Healing from a Place of Strength

Two of the key reasons for the huge leap forward in healing I have made over these past couple years are motivation and hope, which were made possible by enormous gains in self-awareness.

Some of you may know that this site began as a record of a "consciousness" experience I had after several months of working with my current therapist, my "Healing Guide." That experience is chronicled in A Healing Journey (Original). At the time, I believed that experience was the "end game." That I was fully healed. Looking back two years later, I am still trying to make sense of the experience and place it into the proper context (although I have addressed it at various times, see the Enlightenment category).

I know that the "full conscious" experience is forever part of me. I also know that experience was not a singular event. At various times since, I have had similar experiences, where I felt like the barrier between my body and mind and the "life force" which exists all around me became one. Usually I do not have these experiences in the extremely pure manner I had originally. But I have wondered if I actually do have them in as pure a form, just that they are not new to me anymore and experienced differently. One thing is certain: these experiences, on whatever scale, help me keep faith that I am healing and that I am on the right path. They are my touchstones.

I see such experiences now as acutely clarified sense of awareness.

My consciousness experiences did not come out of nowhere. They came at the same time I focused on what the feelings were in my body and mind. For decades, I had struggled with trying to make sense of my inner and outer worlds through intellectual understanding, mostly in therapy. When I began to work with "My Healing Guide," she encouraged me to focus on feelings. She is, after all, trained as an art therapist. So, for many months we worked on expressing feelings through art. I learned, quite quickly, that I was able to access my feelings without processing them through thought. This was not so completely new to me. I had done it with my music since I was a kid, and to some extent with my photography. But it was absolutely new in the context of therapy, and that was when my world changed. That was when everything sort of started to come together for me.

I have come to appreciate that healing—and indeed much of life—requires us to find balance between thought and feeling. But, perhaps most importantly, before any balance can even be attempted, healing needs to be focused around positives. It cannot only be dwelling on the past, on what happened, on symptoms. Sure, we all need to grieve. We all need to tell our stories. That is part of healing. But there is more to healing.

I believe deeper healing is achieved when we challenge ourselves to live more in the present and future—which means setting ourselves up for a better future—and doing that while cultivating internal awareness using mindful approaches. For me, the awareness became my grounding force, my proverbial rock, a net which I could rely on to hold me safe when dealing with even the hardest issues from the past (or even present). I find I am in a much better position if I can work on healing from a place of strength or from a positive point of view. This was the key for me because it was the first time that a sense of safety came from within and was not derived from anyone external. I learned that I am my own healer and that I can indeed heal.

It is not easy work, especially since the responsibility is all on me. Balance is not painlessly achieved. It is most always a moving target. For me, I find that when I make the effort to be self-aware, I increase my chances of finding much-needed balance. I also find that self-awareness is a choice. Sometimes I need to be reminded to make that choice; this is where "My Healing Guide" really makes a difference. I have to be willing to look inside. I have to be willing to give myself a chance.

Most of all, I have to be willing to approach struggles in a manner that is quite the opposite of the internal mechanisms of my longstanding dissociative coping. To do that requires internal collaboration and patience. I find that I have to continually prove to parts of me that the self-aware approach will lead us all to a better place, even though it makes the road rockier for some of us. Much of the proof is in the data I have through my journaling. So, my job has changed over the years, from first having no direction, to then trying to force parts unwillingly to go against the grain, to now being more of a coach and mentor.

I keep saying "We can do this!" And, for the most part, we can.

I have not posted (or read much of other's blogs) in two weeks because much has been happening in my life. So I have taken time to step back a bit and focus on being with my family. This appears to be an annual tradition for me, as I noticed the very same thing happened last year. On another front, the Expressive Arts Carnival will be back with an activity on November 1st. Finally, please bear with me while I solve the problem of site notifications sending out blank e-mails.