Elisabeth Corey's Blog, page 15

Caring is Scary

Dear Elisabeth,

I see you working hard every day to make a difference in your life and in the world.  I hear you talking about how things can be better, how we don’t have to live in pain.  I know you mean well with your optimism and your hopefulness.  But I don’t think you are right.  I can’t understand how life could be the way you think.  How is this possible?  My life has never represented the world you believe exists.  Nobody cared about me.  They only cared when they wanted something.  Maybe they wanted to abuse me.  Maybe they wanted me to do chores or fix dinner or loan them money.  But they never cared.

And the response was always the same.  I could do nothing right.  Everything I did was wrong.  Everything I touched was messed up.  Every time I tried to make something better or get any appreciation, it ended in disappointment for me and others.  There was nothing good that came from my efforts to make it different.  And they didn’t just reject what I did.  They rejected me as a person.  They rejected all that I represented as a human being.  They rejected my creativity, my femininity, my intelligence, my hopes and dreams.  They wanted me to know that I wasn’t good enough.  I wasn’t good enough at anything.  I never lived up to their expectations and no matter what I did, I never would.

Why would you want to make your way in a world full of people like this?  Why would you want to live in a universe that clearly doesn’t care if you are here?  I can’t do it.  I had to shut it all down.  I had to stop caring or I would have crumpled on the floor in despair.  The pain was too great to allow myself to care.  I could not keep going with that hanging over my head.  I had to detach.  There was no other way.  And now here you are with your hopefulness telling me that it is okay to care.  It is okay to dream.  It is okay to believe that something good can happen or that life could be what I always wanted.  How am I supposed to jump on board with that?

Look.  I am not trying to reject you.  You seem nice.  I can tell you mean well.  You listen to me, to what I have always wanted, to my nightmare experiences from the past.  You even let me write your blog.  That’s pretty cool.  But you are only one person.  How can you protect me from the critical “naysayers” of the world?  You can’t.  They are everywhere.  They are the only people I have ever met.  While it is tempting to think about my dreams that were squashed as a child, it is dangerous.  The disappointment could be too much.  I’m not sure I could handle it again.  I’m not sure I have another round left in me.

The Goddess

_____________

Dear Goddess,

I want to start by telling you how much I honor and respect your decisions after all you have been through.  You have heard nothing but negativity.  You have had nothing but rejection.  It is no wonder you have chosen to give up, to stop caring.  I really get it.  I get it deeply.  I feel your futility and I know it must have been hard to stay alive through all of your experiences.

But what I have to offer you is different.  It doesn’t come with a promise of approval and unconditional love from others.  Honestly, that is unrealistic.  It isn’t possible.  You are right about that.  What I have to offer doesn’t require their approval.  It is a new way of living.  Honestly, it is the way you were meant to live.  It is how you have always tried to convince me to live, but the approval-seeking got in the way.  It only takes our approval now.  If we decide we want it, we can have it.  Of course, there are time and money to consider.  The controller is there to remind us of that.  But with the right commitment to what we want, we can create it.  And what others think won’t matter.

Why did it matter before?  In childhood, it has to matter.  That is why life can be so confusing.  The rules change in adulthood, but nobody tells us.  They don’t tell us we can do things differently.  That part gets left out of the “How to Adult” manual.  We have freedom now.  We are not required to follow those rules anymore.  Yes.  There are laws.  But all those made-up childhood rules don’t apply.  We don’t answer to those people.

So please let me show you another way.  Please share your hopes and dreams with me.  Please trust in me to make them happen.  And please be patient with me as I navigate the fears of the other inner parts and figure out the best way to make our dreams happen.  Share with me any futility you need to share, but know that I will work best with you by my side.  I need you by my side.  I hope you will consider what I have said here.  I am truly excited about what is to come.

The first to love you unconditionally,

Elisabeth

The post Caring is Scary appeared first on Beating Trauma.

Was That My Intuition?

How do I know what I want?

This is the most common question asked by my clients.  And it doesn’t surprise me.  We grew up in an environment which did not allow us to connect with ourselves.  We were not allowed to ask for what we wanted.  We were not allowed to feel how we felt.  We were not allowed to say no to what we didn’t want.  After trying to express ourselves authentically to no avail, we learned to shut it down.  It was too painful to listen to the cries from inside when we could not answer them.  So we just shut it down.

Now that we are adults, we listen to all the mainstream self help experts.  They say the same things.  “You have the answers inside.”  “Trust your intuition.”  “Listen to what you want above all others.”  Well damn.  If that isn’t confusing, nothing is.  How are we supposed to connect with the voice we were forced to shut down all those years ago?  How do we know what we want?  It isn’t that we hear it and ignore it (although that may be happening).  We don’t even know what it sounds like.

