Facing Emotional Trauma

Most of us had some major challenges to face during childhood. Parents unable to express tenderness, violence, abandonment, discounting, the list goes on and on. But it’s interesting to note how different children in the same family will respond differently to the same circumstance. This is because the reactive tendency was already there. It was just enlivened by the situation. If you were to explore your long past, you’d find the pernicious stuff has cast a shadow for a long time over many lives. These are the hard knots. They are energetic nodes in a mesh that keep us in illusion and tied to others karma.

With spiritual progress, your awareness becomes clear enough to feel your key nodes. However, our long habit of avoidance gives us no apparent way out, to resolve the feelings. Ironically, the way out is the way we’ve never been. Into it more fully.

The signal is there because the experience was never completed. It has never been accepted or fully allowed. It’s normal that we put off completing traumatic experiences until we’re ready but if we never resolve them, we carry them forward energetically as above.

There can almost be a sense of preferring to feel bad (whatever it is), of being more comfortable with it as it is than facing it. But like the boogey man under the bed, the fear of facing is actually worse than the facing. I’m also not advocating wallowing in it but rather going into the feeling more fully. In a place of openness, if we fully allow the feeling, it can reach a momentary crescendo and be resolved, never to cast its shadow again.

Obviously, being in an open space of detachment helps. Also culturing gratitude and forgiveness. (not making a mood – allowing an open heart)

If this sounds too hard, something like Byron Katie’s The Work is freely available on her web site. It can help you walk through the seeing. And in that, we lessen our loads and raise our happiness thermostat. 😉
Davidya