Become like a snake, shedding skins, returning to nakedness. Layer upon layer, you will find yourself, travelling through the fire of pain because there is no other way. Hold your hand, steady now, you are young and delicate and you will grow so strong by giving your child a voice. Ancient longings stir inside the void, listen carefully now, you will hear a voice. It is me, I have been buried a long time, hold me now, it was a war on myself I survived. Return home to myself, reconciliation, integration, it’s been a long time. I’ve missed you. I need to give you Love, restore with Love, like rain falling down, soaking me, cleansing me, covering me with Love.
I found this in a journal from 2000. I wrote it 12 years before I was diagnosed with Complex PTSD and it has more meaning to me now because I see it was a calling from parts of me yet to be discovered. The mind is amazing, it knew what I needed before I really knew how much I needed it and before I became aware of how many child parts I had within. EMDR is a therapy that showed me my mind desired health as it’s natural state. That living with joy and wonder and real connection to the world and the people in it, was not only how my mind wanted to function, it was how my mind was. Underneath all the sadness and depression, the despair, aloneness and disconnection the abuse caused, was a desire to be real, a desire to be free. My sexual, physical and emotional abuse was just a whole load of shite given to me by my abusers, it was fuck all to do with who I was and who I really am as a human being. I was disrupted and adapted to the abuse. This kind of trauma has such energy, it has such longing to find a way out of me so I can become my real self and return. That desire, that energy, that movement of parts called on me and for me it was EMDR that met all of this at the source and enabled me to travel to the core of it all. I have to live what was stolen from me, I have to feel what was stolen from me, I have to be stripped of all illusions of what family is and what power it has to abuse . There have been a lot of skins to shed and probably a lot more to come. EMDR makes that all possible. It is a therapy of movement and joy and 20 years after writing the above piece it has made it possible to cover myself and my life with love.
