#4 Our Deepest Wound Is Our Healing Work In The World

We Are Arming A Traumatized Population!

Warning: My story contains rape. Please take care of yourself.

We live in a traumatized world.

We think trauma is only the big T kind: a car accident, childhood abuse, surviving an earthquake, or war etc. We believe the rest of us are not traumatized, because perhaps we had a good childhood, with good parents and have lived a relatively calm life.

But the truth is everyone of us has trauma. Maybe our trauma is not the big T kind. It is the little t kind: being bullied, mean friends, rejections, emotionally absent caregivers, being embarrassed, not being seen or understood, a parent incapable of mirroring us, a parent who was just trying to survive, all the little implicit signaling that we are stupid, ugly, a dumb blonde, too sensitive,too feminine or fill in the blank.

And I’m not even delving into ancestral trauma or epigenetics here!

We believe that if we just say our daily affirmations, or change our thinking or reach that pinnacle of success, or ‘ask Jesus into our hearts’, or belong to that group, or marry that person, we’ll be fine. We believe that if we harden ourselves enough, cut off our feelings and show only confidence, we’ll be fine. But the truth is we have to face the parts of ourselves that were created from our childhood trauma. We walk around fractured and fragmented, because we refuse to look at ourselves, never mind self compassion.

We refuse to see our part in all this dysfunction and violence.

We are now living in a world here in the USA where anyone who wants to carry a gun can. And if, God forbid, they get triggered, or upset, or feel afraid, they can use that weapon with dire consequences. Just in the last few days, a 16 year old Black male was shot twice for mistakenly ringing the wrong doorbell. The homeowner said he was afraid. So he shot him. A 20 year old was shot and killed in the backseat of a car, because the driver accidentally drove down the wrong driveway. The homeowner stepped outside and shot at the car as it was driving away. Two cheerleaders were shot after accidentally getting into the wrong car in a parking lot. A 6 year old and her father were shot by their neighbor, because they went into his yard to retrieve their basketball.

This is arming trauma, my friends! This is dangerous.

All of this violence is due to trauma AND our political leaders who actually believe that every American should have a gun and that there should not be any restrictions on access to guns. These same political leaders are telling us to be afraid of each other too. If your neighbor does not see the world as you do, they are the enemy. They are godless, or demonic or evil or woke or uneducated or religious nutcakes or simply out to get us.

We are arming a traumatized population!

It’s our responsibility as human beings to grow up. This means to heal from trauma and Trauma. Healing is life long. The fracturing, the splitting off that happens is actually a beautiful intelligence for our survival. Our sacred body/mind fractured or split so that we could survive whatever it was that assaulted our psyche/Soul. This is done out of our conscious awareness. Our Life Force is so loving and powerful that it does all it can to help us live.

In my childhood, I cut off my coreself, so that I could enmesh with my mother. I knew I needed to be ‘for her’, merge with her as best I could, as this would help me survive. I was, afterall, the child born from her date rape. If you’ve read my other posts about my story, (I hope you do) you’ll know that my mother had no support and was basically forced to marry my father, the man who raped her on their first date. They were married for 52 years until her death in 2012. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand trauma when she was alive. I know she did her best, though stunted because of trauma. I know she couldn’t emotionally connect, nor mirror me either, because of her trauma.

At our core is our Essence, our Divine Spark, our Innocent True Self, which is whole and good. It is our very birthright. It’s just that stuff happens to us big and small. Actually, it’s more about what happens inside us, how our bodies, our minds move unconsciously to survival mode creating parts that try to protect us.

Perhaps, we are conceived in rape, as I was. Maybe we believed the lies, or we bought into the ideology, the religion, the belief system. Perhaps we absorbed the implicit and explicit messages given to us in our culture, subcultures and/or our family of origin.

I knew I was the problem, the cause of my mother’s pain, so I protected my Innocent Core, creating parts of myself who were deeply concerned with her wellbeing, her mood, her emotions, and her psyche. This helped me to survive a very painful existence. I didn’t do this consciously. I was not aware of what I was doing. I adapted this behavior subconsciously. These parts protected me. As a child, I didn’t know anything of my parent’s history.

This kept me from knowing my own Self. I disconnected from mySelf in order to survive. It was too much too bear for my fetal, infant and child psyche to know how I was conceived plus the internal agony of my mother. It was too painful to see how people could so deeply hurt each other verbally and emotionally on a daily basis. It was too painful to believe I was not conceived out of love, but rather dominance. Disconnecting from mySelf and my body and enmeshing with my mother was key to my survival.

Of course, I brought enmeshment and disconnection into my marriage. I replaced my mother with my husband. My subculture of Evangelical Christianity further reinforced that enmeshment with it’s messages of patriarchy. To be godly, was to selflessly serve my husband. Afterall, he was above me. The intelligence of my childhood survival parts helped me survive my volatile childhood. It served me for a while in my marriage, until it didn’t.

It simply became too painful to keep abandoning mySelf.

As time goes on, I recognize more and more of my True Self. That good, beautiful, whole spark of Spirit, which is in you too! I’ve grown more mature and more into the fullness of my humanity. That’s what happens for anyone willing to step into their healing journey. Layers upon Layers. I do not claim to have arrived for I never will in this life, but I do know that we are made to heal physically, emotionally and spiritually.

I can testify to that!

Years ago I toyed with the idea of training to get a conceal carry permit. Back then, I thought it would be cool. It was also before I knew anything about trauma, my trauma or anyone else’s for that matter. I went to a police simulator company with my husband for his birthday. We stood on a circular stage with a 360 degree screen around us and special glocks in our hands. We had to watch as scenarios of city scenes and people moved around us. We were instructed to shoot the ‘bad guys’. As the screen images moved and morphed, I ‘shot’ and ‘killed’ many innocent people. Just the idea that there were ‘bad guys’ who were going to pop up and try to shoot me, set me up for failure. (If failure is the imagined killing of innocent human beings) Afterward, I felt the grave, sober responsibility of owning, using and carrying a firearm. I knew I didn’t want to live in an activated war stance, so I decided against any kind of gun ownership.

A few years later, I began my healing journey!

Most of us don’t need to arm ourselves with guns in order to feel safe. We don’t need to point our finger at others to blame them for our pain. We don’t need to make others into enemies. All we need to do is bravely look inward and find support for our healing. We need to grow up. We need to see our complicity. We need to form communities of healing. We need to feel and understand what we are feeling. We need to learn how to see the Divine Spark in each other.

We need to become fully human.