Why don’t we know what it sounds like?  It is buried under years of traumatic emotions and memories we had to shove down with it.  And our intuition is only available when we are in a grounded state.  In other words, we have to be in the body.  But all the pain is in the body.  We have spent years mastering the ability to stay out of the body.  Now we have to face the fact that our intuition is exactly where we don’t want to go.  While it would be nice if the first step was “access our intuition”, it isn’t.  The first step is to feel the pain of the past.  Who wants to do that?

But if you are reading this, you are already on that journey.  And you may be wondering how you can tease out the intuitive messages from all the parts screaming in your head.  What’s intuition and what is the inner parts chatter?  Here are some rules I have learned as I have accessed my own intuition.

Intuition sounds insane. If you hear a voice inside your head saying you should stay small and live a comfortable life, you are not hearing your intuition.  Your intuition is about living large and fulfilling a purpose.  That purpose is never small.  It is never safe.  Intuition is scary.  Intuition says you are meant to do amazing things.  It doesn’t mean you are meant to be famous or win the Nobel Peace Prize, but it means you are meant to do something that scares you.  Think of the scariest thing you could do.  Think of the thing that makes your heart race and stomach do twists and turns.  Does that thing make you proud beyond measure?  That’s your thing.
Intuition is a whisper. Your inner parts scream at you.  Maybe they don’t scream at you all the time.  But they scream at you sometimes.  And when you are trying to get in touch with your intuition, your parts scream at you the loudest.  They are trying to drown it out.  The controller is the biggest enemy of your intuition.  They are NOT okay with anything big and risky.  That is not their thing.  But if you can ground and listen to the whisper, you may get an idea of what your intuition has to say.  And if the first response to a thought is a beat-down by your controller, it is probably your intuition.
Intuition doesn’t sound desperate. Your inner parts are desperate.  Why?  They are always fighting with another inner part.  Even our most prominent parts have an opposing part.  You may not be able to hear it, but the opposition is there.  So your parts will be in a hurry.  Your parts will make you feel like time and energy is running out.  Your parts will go to desperate lengths to have their needs met.  But intuition is patient.  Intuition can wait.  Intuition is standing by waiting for you to wake up.  Intuition knows you want what they are offering.  And any opposition is not concerning.
Intuition will never give you the entire picture. Following intuition requires faith.  I am not talking about religious faith.  I am talking about faith in life.  And I already know what you are thinking.  How can I possibly have faith in life after what I have been through?  The controller is the antithesis of faith.  But with trauma processing, that faith will build.  And one day, you will hear that first step and find it hard not to take it.  You won’t know what will come next and that won’t matter as much as it used to.  You will take that first step.  And after you take that first step, the next step will become clear.  And you will take it.  That’s how intuition works.  Don’t get me wrong, you may have a fuzzy picture of where you are going.  But how you are getting there will be a mystery.

Don’t give up on finding your way back to yourself.  You do know what you want.  It is buried under a ton of muck, but it is there.  And as you work through your traumatic emotions and memories, you will start to hear the whisper.  As you get to know your inner parts, you will notice how your parts keep you away from the whisper.  You will build the ability to hear yourself above the din of society and your inner chatter.  You will learn to trust and follow yourself above everything else.  But it will take time.  For today, trust enough to take one step.

The post Was That My Intuition? appeared first on Beating Trauma.

Heavy Lifting

I went to the grocery store this morning.  I have never liked grocery stores.  I have trauma around food which complicates my shopping experience.  But this morning as I walked down the aisles, I quickly noticed more activity than usual.  The employees were tearing down shelves and moving labels and food around.  It seemed like a full-blown reorganization.  My mind immediately went to the place it always goes.  Right then, I noticed an elderly woman walking the opposite way down the aisle.  As I passed her, she spoke to me.  And she said exactly what was going through my head.

“I just learned where everything is and now they are going to change it.”

I wanted to give her a high five.  But I thought that might have been a slightly extreme reaction.  I did affirm her frustrations though.  Change is hard.  Change is particularly hard for those of us who lived in chaotic childhoods.  It is nice to know our food will be on the same shelf every week.  It is nice to know that what we have come to expect won’t change.  But in reality, everything is always changing.  The old adage that “everything is temporary” is true, no matter how much we don’t want it to be true.  But it is frustrating and scary when external stuff changes.  And it is absolutely terrifying when the internal stuff changes.

