Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones

The brain is a magical thing. It helps keep us alive. It helps animate this very body that I live in. And a swirl of chemicals within it controls a bazillion functions and feelings. Part of our brain controls our automated functions like breathing and digestion, while another part acts like a computer processor, and handles all sorts of things like speech and language and motor coordination.

One thing the brain does well is to process our every day experiences and file things away. We experience so very many things every single day that we can’t keep them in our working memory, and we end up filing them into our deep filing system, our subconscious. This is also where we file things we do repetitively and without thinking.

Some things we experience are too painful to keep remembering, so our brain plays games with us and makes up stories that help us to feel better. Lies. And when we are very little we file these experiences with their lies into the deep filing system too, just in a different spot.

When I started to dig into healing my childhood about five years ago, instead of seeing a counselor (again), my path led me to some talented intuitive healers. They either were born with this gift full-on, or developed it with training (as anyone can). And during one of the healing sessions I had, the woman I was working with tuned into my childhood and my relationship with my mother. She intuitively saw my mother verbally going at me. She said it felt like electrical shocks to my young self. I didn’t remember it, but then again, I didn’t remember much of my childhood. Even though I didn’t specifically remember it, there was something about it that rang true for me. It felt true.

Since that time, I’ve used hypnotherapy to go back in time and have seen several instances of my mother going off on me in a state of mania. She sliced and diced me with her sharp tongue every time she ramped up into mania. But it was only with me, never my brothers. It would take nothing for me to trigger her and, whammo! Look out!

When you can be a target at the drop of a hat, you learn how to read people very well. You read their voice, their body language, and how they move. You learn when the viper is ready to strike and when it’s sleeping. I am very good at detecting when someone is being deceptive or inauthentic.

Until I started working with intuitives and tapping into my subconscious myself, I didn’t address much of my childhood. Most of it was a big blank. How can you make any headway with counseling when you can’t remember? My brain filed things away so I couldn’t remember the pain. Just because I couldn’t remember, doesn’t mean it didn’t affect me.

The destruction was done. The evidence was through and through. I had no personal boundaries. I was a door mat. I had no self-esteem, no regard for myself, no love or respect for myself. And my wounded child would act out in ways that I could never associate with her. I didn’t even know she existed.

Working with intuitives and finding ways to access my subconscious (hypnosis) has been the only way I’ve been able to make the tremendous progress that I’ve made in the past five years. As I started to dig in and pick up the pieces of my childhood, I began to realize just how many broken pieces were still out there to find. Every time I bring a bit of myself back, I feel more and more like the true me. I still have a lot of holes in my young memory, but a lot of wounds have been healed and pieces of my soul have been retrieved. There is still a way to go, but I’m getting there bit by bit. And every life challenge, every bump in the road, is a neon sign for me pointing out unhealed wounds to lovingly attend to.

I may not have had bones broken when I grew up, but wounds caused by verbal assault are every bit as scarring. And they need to be addressed and healed every bit as much as setting a broken bone with a cast.