying pain becomes so familiar to us.

I know mine did.

I carried it with me everywhere and allowed it to steal from me the parts of me I truly loved and found joy in. Because the pain was so familiar – because it had been with me every nanosecond of every minute of every hour of every day since I was 8, it felt safe. It damn near felt like fucking home – I mean, I ate, slept, breathed, and bathed with that shit every day of my life, so it became my normal.

And the person I am now finds that idea scary, although I understand it and have nothing but compassion for that wounded, bleeding, buried child that I was.

And the darkness that makes up that pain, that anger and rage, that hatred, that mourning is INCREDIBLY powerful. It can start to erode us, start to dissolve us, turning us into black pools of what feels like numbness but isn’t really numbness at all – it’s just that we can become so full of unacknowledged, unexpressed pain that we stop allowing ourselves to feel.

At least, that’s where I spent most of my late childhood and teen years.

The willingness to heal … I feel like that was always in me. I feel like there’s always been a spark or space or part of me waaaay down deep inside that was never even touched by what Jamie did to me, nor by the consequences of his actions. I’ve become more and more aware of it as I’ve moved deeper into the healing process and released so much of the past - it feels like an inner pureness, an inner … I don’t know… bright light, an inner … radiance.

Maybe this is my soul, maybe it’s my soul that was never broken by what he did to me. I don’t know, but that explains it as well as anything else.

And that spark is what gave me my willingness to heal: a belief that maybe I could let some of that shit I was carrying around GO, and if it left me, maybe I could start to feel better!

I found an article on the website Little Buddha (www.littlebuddha.com) recently that addressed this in a beautiful way. The author of the article. Paul Hellwig, talks about his own healing from his mother sexually abusing him:

In order for us to break the chains, we must be willing to give the responsibility, shame, and guilt of what happened to us back to our victimizer. When we hold on to these feelings we are kept in limbo. It keeps us trapped between the pain of our victimization and the feeling that we were responsible for what happened to us. It’s no wonder we feel trapped.

In my case I unconsciously chose to bury the feelings from my abuse as deep and hidden in my psyche as I could. Of course, today I know that they never went anywhere except out of my conscious thoughts. Those feelings continued to work in my life like background programs running on a computer. Not seen, but affecting every area of my life.

My start was sitting alone with myself. No music, phone, TV, or reading material. Just me, myself, and I. You would think that this wouldn’t be very difficult. Well, it was for me, and after about ten minutes I thought I was going to rip out of my skin. The difficulty with it was that I was forced out my fantasy world and into reality. I was no longer running, ducking, dodging, or sneaking away from my life.

Did that mean that I was whole and complete? Of course not; I still had a lot of work to do. But I now knew that I had worked through the biggest and most painful victimization of my life. If I could do that, I could handle and was willing to do any other work needed to be done.

The greatest act of love I have ever given myself was the willingness to do what I needed to do to heal. It no longer feels like work but it is now a blessing I have been given. Every day I pray that all those who need to heal choose to do this work. My hope is that you do!

~from “Breaking the Chains of Victimhood When You’ve Been Abused” by Paul Hellwig

I just love his words. The “willingness” is the key part, though. If we aren’t willing, then we don’t heal. You have to want it. You have to be open to it. And you have to pursue it. Anything painful in our lives can shift to something that ultimately benefits us in the long run as long as we allow it to shift, as long as we want it to shift, as long as we are OPEN to having it shift. We have to do the work.

Death, injury, break-ups, dark nights of the soul, betrayals – I feel we are resilient beings and can self-heal just about anything that befalls us. We’re never the same, and maybe the fact that these calamities hit us always hurts, maybe there’s always pain around it, but there can be healing from it.

I know that because I’ve lived it. I am living it.

Paul Hellwig in the quote above talks about the willingness to heal, the necessary step of giving the responsibility for the trauma back to the victimizer where it belongs. We as victims of their violence – whether it’s sexual, emotional, or physical – are not responsible for what happened. We aren’t accountable for the actions of our abusers.

Blaming ourselves for someone hurting us is a huge lie born out of pain that we tell ourselves.

And with that willingness to heal comes the other part of Paul Hellwig’s quote: willingness to sit with the pain, the anger and rage, the deep sadness, the self-hatred, the bewilderment – the willingness to sit with all of it and let it wash through us instead of distracting ourselves with media, with substance abuse, with sex, or any one of the countless vices we as humans might take up in order to keep the pain and memories at bay.

To say this is difficult is a severe and almost criminal understatement. But I do not know how to express in mere words just how hard it is. It’s a herculean task. It is epic in its scope and magnitude.

I’ve written in a couple of my other blogs about the physical sensations that erupted inside me when I let go of my rage and anger. I remember bouts of depression that made my body feel like it turned to lead and my blood had turned to cement.

I remember weeping through sharp arcs of pain that would seize my head and my entire torso, sobbing so hard that I thought I might actually break apart.

I’ve gone through periods of restlessness and … transformation that felt like I was being destroyed from the inside out, that felt so intense that I thought I might not survive them. I felt like I surely would end up insane.

But quite honestly, after each bout of intense emotion and feeling, after each round of sitting down with my demons and systematically disarming them, I emerged feeling so much better. Softer. Gentler. Happier. Loved and loving. Lighter. Stronger. More compassionate toward myself and toward others.

After I emerged from each layer of healing, I found myself looking forward to the next one, which seems crazy as I read these words back to myself, but it’s true. I actually started to become EAGER for the next round of emotional intensity, the next round of resolving parts of the past. I looked forward to the release because that felt SO FUCKING GOOD. And I really LOVE feeling SO FUCKING GOOD.

But none of it ever would have come about without that initial willingness to heal. I think it was Pema Chodron in one of her talks on maîtri who said “If you want it to happen, it will. If you don’t, it won’t.”