That’s where I am now.  There is internal change on the horizon and it is big.  I can feel it in my body.  There is muscle tension in my back and neck (more than usual) which is making it hard to function at normal capacity.  My heart feels like it is in a constant state of contraction, like there is a war inside it.  My anxiety and fear are certainly high.  I can feel my immune system working overtime.  And my inner conversation has reached a high-pitch intensity I haven’t seen in a while.  There is change coming.  And my parts are sure this will be a bad thing.

I have been writing my inner conversation with a bit more commitment than usual.  I am usually committed but when the war inside has the potential to take me down physically, I get extra committed.  So today, I thought I would share my inner battle between my goddess and my controller.  These two inner parts have a way of mirroring the feminine and masculine struggles which seem to be manifesting globally these days.  The futility of the feminine and the oppressiveness of the masculine are in full effect.  And something tells me that if we don’t work this out on the inside, we can’t work this out on the outside.

The Goddess

Nothing ever works out.  Don’t you see there is no hope for me in this world?  I don’t belong here.  There is nothing I can take from this world that will help me.  There is nothing here for me at all.  I am an alien.  This world is filled with evil and nastiness and there is no point in continuing the battle to survive, to fit in, to be someone who is respected.  I am not welcome here.  I didn’t create this circus.  I am not a part of this circus.  I can never be a part of this circus.  There is something about me that is different and I cannot belong here.  So stop trying.  It is best to wait until I can go home where I belong.  Don’t you understand?  This is not my place.  I have been told that over and over and over again.  This is not my place.

  The Controller

Did you just hear that?  How can you let her loose knowing that?  Can’t you see that it will do no good at all to have her with us?  She will drag us down with her talk of not belonging, of being different.  She will bury us in her futility (as you call it).  She will leave us with no practical way to survive because she doesn’t care about those things.  Can’t you see how she is a problem?  She is right.  She doesn’t fit here.  So leave her where she is.  Leave her buried deep inside where she belongs.  She has no place here.  Even she knows she has no place here.  Stop trying to rescue every part of yourself.  Maybe some parts need to stay tucked away.  Maybe her place is in the dark.  Society certainly thinks so.  They can’t all be wrong, can they?  Why would they all be wrong?

The Adult Self

I don’t agree with either of you.  I don’t believe that she belongs in the dark.  I don’t believe she doesn’t belong here.  Society needs her.  Society needs more of her.  She must come out and show others they can come out too.  We must show society a different way, a balanced way.  There has to be a balanced way or our human race will die just like the Earth is dying.  She must come out or there will be nothing left to come out to.  She must come out in mass.  It is time for her to live whether or not she “belongs”.  Honestly, this world is messed up right now.  She isn’t supposed to belong.  She is supposed to lift it up.  She needs to lift it up.  And she must start now.

The post Heavy Lifting appeared first on Beating Trauma.

I Want to Go Home

There may be nothing more horrible than the isolation that comes with a childhood of complex trauma.  It isn’t that we are alone.  We are probably surrounded by people, but we are alone on the inside.  Life is happening around us.  It may even be happening to us.  But we aren’t really involved.  We are watching.  We are watching others have fun in life.  We are watching others meet milestones.  We are watching life happen to others.  But this life is not for us.  This life is not ours to live.

Sometimes I feel like I was dropped off on Earth from another planet.  It feels like my actual family and community asked me to visit this planet and learn the ways of Earthlings.  But on the way, I accidentally hit my head and became an amnesiac.  Now I am wandering around Earth trying to act like a human while my real family desperately tries to find me.  It might seem far-fetched, but there isn’t anything more far-fetched than my actual story.

Feeling out of place is so normal that feeling anything else feels out of place.  I have always wanted to belong somewhere.  I have searched for a place or a community that felt good to me, that felt like home.  In the end, I was always left feeling like an outcast.  Is that because I didn’t belong?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  But I had inner parts who were convinced I would never belong.  They knew I was never going to be like the others.  They knew I would be rejected and abandoned by them.  And because they knew it, they made it happen.

So I search for home.  It might fuel my love of travel.  Maybe I believe if I see enough places in the world, I will find my home.  It probably fuels my extroversion despite my relational trauma.  If I can finally meet the right group of people, everything will be okay.  I will finally be home.  And this is how we live after trauma.  We search.  We search for that family, community and feeling of home.  We search for something that will make us feel like we belong somewhere, anywhere.  We want something more than isolation.  We know we are supposed to belong.

But we don’t know it’s an inside job.  It isn’t about others.  It is about our own beliefs and messages.  We are telling ourselves the reasons for our isolation but they aren’t real.  Let’s look at the most common beliefs keeping us isolated.

I am not good enough for others.  This was drilled into our heads by abusers and bullies in our traumatic childhoods.  It doesn’t even matter if these things were said out loud.  The behavior of our abusers was often meant to be interpreted in this way.  And since our child brains are wired toward self-blame, we get the message loud and clear.  We take that message into adulthood and watch it manifest over and over again.  So we isolate.

