Last week I had a memory, well the final part of a memory that has been working it’s way out of my system for a while now, since December 2019. By my system I mean my mind, body and Soul connection, child and adult, every part of me that feels and works the memory. I remember on an adult level and I remember from one of my child parts within, because it is they that carry the memories and feel safe enough to give them up to my adult consciousness for all of our healing and freedom. It is the child part of me that remembers first naturally, because the incident is from my childhood. I am called to remember by a part of me that has carried so much pain and sorrow for so long. I heed the call every time. I pay attention, I listen , I notice. That’s what I do today. There’s a rush of feelings so intense it makes me nauseous and dizzy, an emotional recall of the terror and powerlessness I experienced back then. I eventually always work out what is happening to me, that I am remembering, I know now what is occurring, I can be present, but of course it wasn’t always like that. I numbed the pain with chemicals and then after getting clean I had to dissociate and leave my body because it was just too unbearable to feel the whole experience of the child I was. It is only since 2012 when I started EMDR therapy that I have learned to not dissociate and remain present for the pain and the whole experience of the memory. To basically allow the child part to tell her story and for me to hear it, then process it using the tools and skills I have, in order to integrate the memory. The process of EMDR has given me a way back and through the memory without having to leave myself behind through dissociation. That doesn’t mean I don’t dissociate sometimes at the peak of the pain in a memory. I do. Because that first rush of pain is so intense there’s a huge desire to run and to fight, and before that moment I consciously see that the memory is there, my mind runs with fear and voices in my mind shout at me. Trapped voices, my child voices from the past. The voices / voice I could never have, was never allowed to have. If you can’t shout out, you shout in. It is blind panic, it’s prison, it is fear of dying and obviously the most natural thing to want to do is ESCAPE. And that is dissociation, my mind and body’s way of escaping when there was no way to escape the abuse . Or there wasn’t. Not back then, I really was trapped as a small child , but I’m not trapped anymore in the present. I say this out loud to myself. I plant my feet firmly on the floor, it’s ok it’s a memory, I’ve got you. I find it helps me to say this out loud as then my mind calms down allowing me to think and then deal with whatever comes next. It is an acknowledgement to the child within who is remembering, that I can handle the actual memory that is coming. And I do handle the memory, I have to but remembering is so difficult, dealing with other people’s savagery. People who were supposed to love you. It’s humbling for sure being so broken and vulnerable and still living after the physical beatings. That’s ok for me and I say this because I can be broken down and humbled and through all of that I can turn to a place inside of me and it’s in there that I have found out who I really am and what I am made of. What I found inside me was that there was a lot of light, and all the beatings in the world couldn’t take that away from me. Remembering connects me to the earth and Nature. Having your tiny body beaten up by grown men gave me a survival strategy where I had to become part of all that was around me and as a lot of the abuse I experienced happened out doors, I choose to cancel out the humans committing the abuse , and make myself part of the earth and the trees that surrounded me. I used my imagination to survive, there’s a lot you can do with imagination as a child when your life is under threat and you know no one is coming to rescue you. Yes it’s bumpy for a while when remembering it takes time and a lot of energy and sometimes it’s just a fucking inconvenience. I get pissed off, my parts get pissed off and I guess that’s putting it mildly, but as the saying goes the only way out is through. So during that through time I have to try to be as kind to myself and my system as possible. I get ill from remembering, this time a bad cold and my body remembers the pain of the abuse. As this particular memory was one of physical abuse my body remembers the places I was hurt, I get joint and muscle pain. There was lasting damage done to my body so I choose a number of ways to take care of myself when the pain sets in. I see a great chiropractor, I have regular massage, I run and I practise yoga on a daily basis. I eat good food and try to get enough sleep. There are two conditions that have to be present for me to be able to get through a memory. One is love and that is everything. Love for the child who is giving up the memory. I have to tell her out loud, I love you , I am here for you, I won’t let you down, we can get through this together.The other is safety and safety comes from that love I give. I have created safety internally and externally from love. The love that I give myself has made me fight to build an environment that is nurturing and safe so I can be broken open with the truth of the child memories. Without love and safety I can forget it and that is after all what I did, what I had to do to survive. Building safety inside and in my environment took me a while to achieve and there is a lot more I will be saying about this.
Remembering is odd beauty. Odd because pain is not supposed to be beautiful, but for me now, it is. Remembering is beautiful rebellion and resistance against those that dealt out that pain and who forbade me to remember it, let alone talk about it as I am. Beautiful because the pain of remembering is the truth and it speaks now and is not silenced . Never silenced, only loved .