A long rave

@eth

I looked at some of the fire circle stuff. I may be ready to look at some of the healing aspects of fire soon.... its on my list. I am doing a 30 day personal spiritual retreat from the Catholic tradition atm. Thanks for sharing about it.

@Mazarita Sorry I was not concentrating and got it wrong, about your mother's visit.

Doing trauma work is not easy and makes sense you were effected. Mobilising anger well, can be very delicate work, to use it to animate life force and sense of protection. That was my first experience of it in therapy back in the early 1980s. However later in the privacy of my own process, I do work with the concept. Periodically I am flooded with rage ( can be months or years between), but it is not my usual way of being. It is also mostly private. When parenting I had to suppress it a lot cos of kids. In last 20 years it has mostly been when I am out walking or driving or in the privacy of my mind and room. It comes out little by little. I simply would not be here without the empowerment of anger, but find it a feeling to use with caution. Good luck with the processing with therapist and spt wkr.

With my spt wkr, he is gentle and intelligent and motivated in his work, but for authenticity, I had to share how close and deep my SI had been the day before. I also apologised for being a downer, but he actually seemed to get it, spoke to the triggering cause, and calmly listened and read a letter I wrote, and drove me to bank to sort out payment for internet which had not gone thru. I have a 3 hour session once per week with him, and am so glad I have that length of time, and regularity, rather than the very artificial one hour usually given in clinical situations, which was less than monthly .... It was never enough to deal with any topic.

Love that we are of an age, we can take the path of connecting in nature.

@rivergal @Zoe7 @Faith-and-Hope

Your support worker sounds amazing @Appleblossom and just what you need. Having 3 hours each week just to connect with someone that gets it is invaluable so I hoe this continues for you. Hugs and hugs Apple

Hi @Appleblossom

I get what you are saying about the life force that can be mobilised with anger and relate to that from the only physical fight I've ever had in my life - with my mother when she was trying to stop me from running away from home as I was just turning 17. Getting away from that miserable abusive family home felt like a massive liberation, of hope, of strength in me.

It's good to hear your ongoing experience of slowly releasing anger is helpful. I once asked my first psychiatrist how to deal with anger, and he too said slowly, which still seems wise to me and likely helpful to some people as it has been with you, perhaps many people could be helped with that approach.

But it seems I have not worked out how to do this in practice in all these decades since he advised me about that. With me it still tends to be sudden and very intense, scary for others and myself. I am afraid of my own anger and have spent a lot of my adult life trying to calm myself for my own wellbeing and for others. For almost ten years now, I've been mostly successful with this.

I was not actually seeking trauma work in seeing the new hypnotherapist/psychologist. In fact I have made it a point of letting current medical, psych and other support people know that I went through years of delving into my traumas in my 20s, believing I would at some point find a catharsis and release to a shining new life. But instead became darker and darker, and more and more obsessed with my own tragedies to the point of being semi-psychotic with depression.

Aside from the awful traumas I know were a real part of my early life (as if they weren't enough), I came to believe that I had also been sexually abused, something that may well have been a complete figment of my dark mind. I had no memory of it but, perhaps because I was obsessing about it so much, I started to get a few ghosty images.

Then there was another layer of self-trauma in trying to get the ghosty images, coincidences and possibilities etc. to fit with my thinking that I had repressed memories of sexual abuse. There may be repressed memories in me about that, but it damaged me a great deal to go looking for them.

A schism opened in my sense of reality about whether it did or did not happen. This was very damaging, and torturing, and went on for a decade or more. Anger and rage were a big part of it and spilled out in very destructive ways into my marriage. I believe that delving into past traumas was at least partly to blame for turning me into someone who verbally abused and repeatedly directed rage at an innocent man I loved.

In a big way the trauma delving was the cause of a seriously suicidal year in my late 20s. Ever since I've been trying to heal myself from the way I traumatised myself during those years. My experience of all that was at least as bad as the traumas that had happened to me in the first place, possibly worse because I became an abuser myself in the process.

So at this time I have been mainly seeking hypnotherapy to deal with other deep issues. For one that I struggle so much to believe in myself beneath my fake-it-to-make-it surface, sometimes to the point of feeling like I am not even real. Most of all I am at this time seeking healing in my relation with life itself, to heal my anger towards life for being so full of pain for so many of us. I want instead to grow my love of it.

The trauma hypnotherapy I've been doing just recently came about in a sidelong way. The psychologist I've been seeing for past five years told me she thinks childhood trauma is still affecting me a great deal. After a first two-hour talk-session with the new hypno/psych, he also felt childhood trauma to be affecting me deeply. I was reassured about the trauma hypnotherapy process by the information I would not have to relive the traumas.

At that time I did not know that anger mobilisation was part of it. I suspect I wouldn't have agreed had I known that in advance. As it stands I have already been somewhat re-traumatised by what we have done. Still, loved the first hypnotherapy in the series, which was full of integrative and healing energy for me. And I like the human qualities of the therapist and our rapport. So we will be working together ongoing, now that my old psychologist has moved away from this region.

Thanks, Apple, and anyone reading, if you've made it to the end of this rave.

@Mazarita

So much heartfelt experiences from your story in your post. I wanted to go through it very slowly.

I felt fortunate that I did not have to deal with alcoholic violence in my family of origin. I saw it around me a lot. Sorry you went through all that.

Leaving home is especially difficult in those circumstances.

The therapy fashions of the 1980s meant well, and were part of the evolution of the field, but had their issues. I saw many young people dig up painful memeories and adopt the reincarnation beliefs and if they "felt" something they tried to find an instance. I had similar "ghosty feelings" when I did primal, but also was at university and studying and my academic side kept me moving forward. I put a lot of money into it, from a broke student's perspective, and I would work for a year to pay for therapy, and took it all seriously, but I baulked when lots of people were telling me their previous life stories. The struggle with uncertainty about what was real and imagined can be the hardest of all, taking up all of our attention, mental energy and time.

I think I posted about it before but one therapist wanted me to hit a beanbag with a baseball bat, and I could not take that seriously, that is what I meant I had a similar sense. He said I should be more angry with what I had been through, but maybe I sensed something voyeuristic in him and I never went back.

I continued with primal groups though, and one day a therapist indicated someone else who had also experienced a sibling suicide. Devastation was more appropriate to raw anger ... the positive aspect I took is that it anchored me in feeling rather than me dissociating and moving into psychotic territory.

Anger is very draining and straining and later after my divorce, when I began to realise what I had been through I would get angry and it would go straight to my neck, so yes, like you I would spend a lot fo time trying to calm myself down. I felt very hopeless, depressed and despairing in my marriage. So later the animating side was important as I had to get things done. Later also away from all the psychological manipulation and guilt tripping in my marriage I saw other mothers and the need for strength .... its so complicated.

I really hope your current journey with therapy works better. maybehaving more than one anchor, eg support wkrs and weekly goals and posting on the forum etc, should be some help. Also we do tend to become more mild as we age.

Room with a view

Wishing you balance.

Love Apple

Beautiful. Thank you, @Appleblossom.

Hi @Mazarita hoping the hypnotherapy is going better for you today.

Warm wishes to you and @Appleblossom

I don't have a lot of words today.

@Zoe7

Zose Word thingummies, Zay come and Zay go ... like Zee Famines and zee Feasts.

@Zoe7 @Mazarita @eth

@Appleblossom

Hi @Appleblossom @eth what a difference a couple of days make. Hypnotherapy today was so healing, taking me to a rare deep space of stillness, so calming of my spirit. From next week I will be starting a series of 6 weekly group sessions with him involving guided meditations and other things I am yet to discover.