Ever since my trip to Amsterdam, now almost three weeks ago I have been knee-deep in healing my survival, defense, and protection mechanisms on an inner child level. This had already happened on a soul path level, but not yet completely on an incarnation level.
You often hear the saying; as above, so below which are also these two timelines, the soul path level and the incarnation level. On a soul path level, I had already been shown how timelines and experiences had predisposed me to have the survival, defense, and protection mechanisms I developed in my current life. That same clarity that I was given on a soul path level is now being given on a current life incarnation level.
What makes this aspect of my healing journey unlike anything before is how freeing this process is. After years of clearing out both trauma and karma, the healing now is focused on healing how the experienced trauma as it were changed or even altered me both on a soul path level as well as an incarnation level.
The focus is no longer on trauma or karma, but on the impact, it has had and how this impact has made me less of who I truly am. I use the word I here, but this is true for every human being.
Trauma makes us subconsciously shut down parts of our true selves because it feels unsafe to embody them, this is true on a soul path level and this is true on an incarnation level and you can’t just wish or will your way around it. What I am finding is that we aren’t even really consciously aware of the extent to which our deepest traumatic experiences have changed us. Or how much we have identified with the parts of us that were changed through the experience.
I have just been sitting with all of this for the past couple of weeks, last week I sat down to write something but then instead I was drawn to update my blog on ‘accidentally’ healing the agoraphobia that I have struggled with all my adult life.
I couldn’t write anything new as I was shown that even the postpartum depression I had was a response to my body remembering the trauma I had experienced as a little girl. Sure enough, when I Googled it I found that giving birth can trigger memories of sexual abuse and that there’s a correlation between such abuse and postpartum depression.
I got pregnant really young in the 1990s and as one of my clients who is a psychiatrist pointed out, back then postpartum depression wasn’t understood not by the general public, but not even by many professionals. Nobody understood what was wrong with me and that made it even more difficult to go through.
I was made to feel ‘crazy’ by the people nearest and dearest to me because none of us knew that I had been abused as a child, not even me, and the two people that did know thought I was too young to remember and underestimated or where unaware of what impact it would have on me.
This started me out on my healing journey at an age when most people my age were still out partying with friends. I found my way out through homeopathy and Bach Flower therapy but being ‘afraid to be alone’ which was one of the biggest triggers for anxiety became such an integral part of my identity even when I didn’t want it to be and I had no idea why it was.
I now understand that the very things that I have always considered to be “wrong with me” were the aftereffects of my childhood abuse. They weren’t parts of me, they were how the experiences that I had had in the past have changed me and that is a big difference.
Just as agoraphobia was my inner child’s response to feeling out of control because it triggered the repressed subconscious emotions of the abuse. “Agoraphobia,” so Capps and Ochs write, “is intimately tied to a deep sense of the absence of control over one’s feelings and actions” (Capps and Ochs, 1997, p. 152). Likewise, Barlow writes of the “core of anxiety” as involving “the sense of a lack of control” (Barlow, 2002, p. xiii). Source: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Control (over my emotions) had been one of my survival responses to my childhood abuse.
If you’re reading this and think to yourself ‘I don’t need to know all this, this is you not me.’ then you are missing the point. Trauma both on a soul path as well as an incarnation level keeps us from fully embodying who we are on a soul level.
You are on the spiritual path, right?
Well, if you want to truly embody your soul essence and not play pretend that your all love and light when you’re not — then you have to address the trauma.
Trauma blocks you from fully embodying your soul essence.
Last Friday I had a session with one of the healers on the island that really brought this message home and showed me even more how my childhood experiences created distortions in who I really am and how it has disconnected me from my true self as a survival mechanism.
You hear plenty of healers and coaches talk about how connected they are to their true selves, but you hardly ever hear people admit that they are disconnected from their true selves. Yet most of us are and arguably even those that claim they are not, perhaps are unable to see the level they are disconnected because these mechanisms are all deeply unconscious. We can’t see them until we are ready to face and release them.
They require time to sit with them and although we all love to see immediate results, breaking down these false or sub-identities that we created to survive at different times in our lives simply takes time because we so deeply identify with them that we mistake them to be parts of our true self.
I hope that sharing my process with you, helps you in your process of truly embodying the truth of who you are instead of who you have become in order to protect your true self underneath because that’s what survival, defense, and protection mechanisms are. They are sub-personalities that we create to keep our true self as safe and as whole as we possibly can despite our traumatic experiences.
It only makes sense that at some point, we need to strip back these altered parts of us if we truly want to be who we really are on the deepest level.
With my deepest love,