Beyond Broken

Trauma

My Wanting Has No End

 

This phrase comes to me on a walk to the river.  Why is it so comforting?

“My wanting has no end.”

The first thing I notice is there is no judgment attached to it. If I say it this way, “there is no end to my wanting,” I hear judgment.   Judgments I have heard my whole life — “You are a bottomless pit and you are too needy.” I feel the familiar shame of my needs and wants. And almost before I feel this I feel an even more familiar litany of anger at all those who deny me. To be honest this “why haven’t you, why didn’t you?” plays in my head for a great majority of every day in a constant stream of turmoil and unrest.
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Follow Your Heart

When I took my first serious writing class I learned a startling fact: To write you must read. “The more you read the more you will be inspired to write and the better writer you will become,” my teacher said. I had never linked these two activities.

As an only child I kept myself company with books. The characters became my friends. The children’s book The Lonely Doll, by Dare Wright in 1957 expressed my dilemma. “Once there was a little doll. Her name was Edith. She lived in a nice house and had everything she needed except someone to play with.” I was four when the book was published.

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Uncovering Lost Resources

When trauma occurs we look straight ahead. We cannot see left or right. Time seems to stop and our bodies hold our breath. In this myopic, shut down place we often miss the people who were there, who did see our pain, who tried to help. We carry this narrative forward in our psyches and in our bodies ¬– we were all alone, no one understood. This is the story we tell ourselves for the rest of our lives.

This narrative holds us in a grip of expectations of what life has to offer us and we repeat the story over and over again with slightly altered scripts and new characters.

Until…… we go back to the moment of the trauma and ask; what happened next? We move the narrative forward now and look around to see what we might have missed….

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