Yes, that is pretty straight forward. You probably keep a lot of things buried as you are trying to battle your way back to reality. If you are still in the midst of your abuse or have just gotten out of it then it may feel like you are just laying there looking up wondering if you are capable of moving again. Over the past few months I have been able to share my strength with others while I deal with my own trauma. There seems to be some defining line between actions inflicted upon us by those we are not close to and those that we have placed so much into. This is obvious I know. But it takes a part of you that goes beyond the love you gave, a portion of who you were defined as in that time. Scripture tells us that God has not given us the spirit of fear but of a strong mind, to pull down strong holds. These strong holds may feel overwhelming and keep us from seeing how we could possibly grow in the future. I understand the challenges of trying to pull in good things and express that as who you are all while you are continually being crumbled over and over. Literally my experience has left me feeling like I have had loved placed into my hands plenty but there is this hole in my hand that will never allow me to hold it. The more I thought of this I really tried to determine how do we fill that hole? God, relationships, family, drugs, alcohol, depression, therapy? Some of these are optimistic and some of them self destructive. But the idea is we are trying to not feel so at loss.
A friend of mine recently told me how when they are in therapy fro their marriage that they cry pretty much the entire time. I asked them what the reason was and it was pretty clear when they said it. They were grieving. This statement was so self evident, so expressive of actually what is happening. When past trauma and trying to know how to get past it, it is much like someone dying. Only in this instance it is ourselves. We attend our own funerals as we see someone who somehow expressed such love and life to us then actively work to hurt us even more than they ever worked to love. A panic sets in and we question every word ever spoken to us in love. There is no clear defining of these emotions or how they even possible within our minds. While our brains are developing we are shaped based upon external and internal factors and for the majority of us these things turn us into the somewhat functional humans we are. But love is the one emotion that is able to take and reshape parts of us, open us up vulnerably to be defined further. Our brain chemically functions from the things that are realized when we feel this love. It places our physical body back into a state to be shaped just like when we were young. So if you are wondering why trauma from a relationship is so painful or even causes such mental changes, it is directly due to this fact.
The developmental stages of our mind start at a very young age and it is built most times by those that raise us or interact. Each instance of emotion regardless of good or bad is building our reactions and personality as we get older and at some point this development stops to give us our core of who we are. We then deal with how to fix certain aspects or we celebrate how great we were raised. But when love is introduced even later in life, these same chemicals that build us are released again, even if over a small segment of time they open up an area that we do not realize starts to once again influence us on a psychological level literally changing our brain. I will go further into this with some grounded facts for those who may be interested in the actual science behind it. From a purely experienced perspective I’m pretty sure many agree that what they feel during this time now makes a little more sense.
It may feel as though you are dying but you can make it. I believe in you as much as I believe in myself and on days where you feel like you cannot go on, well, just pull up this video. Seriously just do it. It’s time to take more of what is ours and find the things in life that bring life.
-J
A Ghost Of Abuse 