Tag Archives: healing multiple personality

Doing the Work of Healing

And here’s another from Story, perhaps more to the point, reposted from https://wherespiritstops.wordpress.com/2016/06/09/doing-the-work-of-healing/:

One of the most difficult lessons in acceptance lies in the fact that we encounter situations that may not have been our fault (like a car crash) but which have consequences that require us to do painful, difficult work (like physiotherapy for injuries) in order to get through the experience and ultimately overcome it.

Any lack of acceptance of this fact will leave one stranded and stuck in one’s own life journey, asking why me? and protesting that this isn’t fair. Of course, this attitude doesn’t accomplish anything except to prolong and potentially exacerbate the problem at hand.

The work we are required to do in life never ends; in fact, life has a funny way of finding something for us to do if we have too much stagnant time on our hands. But one can easily find ways to avoid doing the work, especially when it comes to healing one’s own soul from past hurts. This is the most important work we can do for ourselves and the potential for growth, renewal, and reward is exhilarating.

Yet all too often we resist. Because it doesn’t seem fair that we should have to do the work, and perhaps because we fear both how hard it will be, and also how much responsibility for our life we will be claiming as our own. After all, if we believe we can’t heal ourselves, then it’s not our own fault that we’re unhappy, right?

No.

It is terrifying to accept full responsibility for our physical and spiritual lives, and many people are devotedly determined to avoid that responsibility. By claiming responsibility for our own lives, we have the potential to create our own present and future selves in ways that, when we were stuck in our pasts, we could not have imagined. Unfortunately, this thrilling truth is overshadowed by our fear of failure, because if we are solely responsible for our own healing and growth, any sense of failure leaves us with nothing to blame but ourselves.

What if I told you – what if I outright promised you – that you have the power to dream yourself into a new state of being simply through faith and doing the work? What if I told you that by surrendering to your own responsibilities you could actuallyguarantee a better, happier, healthier, more fulfilling and infinitely free life for yourself? And, you can’t fail. You’ll make mistakes and life will still throw things at you that you’ll have to figure out how to handle. But if you are doing the work, you can’t actually fail at all. It’s a win-win situation where what you’re really doing is claiming your soul’s purpose and living for it.

The only thing you have to do is surrender to the fact that you are responsible for your own life’s happiness and achievement. After that, you will be comforted to know that there is little else to surrender yourself to.

I am writing to you as a survivor of abuse of every sort, beginning as early as I can possibly remember. As a result of this, I suffered a multitude of symptoms of various mental disorders – PTSD, social anxiety, eating disorders, depression, self-harm, and extreme dissociation. I experienced constant body memories, a type of somatic pain that could be excruciating, as if the past abuse was happening in the present moment. I came to identify as a multiple, meaning that I knew my soul was fractured into countless pieces due to the trauma I experienced. The wounds and consequences of my past gripped me in an iron fist of pain and fear and a complete lack of personal power or hope.

I thought I was broken and couldn’t be fixed. I could not recall a time when I had ever felt whole and sane and strong. But by taking complete responsibility for working my own healing, by definition I also claimed all the power over it and am now achieving more than I could have ever dreamed possible.

In the last six months especially, I have been freed from almost every  debilitating symptom that I used to experience daily. I’ve been doing hard, relentless work, every single day. It’s not an easy road, but it is my road and to give up healing would be to give up my own personal power.

The most instrumental concepts behind my work towards healing can be summed up in two statements: 1) I am not morally responsible for anything that happened during the years of my abuse, due to the young age at which it began and the way I was kept controlled. 2) I am completely responsible (both causally and morally) for my soul’s purpose now.

To me, it is a simple fact that nothing that happened to me throughout my childhood, and even into my adulthood, was my fault. I did not deserve the abuse I suffered. Further, I had no choice and no freedom during that period of my life, being as much a captive as anyone can be. You can’t blame a prisoner of war for things she was forced to do by her captors under threat of death. I did a lot of unpleasant things under force, and those things aren’t my fault either.

Is it fair that these things happened to me, or that the work I have done has been so difficult, even deeply unpleasant? I don’t think in those terms. I might as well ask if it is fair that my heart must continue beating on and on without rest.

The heart beats because it is the work and purpose of the heart’s existence. Likewise, I heal because it is my soul’s purpose to do so, at least in part.

I believe I can achieve a complete transformation of my body, mind and soul — simply because no one else can do it for me.  This is my life’s work, and I accept it with grace and gratitude.

My Last Blog Here

This idea has been coming on for a long time.

There’s no reason to write anymore here.

I’ve been withholding a lot in the last year or so anyway, feeling there are things I know that I’m just not willing to commit to print, and so I point out details or tell my experiences, and leave readers to connect the pieces.  But I’ve been withholding more and more recently.

