The Poison in My Heart, The Space in My Head

I had another session with ‘S’ my hypnotherapist last night. I told her that as I was away over the weekend and had such a hectic week that I had not done my ‘homework’ – I had only listened to my tape once that week. I also mentioned that my hip pain is acute this week. She then remarked that when I was listening to my tape every night, my hip pain had reduced greatly.

In case I didn’t explain this already, S previously recorded one of my sessions which was full of suggestions about self-worth and also had embedded messages about my hip improving and becoming less sore. So I do believe that the tapes influence my pain levels, even if only that they relax me and when the tension in my hip reduces then I walk better and therefore there is less pain.

We then chatted about my week and I mentioned that I am getting less prone to flying off of the handle, and I am pausing to evaluate my emotions before I react. Somehow the name of a colleague came up and I said that I am now just popping in my headphones and listening to music when he starts whittering on with his boring stories. She asked me what bugged me about him, and I said that he is always telling long elaborate stories where he is the victim – someone is always taking advantage of him or doing him wrong. In the few months we have been on this project together he has been in fights with Telkom, cell c, his car insurance company and some kids at his child’s school. All of these disputes are done at full volume in the middle of the office. This is the same guy that I threatened to stab in the eye if he didn’t shut up and who then reported me to the project sponsor and resulted in my getting a right bollocking.

So when I told S the background she said ‘so this guy is triggering some emotions, maybe we need to explore that if it is impacting you on a regular basis’. At first I did not want to waste my time or money on my feelings for this arse, but then I realised I need to let her guide me. I need to get out of the way of my own recovery.

So we agreed to work on this emotion he triggers in me.

Under I went, and she took me to the last time Arsehat and I had a disagreement. She asked me to feel the emotions which were triggered in me, to understand what had caused this reaction and to go back in my past to a time when I felt these same emotions.

I went zooming back to my childhood. I was about 7 years old and I was playing tag with my cousin Warren. Warren was on his bike and I was on foot and he lunged at me, resulting in his flying off of his bike and landing face 1^st on the pavement. His skin was scraped off of his face and he was knocked unconscious. I could not understand what this scene had to do with anything, but as she always tells me just to talk and let my subconscious have free reign, I went with it and when she asked me what I was feeling I realised that I have always carried the guilt of his accident. I felt it was my fault as he was chasing me and I jumped out of the way. She nurtured the little girl who carried that guilt & had me tell her she was not to blame, she was only a little girl and it was not her fault.

After healing that guilt, she then brought me back to the present and the last interaction with my work colleague. I was still feeling hostility and she asked me what it was that was triggering me and I realised that he has the same eyes and accent as my ex-husband. As our bodies hold onto the energy generated from our past traumas I can see why I reacted so strongly to someone who triggered that reaction.

So once I realised and voiced this then S took me back again to a scene with my ex-husband. She had me return and I immediately wanted to get up and run from the room, my heart started racing and I started sobbing. She asked me where I was and I told her I was on the floor with my ex standing over me. I had been hurled against the wall. I was pregnant with Caitlin and he had taken me by my hair and thrown me against the wall. She asked me what I was feeling and I said ‘ashamed’. She asked me why I felt ashamed and I said it was because ‘I let him do it’. She asked what could I have done to stop it, wasn’t he bigger than me, wasn’t he stronger. I said ‘Yes he is, but I could have killed him’. She pointed out that if I had killed him I would have gone to prison and then what would have happened to my children?

She had me converse with my past self – to comfort her and tell my past self that she will survive the entire trauma. That she will find the strength to divorce him, that she will lose everything but by losing everything she will gain an inner strength and confidence and will allow her to make a beautiful life for herself and her children. That she will find an unconditional love with another man, and that she will be safe and happy.

She then had me converse directly with my ex-husband. I was able to tell him how I feel now, how I felt then and to let him know that he did not succeed in his attempts to break me. I survived and ended up even stronger and happier than I dreamed possible.

She then had me transfer my conscious mind to his – so that he could tell me how he felt.

