What Helps You Get Over Trauma from an Abusive Relationship
You Are Not To Blame and It Is Not Your Fault
"Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish; Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal.” - Thomas Moore
As a long term spiritual teacher and energy healer I have heard the worst imaginable stories of the most unthinkable cruelty we humans are capable of.
People come to me for healing. They want to find their happiness, and often that is something they have never really known.
I will spare you the horror stories. From childhood neglect and even torment to emotional degradation to domestic violence there are many varied aspects to this but there is one thing I want to focus on because it is the first thing that has to be addressed in order for healing to take place.
The victim always blames themselves.
This recurring theme has its origin in the first relationships we all have, with our parents. Any sign of neglect, diminishment, from the most mild dismissal to the most ugly abuse, is inevitably taken personally by the child. The little one cannot fathom parents being anything other than perfect. They are literal gods which hold in their hands the entire life of the powerless and infinitely vulnerable child.
And so, no matter what the parents do, "It is my fault" will be the conclusion drawn.
Parents have an impossible job. Becoming conscious enough to discipline the child without imparting any blame. But in order for that to happen, the parents must get beyond that in themselves. Raising children and working towards conscious being are inseparable.
I could go on about how to stop the cycle of abuse before it gets started but most of my career as a teacher and healer has been dealing with it after it has already happened and is repeating itself in adult life.
The whole law of attraction thing did not help matters. People, already beating themselves senseless for getting into the same situation time after time, could now become totally to blame. "You are attracting this into your life." Original sin, in the back door. I even heard a disembodied voice, speaking through a channel explaining how it was the baby's vibration attracting the abuse. What horrific nonsense, not to mention offensive. I guess the dinosaurs attracted that meteor that put an end to them.
There are emotional vampires who can smell that deep shame a mile away. Charming at first, buttering you up with compliments galore but soon undermining your confidence and pushing that guilt button, playing you like a violin.
So how do you get over the trauma from an abusive relationship? I always start at the same place. "It is not your fault."
Mind you, I am holding that space in myself and I never say that to the one I'm working with, at least no right away. Just saying it would have zero healing effect. Even if the conscious mind could believe it, the traumatized energy, buried deep in the body is convinced otherwise.
STEP 1: INVITE
The healer recognizes that none of this was a personal choice but conditioned habits, buried in the body, that was programmed into the person through no fault of their own and without any participation on their part. In other words, they are completely innocent.
Holding that inner space, the healer becomes the enlightened witness. They are creating a loving environment where any all feelings are INVITED to come up and express themselves, with no fear of negative consequences. They validate the person's experience which, although they know was wrong, they can't validate it for themselves. This is partially because they feel it was their fault, but we will get to that.
So the healer is literally INVITING the truth of the experience to come up and be acknowledged. And, in this loving, witnessing atmosphere it does. This inviting space, felt by the nervous system starts bringing up emotions, memories, reactions and often very strong; anger, even rage, hatred, resentment, bitterness, but also embarrassment, deep sadness, grief for what is lost and guilt.
But, most importantly, there is a sense of relief, a sense of being seen and acknowledged. This is the space in which the deep healing will happen.
Mind you this can take some time. The energy system has been so conditioned to expect more pain and punishment it will be slow to accept that a loving, accepting environment actually exists. It is like saving a rescue dog. It is slow to trust. But as that loving environment becomes consistent, so does the trust and then you can open the door to an even deeper energy exploration.
STEP 2: INQUIRE
INQUIRING is the art of asking a question and then really listening. It is subtle and does take some time to master but it follows a very important pattern that, if adhered to will get results, even if you are very new at it. It is always in the form of a question.
I emphasize ALWAYS because, the moment you assert anything that contradicts a deep energetic assumption, the defences go up and the rescue dog runs off to hide.
In the INQUIRE stage there is never an affirmation. There are only questions.
"What are you feeling right now?"
"When he/she did that, how did you feel?"
There is always an emphasis on the feeling, keeping the attention anchored in the body and out of the mind's ideas about what happened, which are almost always distorted in some way. It actually does not take that long to get to the deeper questions, which are:
"What if it wasn't your fault?"
"What if you weren't being punished?"
"What if you didn't attract that to yourself?"
"What is you didn't deserve that?"
"What if it was them that was to blame and not you?"
Traumatized energy is frozen energy. It is stuck in the assumption that it was the person's fault. So, using questions, we engage in an INQUIRY that makes it safe for the traumatized energy to question its assumptions. You can't convince it. It has to see it for itself. You can't tell the rescue dog it's safe. You have to make it safe and let it discover that for itself.
Again I emphasize the INQUIRY is an art. The question get formed in direct response to whatever rises to the surface as you are INVITING. But, just keep that loving, and allow space of a solid container of safety and you will get results.
STEP 3: INTEGRATE
Great news, this is the easiest part of all. When the water comes out of the ground in the mountain, it doesn't need a GPS to find the ocean. It knows where to go.
The human nervous system is a miraculous mechanism of pure adaptability. Like water takes the shape of whatever you put it in, even so the energy system takes the shape of the container it finds itself in. If that is an oppressive, abusive environment, it will take adopt a defensive posture and go into hiding. If however it is a loving, INVITING environment, an environment where, when an INQUIRY is made, there is a genuine welcoming of the answer, it will adapt to that and naturally enter into a self-expressive posture.
When the abusive environment, and the self-blame that remains as a deep presumption, shifts to a loving one, the natural adaptive capacity of the system takes over. INTEGRATION is effortless, it just happens, because that is the nature of life itself. From the outside we call that healing, but in fact, it is a return to what is, in reality, the natural state.
INNER RECONCILIATION
I call this process INNER RECONCILIATION.
To reconcile means to:
Restore to friendship or harmony
Win over to friendliness; cause to become amicable:to reconcile hostile persons.
Resolve or settle differences (a quarrel, dispute, etc.).
Bring into agreement or harmony; make compatible or consistent:
Reconsecrate (something that has been desecrated)
We are not really fixing anything, because nothing was ever really broken. You never were to blame and so don't need to find a way to become blameless. Instead, we are being vindicated of all wrongdoing. You have been found innocent.
And so I say that Inner Reconciliation reawakens you to your Original Innocence.
This is a process that I developed over the last couple of decades and I have found it to be the most effective way of treating even the most sever of traumas and that it consistently brings about an alleviation of suffering and eventually a total transformation.
I have adopted different kinds of healing modalities, like meditation, meridian tapping, body awareness, archetypes, voice dialog and many others, but always within the context of restoring and reconsecrating what has always been true about you. Namely, it was not your fault and you are not broken.
For a moment just imagine that all the guilt, shame, self-denial, self-hatred and blame was just gone. No more need for self-fixing. No more self-improvement. You are done. You have passed. You are now spotless, without blemish. What would that feel like?
An impossible dream? No, in fact, as difficult as it may seem to accept, it is what is already true about you. We just need to remove everything isn't you and bring you back to yourself, to the pure, pristine, original, blameless, innocent you, where all the gods, angels and divine beings will be there to welcome you home.
Join us for the next episode of "OM School Live" every Tuesday at 12 noon eastern time. at http://youtube.com/gpwalsh or in the private facebook group https://facebook.com/groups/gpwalsh
GP offers dozens of workshops, meditations and courses on his learning platform, The OM School
Check out GP's podcast on Spotify and other media outlets
Watch GP Live Every Tuesday at noon Eastern and Every Sunday at 2pm Eastern or catch his hundreds of vides on Youtube.