Besides withholding, I spend so many hours trying to communicate intense, multi-dimensional realities in the language of this 3D world, yet have no idea whether my readers are real and I’m helping them, or if I’m writing for mostly agents – or if my words are published as I actually write them.  I’ve seen too many weird things happen on my computer to really want to invest too much more here.

Finally, maybe most important, writing keeps me locked in the past when I could be looking forward and grounding into my present with more attention.

So I’m saying good-bye on this site to spend more time in my garden and art studio, with friends, grounded in my actual world, and better connected to my Helpers.

I’m very tired of this virtual world.

And I recommend my readers also look for what they need inside themselves, in Nature, within their community, and from their Helpers.

I’ll leave this site up for the information it contains, but don’t expect any new blogs here.

If you want to know what I’m doing beyond this, I’ll probably continue to blog every week or so on my other sites – Home & Garden Inspiration, Garden Healing Church, and Jean Eisenhower.com, and the other sites near the bottom of the right column.

~

A bit more on Why:

No one who doesn’t already understand wants to hear this stuff.  They claim their right to not listen because it’s too scary, and their own lives are already filled with more drama than they can handle, or if it’s not, they want to keep it that way, and it’s their right.  It’s only natural.  It’s survival.

Therefore, this task is futile, and I should find better things to do.

We might think we need others to hear and understand.  But after that, there’s really not a lot anyone can do but sympathize.  And that gets old and, in a sense, by putting the information in another person’s head, locks us into that picture in another person’s mind.  So we communicators get nothing useful, and they get bummed out.

The only enlivening thing, after we’ve learned to develop better skills of perceiving and responding where we’ve been blinded, is to keep on with the cosmic dance of creating as much beauty and goodness as we can in our moment of life here.

I’m on to other things.

Second Sunday Summary: Surprising Spiritual Healing

The week’s highlights:
~ a powerful (and surprising!) heart-healing experience
~ discovered and rediscovered reading and videos
~ cleaned and cleared energy in house and yard
~ decision to limit computer use

skeleton-hand-holding-anatomical-red-heart-free-tee-design-sMost amazing first:  It began with a massage.  Greg thought he was being intuitive, but I experienced it as being gouged in that soft spot just below the heart at the highest point beneath the ribs.  It was so shocking that I ended the massage and was physically ill for two days afterward.

Greg felt terrible to have caused me pain and was confused because he didn’t think he’d gouged me at all.  I went through bouts of serious fear that he’s multiple too and had subconsciously (in another alter) tried to hurt me.  I freaked out quietly and practiced being calm and open-minded that maybe something else had happened that I just couldn’t understand yet.  As my friend Darlene often says, “More will be revealed.”

As soon as Greg left for work the next morning, I called a healer friend.  After asking me a few questions to eliminate more serious possibilities, she told me to treat myself very gently that day, hold that place, send it love, and give myself permission to cry.  I did all those things, cried, then refocused on the work I wanted to do that day.  But I also read a bit online and became convinced that Greg had bruised my liver.

For two days I moved slowly, skipped exercise, and the second day called a Nurse Hotline to make sure there wasn’t something else I should know about a possibly bruised liver, and was encouraged to go to Urgent Care – which I thought I’d do, but decided to keep doctors out of it.

My journaling was full of hate and despair for two days, though I could always turn my attention back to working on this site.  (I had signed up for a WordPress blogging course, so it was helpful to keep my mind otherwise occupied.)  I also slept two long 10-hour nights.

The second morning, my journal says, we talked in bed from 4:45 − 8:45 — four hours! – after which I wrote in the margin, “Really??” – meaning that I wondered if there was some amnesic time in there – more stuff I might have worried about, but I didn’t.

Instead, I felt inspired to do yoga for the first time in many, many months.  I continued to upgrade my website, deciding it was worth spending the money on to be able to load videos onto.  That was immensely satisfying.

Later, I went to exercise and worked the machines with more power and conscious sensation of my physical body than I usually have – of muscles exerting and relaxing, exerting and relaxing – fascinating and very satisfying.  I marveled at this and was happy to tell Greg when I got home.

That evening when I finished my website work, Greg was playing music in the living room, songs I like to harmonize with, so I sat down and I joined him in a few.

Suddenly, I became aware that the area around my heart and liver felt different.  The writer in me sought for the descriptive word, so I focused my attention there, and seemed to perceive a hole, an opening – something through which energy was moving!  Energy was flowing, breathing in this place – so central to singing, obviously – so that now I could perceive – after the fact – the blockage that I’d always known was there but couldn’t feel or address, and now the blockage was gone. 

I thought to test whether this was the blockage that had dogged my singing all these years, see whether I could sing with more power now, and I did notice a little new energy flowing up and into my voice.  It was exciting.  But I was tired.  It had been a difficult couple of days, and I’d expended a lot of energy already in exercise, and it was late, so I’m looking forward to the next practice.