I had clarity that he was also a victim of neglect. His mother had bragged about the fact that due to her postnatal depression, she had just left H on a blanket for hours and he never fussed. I suspect that he never fussed as when he did, he was ignored. I then remembered the stories of his many nights spent in hospital as a small boy all alone, in pain and with no one there to nurture him. I remembered the stories my own children told about how cold and unloving their grandmother was.

I was able to forgive him. I was able to understand he is just another soul, trapped in a physical body, with his own issues to deal with. It does not mean I can ever be ‘friends’ or loving to him. But it does mean my fierce hatred and anger towards him has dissipated.

He no longer has any space in my head, or any poison in my heart.

I came to work today and my colleague is still the same boring, loud, boasting person he always is. He too has his issues and his deep need for attention drives his actions.

The scales are lifting from my eyes….the peace is coming in my mind…..the confidence in my own value and self-worth is growing.

I heal a little bit more…..

The Root of the Problem

Last week’s hypnotherapy session was very enlightening to me. I was taken down to ‘sleep’ and told that we were going to go to the point where my personality issues began.

I was a bit nervous as I thought that the place I was taken by my subconscious would be a place of trauma, possibly to the molestation that occurred when I was very small. I was nervous as I have no memories of this time other than a single flashback image. This image is generated on occasion – but my mind has blocked most of the episode. So when I arrived at the point of the start of my ‘trauma’ and I was taken to a seemingly innocuous scene where I was sitting talking to my parakeet and playing with my dog. But when S asked me ‘what are you feeling’ then I realised why I was there. I was feeling ignored, almost even invisible.

My Mother was present in her 20ish year old self as I was about 2 years old. My Mother seemed totally unaware I was there.

I was given 2 books to read by S as part of my quest for enlightenment. One was by Brian L. Weiss, MD who wrote several novels on past life regression. And the other was ‘The Hidden Messages in Water’ by Masaru Emoto. I devoured the book by Weiss and just skipped through the one by Emoto, but I did discover some things which touched me deeply in Emoto’s writings.

The basic principle in the experiments done by Emoto proved the impact of our environment and the conditioning we receive from our experiences. They wrapped bottles of water in pieces of paper with various words or phrases imprinted on them, or they spoke the same words over and over the water. They then froze it and examined the crystal formations which resulted.

What I found amazing and mind boggling was that abuse is not as damaging to the soul as neglect. I had assumed that my issues were from the traumas of my past – at the hands of the various abusers from both my childhood and adult years. In actuality my damage is from neglect, from being ignored and not nurtured.

I was not parented; I was never given rules, regulations, curfews or limitations. My parents were hippies and they thought that I should decide myself what was an appropriate bedtime, what time I should come home if I was out and whether or not what I was doing was correct. But without a parent there to tell you what is acceptable then how does a child parent themselves?

I went to parenting classes when I had children as I knew nothing about kids. I had never baby-sat, I do not think I had even held a baby except as part of my rotation through paediatrics in University and I knew I did not want to parent the way my parents had. So I hope that I learned more about communicating with my children, that I made them feel loved and valued. But I guess only they can answer that….and part of me is afraid to ask.

30 Days of Gratitude

As part of my quest to change my outlook on life and to reprogram my thinking, I decided to participate in the 30 days of gratitude exercise I had seen others do. Someone asked me to collect them all and post them as a blog, so here goes:

Day 1 30 days of gratitude; I am grateful that I have a job I enjoy and have not had any time since I've been in SA where I did not have a contract

Day 2 of 30 days of gratitude; I am grateful for my beautiful, healthy, intelligent and all round wonderful children. I love them so much it makes my heart ache

Day 3 of 30 days of Gratitude: I am grateful for my husband who loves me unconditionally and understands me better than I understand myself

Day 4 of 30 Days of Gratitude; I am grateful for my friends. I have wonderful women (and a few blokes) in my life that keep me entertained, listen to my problems and are always there for me.

Day 5 of 30 days of gratitude: I am grateful for my beautiful home, our stunning views, my pool and our gorgeous garden. I feel very blessed to have a warm place to live when so many have so little

Day 6 of 30 days of Gratitude: I am grateful that I've been lucky to travel the world, to experience such a wide variety of cultures which have enriched my life, to have been all manner of places from sharing a meal with a family on the floor in a long house in the jungle in Brunei to tea at Buckingham Palace with the Queen.