I can’t connect with others.  In childhood, we didn’t do what other kids did.  We didn’t have time to play.  We were too busy trying to stay alive.  And there is no more energy available after the obligatory survival tasks.  In adulthood, we can feel awkward in situations that seem “surfacey” or all about fun.  We live in a very deep place focused on hyper-vigilance and trauma recovery.  We can’t connect with others who are doing normal life stuff.  We just don’t get it.  So we isolate.

I can’t trust anyone.  Let’s face it.  In childhood, we could not trust almost everyone around us.  Even people who appeared to care really didn’t stand up for us the way we needed.  And sometimes, people developed trust to manipulate or betray us.  In adulthood, we have this expectation of humanity and it is not helping us to meet great people.  We can’t.  If we meet a great person, we don’t believe them.  We are sure they are lying.  And after many attempts to meet someone trustworthy to no avail, we give up.  So we isolate.

The irony is there are so many of us isolating from the world for these reasons.  And if we knew about each other, we would build networks to support us in our journey home.  But first, we must look inward and recognize the lies we were told and the lies we keep telling ourselves.  We are not meant to be isolated.  We are meant to connect and belong somewhere.  But we will have to come out from behind the curtain of isolation we have created.  Only then can we come home.

The post I Want to Go Home appeared first on Beating Trauma.

Time for Rest

I have always been a hard worker.  The compliments about my productivity have been endless.  People are always amazed at how much I can get done.  “I wish I had your energy.”  “How do you stay so organized?”  “It is amazing how much you fit into one day.”  They say it like it is a choice.  They say it like I have chosen this as my life’s dream, as though productivity was an Olympic sport and I have always aspired to the gold medal.  And while I always take the compliment, I find the entire conversation very confusing.  It was never a choice.  And it has never been for fun.

I learned a long time ago that I had one acceptable path in life.  If I wanted to be loved, translated to “stay alive”, I had to be perfect.  I had to pay attention to every detail.  I had to stay as hyper-vigilant as possible.  And there was no time for relaxation or enjoyment.  Life was about survival.  Life was about working hard.  Life was about getting through the day without any major messes.  My life involved walking on egg shells and hoping nothing drastic went wrong while staying on my toes.

I wasn’t the kind of person who got to relax.  If I didn’t earn it, I didn’t get to keep it.  And by earn it, I mean work twice as hard as everyone else.  In childhood, if I took a break, I was quickly accused of being lazy and useless.  There was no downtime for me.  There was no enjoyment.

In adulthood, this translated well in the workplace.  Corporations love the hard workers.  They love the employee who is willing to stay late every day, even pull an all-nighter if the project required.  They love the employee who defines herself by her work and is always trying to get that next promotion.  And when I wasn’t working at the office, I was volunteering.  I was constantly working at something.  I knew the secret was in the work.  There was some point when it would all make sense.  There was a destination.  There had to be.

So when the energy started to wane, which it always does, the panic set in.  I am going to miss a detail.  I am going to be accused of imperfection.  I am going to get in trouble for my laziness.  They are going to know the truth about me.  But as I look back on my early years, I realize the hard work wasn’t the answer.  Working hard to impress others never actually met my goal.  Don’t get me wrong, I got promotions and raises and things like that.  Everyone loves a hard worker.  But nobody ever gave me what I was looking for.

I wanted to rest.  I wanted to rest securely in the understanding that I was going to be okay.  I wanted someone to tell me I was going to be okay.  I wanted to feel peace.  I wanted just one person to thank me for all I had done and let me know I didn’t have to keep running, working, chasing the red dot.  I was so exhausted.  But nobody ever said I could stop.  I just wanted to stop.

But my inner drill sergeant would have never let it happen.  It was too scary to stop.  Life might end if I stopped because I would have no more identity.  But recently, it has occurred to me that I can stop whenever I want.  Don’t get me wrong, I still have to pay the bills and raise the kids.  But I don’t have to run the hamster wheel any longer.  I never had to.  In adulthood, the hyper-vigilance has never gained me a thing.  Planning is helpful.  Working is helpful within reason.  But nonstop running is not helpful.

So I have started to question the message from my controller.  The message that tells me I must run, run, run is not a friendly message.  It is a survival message.  It comes from my trauma.  I don’t have to listen to that message to be safe anymore.  I can live a calmer life and there will be no punishment for it.  I can live a peaceful life and nothing bad will happen.  Life isn’t meant to be what the abusers taught me.  There is no destination.  I am there now.  And I am okay.

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