Apparently, Greg had pushed a trigger in me, probably something that has existed locked up in me for decades, hurting me for a few days, but ultimately releasing an old knot of something that had been clenched in my chest for who-knows-how-long.

I’ve heard more than once that sometimes in spiritual healing, you don’t need to re-experience all the horrors to clear them; sometimes, you can just feel the general essence of them, acknowledge them consciously, and “let them go,” bless them for whatever learning or wisdom they brought, however difficult, and let them go.  

Sometimes they’re biggies and might take lifetimes to heal.  However long we carry them, eventually, when we understand enough and accept enough, they can be released.  And we feel the release in our bodies, and our bodies becomes freer, our minds become freer, our emotions become freer.

And I’m so grateful.  (And grateful that I didn’t waste much time in “Oh, my God, this is horrible” mode.  That would have been a big waste of time.)

“More will be revealed.”  Yes, sometimes it makes the best sense to just suspend judgement and wait for that more.  Thanks, Dar.

And thanks, Greg!  And Elizabeth.

Not to say that some of those dark things that had me in their spell for a few decades doesn’t represent some important truth worth knowing.  They are very worth knowing; they just aren’t the whole truth.  

Even when we think they’re the most controlling energies in our lives, we need to remember they’re not All.  There are also wonderful energies dancing all around us all the time.

We must experience both, but we don’t need to go down the drain just because some of the energies seem to want to pull us there.  Our job is to keep rediscovering our relationship and learning new skills.  (Hmmm, sounds like my old definition of shamanism.)

(Ironically, the last accomplishment I’d noted in my journal before the massage that kicked off my heart disturbance and healing was the creation of a new Spiritual Healing page, “Healing Help,” in which I compiled my best offerings.)

From teacherweb.com

From teacherweb.com

My other favorite writing this week:  My first “Friday Foundation” series, “Mind Control in World History,” my first “Friday Random Beauty” post, a few new paragraphs at the end of my Home page, and a draft, “Scribe for our times” post that isn’t up yet.

century of the selfRediscovered writing and videos:  The transcript of DC Hammond’s “Greenbaum Speech,” offering the psychotherapist community help in healing multiples, and The Century of the Self video series – we’ll be rewatching all four hours of these over the next weeks – they’re that good, and that important.

culture highJust discovered last night:  The Culture High:….”is the riveting story that tears into the very fiber of modern day marijuana prohibition to reveal the truth behind the arguments and motives governing both those who support and oppose the existing pot laws. … incredibly moving testimonials from both sides of the spectrum.  Top celebrities, former undercover agents, university professors and a slew of unforgettable characters from all points of view come together for an amusing yet insightful portrait of cannabis prohibition and the grasp it has on society as a whole.”

CCHSAnd the Citizens Commission on Human Rights videos – regarding the abuse that psychiatry has become – in a series of engaging, entertaining, and scary videos.  Maybe a little heavy-handed at times, but I’ll be watching more and reporting back.

One more accomplishment is both negative and positive:  I collected a huge to-do list from my last weeks’ journals.  So I gotta ask my muses – or multiples with so many great ideas:  You/we gotta slow down.”  Breathe.  They’re all on a list.  Nothing bad will happen if any don’t get done.  Relax.

rock creek houseSo, I decided I want to limit my computer work.  When I was a hermit on the land, I always kept a commitment to turn off the computer before sunset and to be out on the west patio every evening, whatever the weather, watching the sun set and the light change from day to night.  It was a wonderful practice.

Not a normal New Mexico sunset, this sky was made dramatic by smoke from a nearby forest fire, 2012.

Not a normal New Mexico sunset, this sky was made dramatic by smoke from a nearby forest fire, 2012.

My new home here is nestled into a hill on the eastern slope of the southern Rocky Mountains, which block the dramatic views that were the daily staple of my previous life.  Now, to the west, there’s just small-town neighborhood rising up the hillside toward the Continental Divide.  So I lost my daily sunset habit, and sometimes now I write all night long.

So, to support my healing, I want to write and otherwise be on the computer only part-time, and so I plan to experiment, and see whether I can turn off the computer at noon or early afternoon each day, leave behind the world of ideas in bits and bytes, and make it a joyful ritual to go into the garden (or the sunroom if the weather is unpleasant outside) and see how the plants are doing, reconnect with the living world.

bathroom art

This alter-like art was created in the flow of clearing energy recently!

Healing comes in lots of forms.  The most recent I’ve encountered and written about are:  accidental (thanks to spirit helpers guiding us), clearing space in our physical environment (a biggie!), spending wordless time in the garden, exercise, and eating excellent, tasty, healing food.

Wishing you, my readers, many healing blessings,
And very grateful for mine ~

Jean

Jean Eisenhower
Silver City, NM
November 3, 2014