Day 7 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful for the many talented people who create art to entertain us, artists, dancers, singers and any other form. Today I'm taking the family to see 'Burn the Floor' and I am really looking forward to seeing the talented dancers perform

Day 8 of 30 Days of Gratitude: today I am grateful for my sight/vision. Even with my eye disease at least I can function fully other than some issues with driving after dusk. I work with someone who is blind and I cannot imagine the challenges she has or the level of dependence she has to have on others

Day 9 of 30 days of gratitude: I am grateful for my internal strength, that with all of the traumas of my past I did not break. I survived it all and turned it around and created the life I wanted.

Day 10 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I am grateful that the Universe redirected my career. Due to circumstances beyond my control I could not do radiography in the UK and I ended up taking a path that led me to gaining the skills I have now and this enabled me to be a specialist in Data Quality and to consult in a field which has very few other people and makes me very marketable

Day 11 of 30 Days of Gratitude: this may be an odd one, but I'm grateful for social media. FB allows me to watch my friends’ children and grandchildren grow and reconnect with my past. Twitter has enriched my life with new friends, invaluable when you move to a new country. I've met some friends for life on Twitter. I even still have some old MySpace blog friends still in my life!

Day 12 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that we are finally able to start renovating our house. The stair rails go in today and they start with the guest room and outside patio next week so we'll finally have a proper shaded place to entertain

Lucky number 13 in 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful for Sharon my therapist who is helping me to 'reprogram' my past thinking and to become a wholly integrated person by healing my past

Day 14 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that my children have found partners that fit in so well with our family. Our family is loud, chaotic and far from normal but Josh and Amber just accept us all and fit in seamlessly. (Now give me some grandbabies to be grateful for!)

Day 15 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful to live in the Mother City. Cape Town is one of the most beautiful cities I've ever seen from the mountains, the oceans, the vineyards - it has beauty from every angle.

Day 16 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful for Cordelia who cleans my house and does the laundry so that I can concentrate on work. Without her my weekend would be all cleaning rather than all fun and I would be a very dull girl

Day 17 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that I still am lucky enough to have my Mom still with me, despite being so far away.

Day 18 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that today is a public holiday and since I decided to also take tomo off I have 4 days off! So I'm grateful for long weekends :)

Day 19 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful for my animals. Pixie, Panda, Lola and Blue are a huge part of our family and I love them so!

Day 20 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that I've found a hairdresser I can trust with my hair. Off to see Leandra today for a cut and colour, and think we may make a big change :) Maybe red? Chocolate? We'll see!

Day 21 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful to live in Hout Bay. We love this little village. It has everything you need, and most of the things you want and is close enough to the city for work, but far enough away you feel like you’re on holiday all of the time surrounded by its beaches and mountains.

Day 22 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I am grateful for my health. I have arthritis but it is manageable, it hinders me only with walking and I can cope with that. So many have struggles every day with critical illnesses and I am lucky to be relatively healthy.

Day 23 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that Trevor has bought himself such a gorgeous house, that he has a job, and that he has such a wonderful girl to share it with him. It's nice to see him happy and settled with someone I know will value him and support him and knows him so well and fits in with our family so perfectly.

‎Day 24 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that all of my children have been fortunate enough to go to University. That they have all found careers which suit their aptitudes and interests.

Day 25 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful for all of my family back in the US and in the UK. Family by birth, family by marriage, family by spirit… I'm grateful for what you all bring to my life.

Day 26 of 30 Days of Gratitude; I'm grateful for 'coincidence' (which I don't believe in as all things occur in these ways deliberately). The torrential rains occurring while our builders were here revealed a massive leak we never knew we had. So for those little things we think are synchronicity - I thank you universe!

Day 27 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that my girls live with Norm and I and that we have so much love in our home.

Day 28 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that after so many days of rain, the sun has finally emerged which enabled the builders to make lots of progress!

