“The scab”

First things first. No, we’re not gonna rush this thing. We are going to be fully present, & pay unadulterated, undiluted attention to every step of the piecing back of our characters & hearts. Here, we need to firstly allow the wound to close just enough for a ‘blood clot’ to form. Figuratively, I would see that as regulating & pacifying the internal world, reconditioning the nervous system & making the environment safe again.

There is no need to panic anymore, the knots will slowly start to loosen its tight grip & unroll. There is no need to stay high-strung or anxious anymore. We can ease the tension & take a baby step toward inner peace. WE HAVE BEEN THROUGH A TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCE & dare I say it, after the bullet (the relationship) has egressed, we’ve endured Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Emotional abuse should be deemed in the same serious light as physical abuse & I advocate for this movement. And just because it cannot be seen, we cannot assume that its significance is of less importance. I actually believe that it could be even more destructive. We have to talk about it a lot more in social circles so that its magnitude becomes more noteworthy. Any one thing hoping to grow in value, seeks popularity & clout. If no one supports this thing, it will not receive any traction & eventually die out. I am hoping that the same ideology be applied to the importance of the repercussions from emotional abuse. There is value in the droves of people supporting an idea, so let’s share the message & do our part to help.

Anyway, where were we? Right now, we are a detailed depiction of a feral cat, left to the elements, defending ourselves by any means possible. Emotionally & even spiritually we’re inflamed. So, we have to start out slow, easy & small. I would suggest a prescribed anti-inflammatory & that could look like anything from a body break like decent sleep or regular, well-balanced, wholesome meals. When we’re in fight, flight, freeze or fawn mode, we often by no conscious fault on our part, forget to do the very basic things made to satisfy those raw, innate needs such as eating or sleeping. We’re so consumed with surviving that ACTUAL survival in the quintessential sense of the word, escapes us.

I cannot stress enough how important the fundamentals of self-care are at this time in your healing journey. Many a times we wanna catapult straight to the meaty bits, like therapy or counseling which are both great avenues to venture down into, but if we ignore the primal needs that we have as humans, the ones we’re all manufactured with, no sustainable healing can ever really take place. Feed yourself food, real food & demand sleep, mindful meditation, walks, massages, even a good gym session, to release the pent-up tension. We need to do in the natural, what we’re hoping to see unfold in the spiritual or the internal.

So, before heading off to your nearest psychologist, do what you can for yourself first. Revert to your factory settings so that a solid reset & resuscitation or rebirth if I may, can happen. The truth is, that even as imperatively helpful as embarking on the process of talking to said helper is, it may also still take from you. It may cost you. Reliving the past experiences is in itself expending precious energy. It will raise the cortisol levels again & put the body back into a heightened alarmed state & more seriously; a state of fear. In my opinion, it is too early to take this step. You gotta learn to crawl before attempting any walking, right?! SAME THING HERE. Imagine you’ve been in a debilitating accident & you completely forgot how to walk. Foundation-laying is especially climacteric & at this stage the last thing we need is more simmering panic or anxiety.

We need an equilibrium of inner silence & peace. A great way I’ve learnt, is through mindful meditation. In this practice we become so acutely aware of ourselves & we develop a keen sense of healthy vigilance hereby ascertaining our own emotions, identifying their root causes. Soon, they become almost apparently obvious to label. This to me is a golden discovery that one could either stumble upon or purposefully determine to attain. We have to accept that the work starts with us & before any emotional or psychological excavating commences, we need to allocate the appropriate tools for the stages that we find ourselves at. I feel more in control of myself when I can identify the lurking issues & where they stem from. I’m better equipped to employ the suited solution to the problem with targeted specificity. I find myself wasting less time with trial & error processes of elimination & which in the meantime leave me feeling exhausted even more with solutions which do not help. This futile exercise could also feel like major setbacks at this stage especially since what we’re aiming for are glimpses of positivity, but all we’re getting are results pointing to more ‘failure’, uphill & trudging. NO MORE DEJECTION! & even less self-inflicted dejection. So, I say, take the easy Ws. You need them during this phase of transition. You’ll definitely develop more resolve as your inner strength calibrates itself back to normality. These wins are laying new grounds & reinforcing our robustness. Replenishing one’s psychosomatic resources starts with re-laying the building blocks in our physical body first. The strength we regain from this simple practice will elicit percentages of fixity of purpose, trust & even some joy; all key ingredients for success.

