Yesterday, I worked with a healer within my own healing journey and for the umpteenth time my childhood sexual abuse came up as the main theme of the session. When I say umpteenth session, I am not kidding. I think over the years my childhood trauma has been the subject of at least 50+ healing sessions.
It wasn’t until my 20s after becoming a mother myself that I slowly started to remember what had happened to me as a toddler. I was sexually abused until around the age of three years old, after which my father the abuser started sexually abusing my nine-year older half-sister.
Yet, it wasn’t until my 40s that I actually started healing my childhood sexual abuse even though I thought I had already sufficiently done so in my 20s through art therapy, and other self-led attempts to make peace with my past. And as far as I was concerned I had made peace with the past, I had forgiven my father but this was much more a kind of mental thing than fully embodied. Looking back, I barely scratched the surface of healing my childhood wounds back then.
I was recently out on a walk with a good friend of mine, discussing all of this stuff and he made this impatient sigh and told me that I should just move on and leave the past behind me. This is common advice from people who love us and don’t want us to suffer. They mean well, but their advice is useless. If truth be told, consciously of course I would like nothing more than to leave all of this behind me and everything else that was painful in the past.
For the past two years, leaving the past behind me has become a daily mantra. I have zero investment in holding onto it or feel the need to keep on revisiting it. I am not into masochism, nor am I someone who cannot let go and wants to hold on to people, memories, things, etc. I am a superstar at decluttering on all levels. I have never been someone who clings to the past, I have been a fighter and a survivor all my life and I have worked hard to create a life beyond my wildest dreams for myself and my family.
What I have learned over the years though, is that knowing that something has happened is not the same as actually healing it and I think this is a mistake many people make in their own healing journeys, they think they have already healed something just because they have spent time thinking about it or because they can remember it happened.
What I have learned from my 50+ healing sessions on my own childhood trauma is that there are many layers to it within the physical body, the mental and emotional body, and even the vibrational body.
Yesterday’s session was all about seeing the survival mechanism I had developed as this young little child to get through this experience, allowing myself to feel the huge helplessness that I had felt at this tender age and through all the previous work I had done understanding how neither my mother nor my half-sister had been in a position to be able to save me.
In fact, for the first time ever I can say that I really understand my childhood and can see it for what it really was, instead of what I had made myself believe about it in order to survive it. This has only been possible through revisiting it so many times to be able to see it more objectively and to see my caregivers for who they really are imperfect and wounded, doing the best they could to love me in their own way.
Before because of the abuse, my mother’s inability to see it, and my half-sister being involved in an incident of abuse – my toddler self had seen their behavior as evidence of her not being loveable or deserving protection. This conclusion of not being loveable continued to play out as a subconscious belief in my adult life that naturally wreaked havoc in my most intimate relationships, which was just one of the myriad ways these early life experiences still impacted me as an adult. Peeling back all these layers of illusion has allowed me to truly become and feel whole again in a way that wasn’t possible before because of my unresolved childhood pain.
You cannot get to this level of understanding of how your childhood self’s perception of reality is still limiting you, without diving deep into the often deeply repressed childhood memories where they originated. As Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
When we fail to see these false interpretations for what they are, they become the external reality we live through.
With my deepest love,