Day 29 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful that as we have so many days of pouring rain and cold, we have somewhere warm and dry to live, that we have plenty food to eat, that we have love ones around us, that we have friends we can count on and that we all have each other to laugh at (umm 'with', of course I meant 'with' hehe)

Day 30 of 30 Days of Gratitude: I'm grateful for books. I love to read and I am grateful for the writers who put their heart and soul into their writings. I'm grateful for my book-club and the lovely ladies in it.

Living on the Fault Line

I usually blame it on being a Virgo, but I am one of those people who always look for someone or something to blame for anything which does not go to plan. I recognise this as a character fault but now as my therapy is removing my blinders from my eyes, I see that the actual root cause of this is lack of trust.

I find it very hard to trust. I’ve always just thought I was a sceptic (or a Virgo). But last night during my therapy session I had a moment of clarity. Actually it was all explained to me by the therapist, I don’t want to steal her thunder J

 Last night’s hypnotherapy took me to a place in my childhood which greatly troubled me but had pretty much been forgotten. As I ‘arrived’ there my heart started pounding and my breathing was difficult.

We had some goats when I was a child. I was taken back to a scene where one of the goats had been murdered. (is it murder if it is an animal, in this case I think so) I was standing on the periphery of the group of adults all surrounding the dead goat which was lying with its internal organs pulled out of it. I could remember the adults saying that the goat had been a victim of sexual abuse by the neighbour ‘boy’ who was in actuality a grown man, but his mental age was the age of a child. He terrified me as a child and I could not bear to be near him. He could not speak, he grunted and drooled and flapped his hands violently. To a small child this was incomprehensible. I can’t imagine the life his parents had, caring for him and protecting him from society’s lack of understanding.

From my current adult perspective I could not imagine letting my child see a goat which had been sodomised to death, or to discuss the details of this openly in front of my child. I do remember watching that same goat being born, it was a twin and the mother had the babies in one of our outhouses. That was not traumatic however, it was fascinating and natural despite being bloody and seeing my goat taking strain it was part of living in the country and having animals.

The two people who were revealed as needing me to ‘heal’ a trauma were my maternal aunt and my uncle. She is still alive, albeit in her 80s. She is an evil woman. And I mean the word – not just using it as a descriptive term – she had evil in her heart. She has since been diagnosed as being mentally ill – bipolar, psychotic, schizophrenic, she has a few errors in her system shall we say.

As I started talking ‘to her’ in my hypnotic state I started to think of all of the things she had done to me as a child. The filth she lived in and I hated to visit. I cannot imagine why my Mother would allow me to sleep in that hovel. There would be bugs, filthy dishes, dog hair and poop everywhere. They also would drag me and my cousin out of bed at 5 am and force us to help deliver newspapers. I hated the black ink that would stain my hands, the smell of the printed papers; I would be nauseous and shouted at if I complained I felt sick from it.

I remembered my aunt stroking my hair while she thought I was asleep and saying to me, ‘such a beautiful child. Just as well you are beautiful as you will be a whore like your Mama and it always helps to be a beautiful whore.’

When I was 13 she had me drive her to a bar. I had never driven a car in my life, only a tractor and I promptly had a crash. She lied to the police and we managed to get away with it.

I remember when I was a teenager she would give me barbiturates to take and arrange ‘dates’ for me which consisted of me going out with random guys, and waking up confused and disorientated later. God only knows what ‘deals’ she had made for me or what happened to me while I was out. Once I awoke, having been thrown into a shower fully dressed with 2 gay men who had found me lying in a crumpled catatonic heap at the bottom of the stairs in my aunt’s apartment building. At first, they thought I was dead, but then realised I had overdosed and carried me inside and put me into a cold shower to wake me up and forced me to vomit. I thank my guardian angels that it was gay men who found me, and that anyone found me at all before I did in fact die of an overdose.

As a child I had imagined it was my uncle who was the evil one. That he had encouraged or organised her evil escapades. But in my hyperconscious state I had clarity which revealed to me he was as much a victim of her twisted psychosis as the rest of the family. I remember when I was about 3 years old he taught me to read. He would patiently sit me with on their farm and tell me about all of the animals and teach me my letters and read to me.

I do not remember my mother or father ever reading to me, maybe that is because I learned to read so early on my own. Somehow I doubt that. But it makes me feel less sad to think that.

