I figured out that my childhood was fucking hellish trauma riddled - erm, sorry, I mean "adverse" - shortly after moving out of my parents' house when I was around 19 years old. I focused on healing from that trauma, sought out professional help, literature, and alternative approaches as well as self help - everything I could access. I prioritised healing over my studies and eventually dropped out of university (physics, which was super interesting!) and ended up long term unemployed while busily working on that.
I tried to re-parent myself and to allow my inner children to have a good life now, I nurtured my childish aspects because those are amazing and heartwarming and important. But I always struggled too much with flashbacks, depression, anxiety and other trauma symptoms to function. I was lucky to still be able - albeit barely - to live independent of group homes and I had frequent stints in psychiatries, often 8-12 weeks at a time. I didn't know at the time that the reason I struggled so much was that I was still and always surrounded by abusers because said abusers (including my long term therapist who committed spiritual abuse) subtly taught me that it was normal and the suffering both unavoidable and also my fault somehow simultaneously. No, abuser logic does not make sense. That's one way of discovering it, if one can catch enough of a break to think clearly.
Because I have one actual good and non-abusive friend, Dion, I made several important breakthroughs these past several months, and especially since I got to move into a liveable, abuse-free flat for the first time in my 39-year-long life last month - since then, I have a whole new bar for what's emotionally healthy.
It's like I have begun to taste what having a "self" and boundaries is even like. I never had that before, not really, not in comparison to this. No wonder I struggled so much with everything! And big wonder I got as much done as I did!
To think that others, especially my past therapists, just get handed the opportunity to develop a stable self and then look down on me for struggling, when I never got that chance until I carved it out for myself with only one friend on my side and no money or spoons. I can say with certainty that those therapists did not understand what I struggled with. They definitely didn't help me in developing a stable self or boundaries, or in bringing about the conditions that were needed for it.
I needed what every child would need, too, for stable development of a self and boundaries: An abuse-free, physically safe environment with at least one supportive, reliable relationship.
Everyone deserves that.
I knew that I had never had that as a child, and I knew that I needed it now. What I didn't know until hindsight was how far from that very low bar my circumstances still were. I am still not quite there yet, since my housing and financial situation is not stable yet. But I am working towards that and that gives me hope and enough confidence that I can feel safer now than ever before.
I try not to be too openly "woowoo" because it comes across as either silly and/or cultish (even though there's no reason to be more suspicious of woowoo things than any other thing that could be turned into a cult) and just because my personal ideas about and vocabulary for things like souls and afterlife and so on are probably too specific to be relatable to a lot of people. But sometimes I can't think of better ways to explain things that don't bring "woowoo" stuff to mind, even if just as metaphors. So, please bear with me on this. I see it as a helpful tool that is too valuable for me to just ignore.
That said, having more of a real self to me feels like my soul finally inhabits my entire body and the space immediately surrounding it. Yes, like an aura. I didn't even think of the word aura until trying to formulate this blog post. I'm sure there are other explanations for this, but to me, it really is as if previously, my own energy was never strong enough to fill my body and now, because circumstances have changed and I have worked hard on this, it does. I also feel the "point" of where "I" am differently, or rather, it feels like more of a bigger sphere now, a bit bigger than a beach ball, when previously it felt like a single point either in my head or in my chest. Or outside my body if I was dissociated, as I frequently was.
This self business is still new to me and something that I have to consciously concentrate on, otherwise I fall back into my old "habit" of being that small, shrunken version of myself. A version where my boundaries are inside my body, which is to say, they don't protect me. Physical pain as well as social or emotional attacks (like when the neighbour I was trying to befriend suddenly made bogus noise complaints) throw me back into that small version of me.
I am confident though that being my full self and being anchored and grounded in it will become second nature to me with practice and with increased safety, like housing and food security. But even without improvements in my external circumstances, I know that I have unlocked something that can't be taken away from me. I have already had experiences of conflicts and catastrophes, like being evicted from my previous place, where I could see how different it is now compared to only a few months ago before I made all those breakthroughs in my emotional healing.
My aim for this blog is to share as much as possible of my journey and what I've learned so that others can heal and grow too. I want to share what I have, and I want no one at all to have to suffer unnecessary trauma consequences or feel broken or insignificant. I am also sharing in other ways, by doing co-counselling and what I've playfully called pro-counselling (because it rhymes) and hopefully one day by offering retreats where people can come and really, fundamentally heal and recover physically, mentally and emotionally by being cared for and safe, free from abuse and shielded from oppression and surrounded by support and good vibes. That's my guiding star! :)