I think I have shared before that I am starting a new job. This is a part-time teaching job that I am excited about. The job is part teaching and part coaching, encouraging students to believe in themselves to be successful as they face the next milestone to their dream job.
The training for the job is very intensive, and then preparing to teach the class is even more so. I need to learn and prepare a 330-page curriculum to do the job well. I know from teaching experience that the first pass is always the most difficult and time-consuming. Once you learn the curriculum, then you can teach it with your eyes closed. However, the start-up involves an enormous investment of time and energy to get prepared to teach the class.
This has been my focus for the past couple of months. I have been putting in 4-6 hours a day on top of my already busy schedule to prepare myself to teach this class. This has not left me much time or energy to focus on healing from child abuse, which, in many ways, has been a blessing. Even though I am not sitting around chilling out and relaxing (not sure how to do that!), this has been another way for me to get a reprieve from all of the work involved in healing from child abuse. Right now, I simply don’t have the time to focus on that.
I am writing this blog entry from the beach, where I went for a walk alongside the beach. This is something that I love to do, combining exercise with thinking about the meaning of life, etc., as I look out over the waves. For once, I was not melancholy as I did this. My therapist used to point out that going to the beach was a very healing experience for me. He noticed that I always had great leaps in healing following a trip to the beach. That did not happen this time, but I mean that in a good way.
As I walked along the beach, I thought about how my life right now is not revolving around healing from child abuse, and it is such a relief to be in this place. I know this is just a season for me, and that season will end. I know I have more healing work to do in the future. However, for right now, in this moment, it is nice for my life not to revolve around healing from child abuse for once.
Photo credit: Hekatekris
Blooming Lotus 
I do understand this. For me it has to do with having an awareness of moving forward in life to counter balance the focus on work about the past needing to be done. When i work with trauma clients, I always tell them that we can’t just look back at what happened, but also be forging a path into the future. There is a little book I use sometimes, called “Alternative Pathways to Healing.” It is not about trauma. It was originally about recovery from substance abuse, but is applicable to everything, because it is how to move forward by bringing all aspects of life into balance.
In my own life right now and the sense of trauma I have felt stuck in, it is not only because of the trauma that took place but because nothing else in my life seems to be moving forward either. Part of that is the need for a satisfying job (and the money that comes with it), but over this last weekend I went for a class to complete level one of Reiki training. This has been very important to me, and I hope to be a Reiki Master Teacher by the middle of the summer. This doesn’t solve my money problem, but it helps me move forward and think about “life after trauma.”
Good for you Faith. That must be a great feeling. Just sort of finding yourself immersed in living your life right now.
Good luck with your new class. I’m sure you’ll be great!
Peace,
pf
I am struck by three things. The season reference, the water and the motion.
I believe that PTSD is much about the reptilian brains interaction with the cognitive brains. Note: the reptilian brain is asymmetrical just as the cognitive brain is.
That PTSD is from the disconnect between all the brains and parts of the brains taking over to do things that those parts would not have had the brain developed in a dangerous environment to the reptilian brain.
I am all about the water. I swim in a lake or a pool at least once a day. I have a kayak, rowing shell and wetsuit. I built a home on a lake.(Sold it to pay for bad treatment.) I am all about mediation in motion which is what my reptilian brain likes.
I am different in the summer. I think this is because my reptilian brain had an easier time in the summer due to less work for my cognitive brain and less trauma.
We are working on bringing those from the winter to the summer and those from the summer to the winter.
I do not find that having the cognitive brain teach the reptilian brain anything to be effective. The cognitive brains needs to listen to the reptilian brains and let the body take over.
The reptilian brain has its own memory and its own way of remembering. I believe that there are memories from before this life that the reptilian brain has. I am kinda driven to plant this time of year. In the winter I am kinda driven to hibernate.
Now summer to the reptilian brain is not a date thing. It is temperature, colors, length of day and such.
I can more tie “symptoms” into the reptilian brain than the cognitive brain.
I do little with the emotional brain. It seems to follow rather than lead other than if I feel a line across my forehead I know little about it in words.
So I am kinda in summer mode with could be seen as a break from healing or a time to prepare for more healing. I am trying to transom it into part of my healing. A kinda having all seasons each day as much as possilbe. We think this is doable now as we see no crash in the future.
We look at it that PTSD manifests itself differently in the summer and winter and there is a transition in fall and spring.
We believe that what is termed DID/multiple can not exist without PTSD. As we all get rid of the PTS we integrate naturally. Naturally for a body that has experienced extreme trauma.
The reptilian brain is going to win. It is just a matter of when and what it expects to win.
I think water is very healing. Another example of the reptilian brain in action may be the so-called “pilgrim instinct”, that is, the urge to travel that mysteriously appears at this time of year. It is believed that the popularity of religious pilgramages in medieval Europe, and in other parts of the world today, is due to the migratory instinct still found in the most basic parts of the brain, and which is activated by the change in weather/daylight etc.
In spring I always find myself raising my face to the sun, smelling the breeze and thinking of far-off lands. The place I’d most like to visit right now is the USA, and I always start planning and saving up in spring, then spend it all on other things during my winter “nesting” phase. Blah. 😀
You bring up a good point–that we need to have breaks in our focus from trauma. It is just important that we see what current life has set before us. It is often these things that give us the courage to survive. For quite awhile I felt depressed and that I had nothing to “get well” for. I lost my teaching job when I moved to a new state. After over 12 years of teaching, I had nothing. Nothing but 5 years of applying and being told that in this economy I just have too much experience and cost too much. My life changed when I looked beyond my sadness and into the life I have. I decided to go back to school and get a MSW in Clinical Social Work. Having a new purpose, a renewed interest (this was something I always wanted to do but felt to “unwell”) gave me strength. It gave me something worthwhile to “get well for”. It is our life in the here and now that will pull us out of the ashes. Yes, we have to deal with our histories, but take much time to enjoy the life you now have. The life where you can choose your destiny, and you make the choices in your life. Great to be an adult!!! Better to be here than there. Honor the past; live in the present.
Lothlorien
Lothlorien,
“Honor the past; live in the present.”
I am so going to steal this.
Thank you,
Michael
I went to the beach too this week, but it was for a sad reason to collect shells because my inner children love the shells in my therapists room and we had a premonition that therapist would leave us this week; the premonition came true today sadly we were right and feel much grief and loss although knowing it was time to move on not sure what to…
Ax- I am so sorry about the situation with your therapist. I tend to want to ask what happened, but perhaps that is too personal. I hope you had the chance to adequately process the changes with your therapist. Not that it really makes the change any easier, but having the chance to process your feelings and thoughts about it really matters.
Short answer was, the therapist wasn’t cut out for their job in treating me, i.e they couldn’t deal with very complex trauma and ritual abuse, and began to mask their inadequacy by treating me unkindly. I’m now en route to finding someone who can meet my needs!
Thanks for your concern!
Ax- You probably already know about this resource, but if not you might check out the Sidran Institute website. They have lists of therapists who work with trauma, dissociative, abuse issues. Maybe that would be a way to find someone in your area.