So it is no surprise that I find it hard to trust. I was raised in such dysfunction and chaos. I was taught at a very early age that no one can be trusted or relied on, that the world is a dangerous scary place. This mistrust has created dysfunction in my adult life. I have a huge need for control. If people do not see things my way, do things my way, react in the way I expect it throws me. I get fiercely angry over the most inconsequential things. That is the legacy of my dysfunction.

However with each foray into my past, with each level of purging and purification, with each person I manage to forgive and let go of the hurt they caused me, I find that my hip is getting stronger. My posture is improving; my overall levels of stress are lessening. My ability to see my own character defects, to accept them and try to overcome them – these are all getting stronger along with my physical strength.

It is no wonder that the pain in my hip restricts my ability to push my pelvis forward or to abduct my knee, both are movements associated to sexuality and all of my mental pain is rooted in the sexual dysfunction and shame associated to my bizarre childhood. It is almost as if my frozen hip joint is starting to thaw, I visualise a glacier, slowly chipping away, slowly melting…leading to complete mobility and hopefully an accompanying peace in my heart and lightness of being.

Rainbows

Things just get more bizarre...today I was telling my boss about the session on Saturday and she was as fascinated as I am about the helicopter.

But when I told her about my spirit guides (or guardian angels or whatever you choose to call them) I was facing the window and as I started describing them a rainbow emerged right in front of my eyes!

Crazy? Coincidence? I don't know, I just feel a big change coming towards me....I'll just fasten my seat belt and hang on for the ride.

Helicopters in my Mind

Yesterday I had my first past hypnotherapy session. She took me back to a 'happy childhood memory', through when my mother was pregnant, when she gave birth, to before her pregnancy. There were no traumatic memories that came through, just an incredible feeling of sadness.
The only odd thing was that while under at some stages was so distracted by the helicopter outside that I could not concentrate. The sound was so loud it sounded liked it was landing in the courtyard outside. When I mentioned this S said she did not hear it, that she only heard the children cough and once the tap was on or something, that she is hypersensitive to anything which can intrude on the client.
How can that be! I clearly heard a helicopter very close to me? S said it must be part of my memory as it was not part of the present. So I need to ask my Mom about this.
I felt 2 distinct presences. Both Native American, ancestors I feel. A strong, muscular brave who would appear when she mentioned protected or safe or other key words. The 2nd an old NA woman with a grey braid. She appeared on words like love, worthy, cherished...sh ewould hug me. I feel she may be White Buffalo Woman. I then woke up.
Then she told me I might be very tired and maybe it was the power of suggestion but I came home and slept for about 10 hrs, got up, went to bed and slept til morning!
I feel great today.

It's Never too Late

I am still enjoying the sessions with my therapist, I didn't spend the whole session crying this time, so I guess that is progress?

She is having me keep a dream journal. I never remember my dreams but she tells me I will start to do so now that she is bringing stuff up, some of the dreams may be 'venting dreams' i.e. letting things go.

The 1st week I was actually not getting rested as I kept waking every hour or so in a panic I had forgotten my dreams.

I have been repeating my trigger word 'Peace' as often as I can think of it. I am a terrible road-rage-aholic and try doing deep breathing now to help. I am trying to think before I speak and not snap at everyone like I normally do.

But I think the thing I have benefited most from is her constantly telling me the things I did not absorb as a child:
I am worthy
The things that happened as a child are not my fault. I was a child.
I was not protected, and that abuse of trust by both my parents, grandparents and family, and later my 1st husband is what has made me so brittle and hard on the outside and so fragile on the inside.

She is breaking through the tough shell and helping me to strengthen that fragile interior.

She explains to me why my Mother is reacting the way she is with her own health issues. She is reinforcing to me that my responsibility is towards my own family here in SA. That if my mom chooses to just give up and stay in bed, to live her life in fear, then that is her choice and I have to honour that choice.

She is teaching me that I am strong. That the things I have been through would have broken so many others. That the fact I was brave enough to pick myself up, start my life over and to create the life I wanted is a testament to my strength.

It is almost as if she is giving me the parenting I never had as a child. It is something I need to get healthy mentally. To balance the hard and the soft.