Do you REALLY want to heal? May the Force be with you…
I have been reflecting on my own healing journey. During the last year especially, I have worked with many survivors and I have realised how hard it can get sometimes to go beyond our own fears, anxieties, flashbacks and trauma triggers.
This made me wonder,
What makes one keep going in the face of fear?
What is more powerful than the absolute paralysis that occurs when PTSD hits us?
Let’s call this more powerful thing the “Force”. Thinking about it takes me back to a silly moment in my childhood.
I think I am about 13 or so. I am at my auntie’s house. It’s a simple yet a big house with many rooms though furniture is Sparse. My uncle is a builder so he has been able to extend the house by slowly building one room at a time. At the back of the house, there is an open veranda.
I am roaming around the house and sometime during the afternoon, I go on the roof and walk to the edge where I can see the veranda underneath me.
A thought occurs to me – What if I jump?
The roof is about 4-5 metres high and I am only 13. The fear that grips me surprises me but more than that, it makes me angry. How could something… How could anything make me afraid. I had to tell his bloody “fear” that I was above it.
Next thing I know, there is a sound of a big thud. I am sitting on the floor and my feet are shaking.
My mother and auntie keep running towards me. I am more scared of my mum being angry at me so I start laughing. They look at me and ask me what I have done. I tell them that I have jumped from the roof and it’s been a lot of fun.
Inside my head though, I am shocked by my own actions. I am not sure what has just happened. I don’t know why fear has driven me more fiercely to do what I am afraid of. I don’t know where this “Force” has come from.
I don’t know what this Force is. I don’t know where it comes from. I just know that without it, I wouldn’t have managed to heal. This Force has allowed me to take the actions despite fears.
It is the same Force that allows me to accept that more pain may come my way but I keep moving forward anyway…
A couple of years ago, I had the privilege to work with this beautiful, amazing and strong woman. I felt that her strength went beyond anything that I possessed but somehow the fear, flashbacks and scary dreams kept her at bay. She wasn’t able to get past it at the time.
She used to say that she didn’t deserve to be healed. She said that she didn’t want to spend all this time on herself because her family needed her.
She had the Force but she wasn’t able to own it.
Maybe this is how many of us are – we feel guilty and shameful so we don’t allow this Force to drive us and to give us strength.
We all have it in us but we reject our gift and in turn reject ourselves and continue to suffer in our pain of avoiding healing…
Maybe we avoid pain and that’s what keeps us from healing; but not healing keeps us in pain too. Isn’t it a strange paradox that we live in every day…
Do you own your Power?
Do you own your own strength – you know you have got it? No weak person would have survived what you have…
What stops you from owning it now?
