Step 1
Step Number 1 – Acknowledge the Sword
What is your trauma? What is your story? What has you living in pain and suffering? How is it affecting your life? How is being wounded keeping you away from joy and happiness?
The thought of facing trauma and going through the process of recovery brings up fear. It can make you cry. It can make you have body memories. It can make you want to scream out in horror and rage. It can scare you and leave you frozen in fear and not know where to begin. You may hear all of your negative thought patterns rear their ugly heads telling you that you are stupid, worthless, ugly, or nothing.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
My sword of trauma is that of carrying so many abusive incidents in my body/mind/spirit that I developed dissociative identity disorder (DID). When as a young child I showed knowledge of sexual matters (introduced from infancy by my father) I was punished, shamed and forced into silence.
I had no escape from the neglect and physical, sexual, emotional and spiritual abuse of my parents. I tried hundreds of times to tell police officers, school officials, ministers and adult friends about what was happening in my household and each time I was shamed. I was told that I shouldn’t talk about my parents “that way”.
Each time I reached out for help it was always MY fault. So I had to endure until age 18 so I could escape my family of origin. In the process of all this I developed 207 inner personalities. Why 207? Because as a 6 year-old I decided that since the body has 207 bones (that was what was known in the early 60s), that I couldn’t have more parts than that, or else there would be no where for them to ‘live.’
I continued trying to tell people what had happened in my childhood. Through the 70s, I was told repeatedly that I was bad for ‘accusing’ my parents. Through the 80s I was told that since I had survived, I should be grateful and just ‘get over it.’ Through the 90s I was told that I had a nice husband and a child so I should be grateful for them and just ‘get over it.’
No one in all that time ever asked me how I felt. Or how it felt to carry around the weight of generations of familial abuse in silence. In 2005 I finally found a therapist w ho would listen to me and she diagnosed me with DID. Up until that time I believed that because my mother chose to die a grisly death from cancer with no medical intervention, and because my father tried to donate her disease-ravaged body to science, and those scientists called me and demanded to know why the body was in such terrible shape–all that I believed somehow to be my fault.
If you want to know more, I have written an e-book, the only one in existence that shows how and why a child creates an inner personality in the moment. And also the only writing in existence that shows how levels of abuse can go beyond physical, emotional, sexual and spiritual to damage the connection between the person and the Universe, creating energetic damage. I am trying to raise awareness of the damage caused by this level of abuse.
The URL for my e-book, “Sky Eyes” is http://www.akwbooks.com/BookStore/product.php?productid=16
Thank you for this site and for allowing me to share my ’sword of trauma’. As an aside, my screenname, ’slverkriss’ is after the kriss sword–a wavy-bladed, double-edged Eastern sword.
Love & Light: Kriss
My sword is just recently losing ( or so I thought ) the only person left in my family who believed me. As so many other survivors, I am a reminder of really how sick our family is and like so many others…” I am the liar ” ” I am the sick one in the family” ” Why cant you just get over it?”…I am really mad that all of them seem to go on living their lives in peace and unity and I am the outcast. Like so many of you I too went to all the right authoritive people in my life and nothing was done. I told all the right people…even my own Mom. Im angry that I am left with so many sickening memories, while they all spend holidays together laughing and being merry and I am excluded. My Mom is 89 and lives with my neice..who happens to be the daughter of one of my abusers. I cant call there to talk with my Mom who has recently been diagnosed with dementia..I dont even know if she remembers me anymore. Yes, life goes on without any support from my family and now without any contact at all with anyone in my family. Out of 7 kids…5 are living..one heard the first attack by my abuser…but she wont be my friend on facebook…because shes afraid I may say something that will offend Stephanie..the neice. How horrible it seems to me. How sad I am that it has come to this.
My sword came from growing up in a family with incest and alcoholism as the norm. The secrets and family system that kept those secrets kept me in the pain of denial for the first 38 years of my life. I have spent the past 20 years facing those secrets, voicing those secrets, feeling the pain and then letting go of the pain. Forgiveness has even become an important part of my journey. I never thought that I would be able to forgive my abusers. Forgiveness didn’t set them free from what they did. Forgiveness set me free from carrying the hatred and hurt around in my mind and in my body. Forgiveness gave me the ability to heal from incest.
How many times have I been over this, and still not done?? I’m so tired of the same old stuff coming back to kick me in the butt, when I thought I’d worked through it already. So, ok, I’m going to therapy – just started yesterday. Hurray for me – that’s my valentine’s present.
I’m not sure that this is the most appropriate forum to tell just where I got my sword from, but it’s a big one, I can tell you that. I think there might be a spear or a dagger in there too; maybe a couple of those ninja stars…. damn, those things are a bitch!!
Anyway, I just know I’ve still got a lot of work to do – that can be depressing to realize, in itself.
But, just have to keep moving ahead. Wish me luck!