Things I Have Learned While I Sat & Listened

Things I Have Learned While I Sat & Listened

When the trauma in life has been hidden away from our conscious mind for prolonged periods of time, what I have found is that the integration of new information about the past is a deeply disorganizing and disorienting exercise to attempt.  Basically it plays hell with my self esteem, that much I know is true.

Mother Nature "knows" when to shut people down who are caught between the rock and the hard place ... Festinger’s theory on Cognitive Dissonance. She also knows when it is time to open people up again, to begin the process of reintegration, to open up those things to the light of day that have been compartmentalized at great cost over the years.  It is important to understand that the reopening and shining the light of day into the darker and deeper reaches of the past can be a painful thing to do.

One of my greatest eureka’s came when I noticed that as people recovered their own feelings, their sense of their humanity, they also came to a place of realization about the gravity and the grief from their past that has not been dealt with, and just how inhumane it was to have been them for prolonged periods of time.  This was big for me. It is during this period of recovery that people often come to a greater sense of unhappiness and of sadness. This can be very painful and is referred to in the recovery material as the Original Pain work. The end product of recovery is that the individual ends up with more of themselves available to have a life with, with more of their truth(s) at their finger tips, and with more opportunities for an authentic and satisfying life style.