Paris 2016
“We say: ‘Here I am, pain. I give up. All that stuff really happened. I’ll let myself feel it now. Then I’ll tell the story and let other people feel it, too.’ Everyone has a history, everyone has a story to tell. When you write your true identity, it is a love offering to the world because it helps everyone who hears it feel braver and less alone. We all need to know that we are seen and heard. We don’t need our lives to be different, or easier, we just need someone to see the pain. To know what we’ve faced and overcome. To say: Yes. I see this. This is real. We don’t need a magician to take it all away – we just need a witness.” Glennon Doyle
While reading the book ‘The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma’ by Bessel van der Kolk I´ve come to realize how traumatized I actually am. How pretty much everything that I´m struggling with right now is connected to trauma. From having lost my sense of time, feeling helpless and stuck to bigger things like loss of imagination, capazity to remember facts or concentrate and insomnia. It has been eye opening but it has also been hard. To realize you have similar symptoms like one has when having been in a war zone or been physically or mentally violated truly opens your eyes to how hard it has been. For me it slowly opened the door to letting myself see it all, feeling it all. I´m still scared and I still feel very much stuck and helpless a lot of the time but I´m also learning ways to let my body know he is safe and let my mind and soul connect with my body without being afraid it would cause pain. Good and joyful moments are just as hard as sad and angry moments for they let me feel even more scared because I could loose it all again. I could have never imaged I would ever need to learn to feel joy, to not fight the good moments – I thought everything positive just happends and you figure out the rest. Oh boy. Something good and wonderful can be very scary when you have painfully experienced the lost of exactly that.
I´m holding on and letting go, I´m writing my way through and I try to give myself grace. Lots of grace. Somedays that works out other days leave me very angry and mad. Trauma is complex and not easy to sum up or to explain. The book is long but does a good job of getting every aspect of it all. I would just not recommend reading it while you´re in “the war zone”. Good quotes from the book can also be found here <3
Sending you lots of LOVE!
Madita