Now, I understand how gut-wrenchingly hard this next part may seem, but believe me it is highly necessary. Your community of supporters, if you are privileged enough to have them at your disposal, need all these phases & vital stages communicated to them. I have witnessed how truly genuine yet ignorant our ‘tribe’ can be during these critical times. I have even witnessed how they accuse the ‘survivors’ of being nothing more than attention seekers. So, before you go judging them, let me come to their defense here (CUE THE GASP).  Truth is, they are not educated on this topic & they are not the enemy here either. They are doing their best, & they are NOT mind-readers, neither are they our personal psychologists. They cannot piece together disconnections or catch all the water from our porous stories. They need an induction manual of some sort. The earlier you are able to articulate your symptoms & needs, the better & this will take some doing on your part. Hence the basic, bare minimum, replenishing that we spoke about earlier on.

The mistake I made while trying so desperately to heal, was to expect everyone around me to understand & entirely comprehend what I was going through. I even remember getting so riled up & frustrated because I felt like my point was getting lost on them. I expected my friends & family to respond to me in a way that a psychologist or therapist would, with suggested solutions that were exactly accurate to my situation. I expected a ‘click’ sensation to go off in my brain & to lock everything in place once they would provide me with an answer so specific to my need. My desperation inadvertently applied so much pressure onto my family & friends, that they eventually ran out of options, felt perplexed & conceded to defeat. Let’s prevent this from happening, by taking responsibility first & this does not mean that we excuse the behavior that we fell prey to. NO, it simply means that we accept that this situation was something that happened to us & now we have to be grown up & figure out how to deal with it & start healing in order to move on from it. It’s not easy, I know this but it’s the only way. Things that happen to us are sometimes not our fault, but how we respond to these things is definitely our responsibility.

Three key steps that really helped me when I started out my healing were to…

Show compassion to myself

This certainly doesn’t mean feeling sorry for yourself. Get that straight! But it means to accept the reality of the happening & then to express a deep understanding which motivates you to show concern toward yourself. This also displays a type of relieve from either physical, mental or emotional pain. Self-compassion, just like usual compassion shown to others, shows a sensitivity to the emotional suffering that we face & endure.

Forgive

This I’ve been told by my extraordinarily wise spiritual mentor, Dudley Anderson, that it is both a decision & a process. Meaning that we DETERMINE to forgive. This includes forgiving ourselves as well. Most times, we loath ourselves for being so naïve, for staying longer than we should have, for putting up with being so mistreated, & this list goes on & on.  So, forgive & when triggered by the same kind of behavior, from an external stimulus, we forgive again & again & again, releasing the injustice for your own sake, freeing ourselves from the mental imprisonment.

Show grace…

…to those genuinely out there to help. Their limitations are not ours to judge. They are extending & stretching themselves beyond their borders, in order to show support in an area that they may have little to no understanding of. So, their words may not always be packaged in finesse, but it may be just what we need to hear. A surefire sign to me that truth about me was expressed, is when I feel uneasy or uncomfortable even a little irritated, but at the same time enlightened. Once I’ve sat with the truth & meditated over the facts, I am able to soften my rigid edges & accept it as mine. Mine to own & mine to work on, to no longer be ashamed of it, but to embrace it & maybe even share it with someone else who may need it.

Don’t get me wrong here, we will never be fully, completely or entirely rid of the memories or the nightmares. There will most certainly still be vestigial flickers of the pain, but at this juncture, we’ve made so much progress. We’ve been brave enough to start breathing again. Let’s keep this trajectory going.