used to drown myself in NPR at night, listening to storiesof people who were refugees or victims of unimaginable circumstances. It had weirdly become part of my daily cycle of suck, listening to this and hating, beating, and shaming myself for feeling the way I did. Comparing myself to people with “real problems”.
We need to shift in the way we judge pain.
-It is not possible to simply “get over something” that affected you in such a way that it changed who you were and the understanding you had of your world.
– Time does not heal all wounds. Wounds can heal on their own, but only if they are superficial. Deep ones need attention and special care. The parts of you that hurt can’t see the outside world and use the logic of comparison to heal. Shame and judgment of pain only makes the injury worse. That forces you to hide your own truth from yourself and that leads to many other problems.
-Other’s judgment of how “you should feel” is irrelevant. That’s like telling someone who was raped they should have no problem getting over it because at least there was only by 1 attacker instead of 5. No one else can have an accurate perspective on what your experience was, and trying to force yourself to feel things the way they think you should, will only lead to more suffering.
-Our inner time is very different than external time. Years may pass between things that happen in the eternal world, but time doesn’t work like that on the inside. There is often no space between Then and Now when it comes to the things that have affected us. That is part of being human.
-You can’t talk yourself out of the things that hurt you deeply. To be free of them, you have to learn to hold space for your feelings. Allow them to be what they are in a way that you are not feeding them (so that they gather more volume and take you over) but rather letting them bloom, so that they can then die down. Listen to the messages in them while they are blooming, and go down the paths they are calling you to go down. Only then, can they evolve into lighter feelings of acceptance, healing and gratitude.