Skills to Heal: Understanding What’s Missing & Where and How to Get it
As you heal you will find emotions you weren’t allowed to have and people who could not give you what you needed. One of the forgotten things about trauma is that there can be actions of trauma (physical abuse) and inactions of trauma (neglect).
Also, because some people weren’t ready to heal themselves they dumped things on you. These things were emotions that you did not cause and the situations were generally not your fault. This is especially true if you were a child at the time.
These incidents leave holes in us. As a writer and storyteller I get to fill these holes in my life with fictional characters. That sounds a little strange - but these fictional people are under my control to a certain extent and they allow me to have someone who has enough compassion, emotional maturity or protector guardian vibes to ‘be there’ for the aftermath of the hurt me. These fictional people fill in the holes - so that later in life, I can be there for someone else, because I’m a little further in my healing. Officially therapists call it ‘re-parenting’.
Re-parenting is just giving yourself what you could not have in the moment you were traumatized. So, if you were in a car accident and no one came to check to see if you were all right - you can send in a superhero to do that for you.
Imagination is powerful and a small ‘fantasy’ like this rewrites the brain so that whatever you experienced can become less frightening or overwhelming because you’re now less alone.
Not everyone does this. Many people find it strange, until they realize that this is storytelling at its core. Something bad happened and we the little human weren’t capable of fixing it - so we had to get someone we trusted who could handle the big scary thing.
If you’re interested in trying this here’s a link: https://chronicwriter.substack.com/p/author-voice-4e1
Share Chronic Writer by VintageInkSlinger
Thanks for reading Chronic Writer by VintageInkSlinger! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
