So, I get these momentary, fraction of a second, something seen out of the corner of your eye, moments of deep, deep happiness. Peter Levine talks about trauma resolution as an important spiritual path, and I seem to be walking that path. I am in touch, on a primary emotional level, with what I felt as a small child. I understand why I dissociated. I understand why this was necessary, absolutely necessary.
And I look at all of us, craving love from others. Everyone you meet, you really want, on some level, love from. Most of us are so lonely. Not all: I know happy, well adjusted people exist.
But many of us carry, in some unseen place: wounds, blood flowing out, there was a knife, where did it come from? Who has been living my life? I need to check in.
This is where the thirst for alcohol, or sex, or gambling, or weed, or heroin (a logical choice for some problems), or work, or just checking out emotionally comes from. I see this. I feel this. Water flows downhill, and emotions have an irrefutable logic.
But ponder this: if, instead of asking every person you meet “will you love me, will you complete me, will you lighten this burden I have carried as long as I can remember?”, you instead were filled with a deep, rich, warm, flowing LOVE that instantly connected you with them? What if the love flowed out, rather than in?
Social isolation is the result of trauma. But in healing it, what if it inverts? I am increasingly inclined to think that may be the case. Which would be super cool. (that last line makes me laugh.)
Yes: alcohol. But I am getting more and more moments of connection, at a deep level, with the gestalt of alcohol-less-ness. I have reasons, good reasons, for why I am how I am. As Winston Churchill put it, roughly: I have taken far more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me. It has been a Godsend, a lifeline, something without which I could never have managed the pain flowing through me. I would have remained dissociated, in all likelihood, and if ever pushed hard, thrown into overt psychosis.
But new feelings are flowing through me, new thoughts, new imaginings. The horror is subsiding. The shaking is subsiding (but certainly not gone). I can allow antique feelings to flow through me, and I can watch them and not detach.
It’s impossible to know what good this blog does, but I really do, from the bottom of my heart, wish it to be of use, to someone, somewhere. I have a prodigious amount of love in me. Oceans. And I am just getting started. I am only a child in the world where I want to spend the rest of my life.