Soul Murder: Strategies For PREVENTION & healing
How can we release ourselves from the shackles that bind us; the shackles that come from early traumatic / painful experiences (that are most often unconscious)?
There is no “getting rid of” emotional pain and trauma, no matter how badly one may want to. We cannot erase our past, we cannot erase the experiences we have endured; experiences that have an impact on how we feel as we move about the world day after day.
How might we stumble upon ourselves - our true selves? How might we finally come to discover who we truly are after a lifetime of having to hide the true self in the shadows of a false self; a self that was always performing and accommodating to others in order to secure survival while growing up?
One of the few things I can claim to know with profound and utter certainty is this: “one must go in to come out.” I mean this in regards to the vast array of powerful emotional states we may have been running from most of our lives.
The journey going in is not easy. In, fact, in can feel as scary as allowing ourselves to be annihilated.
It is with a brave heart one endeavors on such a journey. I will always have great respect for the true courage and willingness it takes to do so.
The journey will likely be painful at times, indeed. At times it will feel terrifying, at other times it may feel wonderful… it may feel awful, incredible, liberating, devastating, cruel and kind and who knows what else. And while we cannot rid ourselves of the painful stuff, I have found comfort in understanding that we can know for sure that all feelings are, by nature, temporary. All feelings - the ones we like to feel and the ones we don’t (the pain) - they are always temporary. (Even though they are quite convincing of their false permanence when we are in them).
What happens when we go into the pain that we may have been so sure would kill us…. and we survive?
What happens when we “go in” or lean in to the pain, the fear - alongside an understanding, caring, curious, nonjudgemental other who is willing to be in the darkness with us, with the sole desire for understanding our emotional experiences, with us?
What I have seen is this: what follows the prolonged experience of an actual relational home for one’s emotional world (as described above) is profound understanding of previously unknowable terrifying emotional experiences; experiences that have been kept out of consciousness but stored in our bodies. Finally these experiences (parts of our selves) are allowed to be seen and known and understood. They can then become bearable and integrated. We can finally start to tolerate what was previously intolerable. We finally can say the previously unsayable. With this new understanding, born out of the co-creation of a true relational home for our feelings (often for the very first time), comes greater tolerance for our emotions. This starts leading us along the path to genuine self-acceptance.
Split off painful experiences gradually become integrated. We move towards becoming more whole human beings, rather than strings of fragmented pieces of raw emotional experiences; raw experiences that never had a chance to be processed or truly known (yet lived through nonetheless); never allowed a chance to be discovered, nor understood, and thus barely resembling anything remotely close to an authentic sense of self.
If we are able to find ourselves in a therapeutic relationship in which we are co-creating a safe, open, nonjudgmental, and curious stance TOGETHER as we follow along the journey to understand not only what has happened to a person, what has been experienced in a person’s true emotional world throughout their endlessly unique experiences, but also this: to attempt to understand, together, to the greatest degree possible, the serious barriers that come up between us based on each of our own histories and archaic organizing principles - to find a way, together, for true understanding from both sides to exist simultaneously.
There may be many ways of releasing the shackles. The way I have described here is where I have found the keys to releasing some of those shackles, not just in my own personal journey, but alongside the journeys with others as well.
Oh and what a beautiful sight that is to see. Liberation of the soul; the soul saved from being entirely murdered.
People find their own ways of being able to live, and be alive, before they die. What an honor and a joy it is to be a fellow traveler and a witness of such freedom found.
Dr. Amie Love Callon