About resilience and healing trauma.

 

Things I am learning about resilience:

"When you think about resilience, it's closer to talking about plastic, something that returns back to its original shape after you bend it. I think that humans don't really work like that. We don't go back to the way we were before we were broken or bent. [...] But is much more about reclaiming whatever new shape your form has taken. A resilience that doesn't really ask us to forget, but that carries the memory of whatever harm or whatever fire we've been through. A resilience that carries that memory and still is committed to one's survival and one's going on in the world, however that shape looks."

James Baldwin said this: "It was very important for me not to pretend as if the terrors of that time left no mark on me. They marked me forever." 

From Psychotherapist James Finley: "It is in experiencing and accepting how difficult it can be to free ourselves from our hurtful attitudes and ways of treating ourselves and others that we begin to understand that the healing path is not a linear process in which we can force our way beyond our wounding and wounded ways. Rather, it is a path along which we learn to circle back again and again to cultivate with ourselves a more merciful understanding of ourselves as we learn to see, love and respect the still-confused and wounded aspects of ourselves. In so far as these wounded and wounding aspects of ourselves recognize that they are seen, loved, and respected in such a merciful way, they can feel safe enough to release the pain they carry into the more healed and whole aspects of ourselves."

About healing trauma -

Psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem: "Healing trauma involves recognizing, accepting, and moving through pain - clean pain. It often means facing what you don't want to face - what you have been reflexively avoiding or fleeing." "In the process, you also grow, create more room in your nervous system for flow and coherence, and build your capacity for further growth. [...] It is about letting go of what is familiar but harmful, finding the best parts of yourself and making a leap - with no guarantee of safety or praise."

"What will your situation look like when you come out the other side? You don't know. You can't know. That's how the process works. You have to stand in your integrity, accept the discomfort, and move forward into the unknown."

Richard Rohr said that survival mode can be triggered in many ways, which I know very well. "Persons with trauma deserve deep understanding (which is hard to come by), sympathy (which is difficult if we have never been there ourselves), patience (because it's not rationally controllable), healing (not judgement), and frankly, years of love from at least one person or animal over time." 

...that is not something we did, but the effects of something done to us. 

Paty ♥
Learn. Believe. Allow.