Okay, I admit…
Things aren’t going as well as I pretended.
Last Saturday night in my last post I wrote about how well I’m doing. Much of that post is correct, but there are other dynamics working in the background.
Now, four days later, something was still brewing. I’m still feeling it in my gut. I meditate on it, I make ‘walks’ with it and sometimes I fight it (my old hard strategy). From that hardness I wrote the post Saturday. It was an attempt to pull myself out of the energy.
But it’s been nagging away in the back of my mind, because that’s how it works if you don’t face it. When I looked in the mirror this afternoon, I saw the drawing in my face. And again ’emotional eye bags’ formed under my eyes and I noticed how new eczema spots were formed. “What does my body have to tell me?”
So (again) I’m going to expose myself honestly to stay true to myself and go beyond the shame.
Last Saturday-morning I had gone ‘knock-out’ for a while. My trauma system had kicked me, as I told two of my colleagues yesterday, in all corners of the room again.
I was triggered in a piece of trauma energy which has its origin in the early attachment with my, then, mentally unstable mother. I became, as it’s called, anxiously attached, also called a preoccupied attachment style.
Trauma works in such a way that it repeatedly brings you into situations that resembles the original trauma, also called re-enactment. This happens simply because trauma is unfinished, frozen energy. For me, this is the overwhelming impotence I was feeling when I was a very young child, at times my mother was emotionally unavailable and totally unexpected due to her mental state.
Re-enactment of trauma continues until it is seen and healed.
An example of a re-enactment from my adolescence is the following:
As an adolescent, I wasn’t very good at dealing with the opposite sex. I remember my first experience very well, at the age of 15 I guess, with an Indian girl. She was visibly attracted to me. I was also attracted to her but didn’t know what to do with her. She was too beautiful, too mysterious for my low self-esteem and the shame I had at that time.
It was a classic setting you can see in every romantic movie. We were talking at the beginning of the street with a group of friends and girlfriends and did our ‘adolescent things’ (whatever that is).
We were there with a mix of known and unknown children, and this girl was one of the strangers. I had never seen her before. The evening was coming and one by one everyone was dropping off home.
And we were left together.
Somehow there was a certain pleasant tension between us that I had never really felt before.
We were chatting and somewhere I knew something had to happen now, just what? Desperate I stood there, waiting for her initiative. I think I must have looked a bit sheepish. At least she had no patience for it and said: “well if nothing more happens then I’ll go”.
And the next moment she left… leaving me in all my powerlessness.
I never saw her again after that.
I was not able to realize it at that moment, but now I can see the same impotence from my early childhood was acting out ib that moment. Now I know that the pleasant energy I felt with her evoked the association with my incalculable mother. Unconsciously I was already preparing myself for her sudden departure (just like my mother did). And so it happened. It had became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There was only one way left for me to deal with the overwhelming powerlessness and shame I felt. That was by dissociating. Pretending nothing had happened.
In this phase of my life, as I have shared before, these dissociations are thawing out during my ‘healing journey’ and the underlying trauma energy comes to the surface.
In any case, I manage to regulate faster, without outside help. So yes, from that perspective, I am doing very well.
And, uh..,
Instead of ‘punishing’ myself, for once I’m just being nice to myself. So, for a change, I bought myself a bunch of flowers. Because In secret I love myself.
