The Cruel Unlove of Childhood Trauma: How to Unwind?

A kinder way to start processing traumatic childhood events

This story is a part of the series I am writing on facing and healing childhood trauma. This is the first installment, it covers foundations from the point of view on this topic that makes the most sense to me, which is the cosmological viewpoint that is common across many indigenous cultures from around the world. In this series, as usual, I am not looking to repeat cliches or debate about “what the experts have said.” I am looking to share things that I have processed from the inside and that are unique to me. But in order to do that, it’s good to establish a framework of understanding, a foundation, which is why I am sending this intro first.

This perspective, while it offers great joy and great clarity, is not commonly taught in the West (out of arrogance, and because it gives us tools against the masters). Those of us who have never encountered this aspect of the wisdom of our Ancestors (and we all have indigenous Ancestors if we look far enough), could learn something happy and helpful and get new ideas about how to solve problems in our own lives. That is my hope. I am merely a messenger here, and my job is to help. All of us have our own ways to practice our spiritual beliefs and to pray—but all of us also have our Ancestors who have walked this Earth before us and who are now watching our backs and want us to heal and succeed. We are their blood. We are their hope. They want us to succeed.

Photo by Igor Kogan taken in Ethiopia / Photo by me taken on the subway

According to the traditional indigenous view, before we are born on this Earth, we select our “task list” in the spirit world. The spirit world is our home, and it is there, in the spirit world, where we make a conscious choice to be born on Earth at a particular time, into a particular circumstance, to do what we want to do.

Sometimes, as spirits, we feel an affection for a particular family or particular person, perhaps due to having been a part of that family or having related to that particular person in some of our past lives.

Sometimes, our­ chosen task list includes the task of healing some parts of family energy, the parts that had gotten sick at some point, and that our Ancestors didn't completely heal while they were still alive.

Family is its own spiritual entity, it’s a living entity,  an organism. Its evolution, just like the evolution of the world, takes place in real time. If a family has an unhealed spot, that spot wants to heal, and so some spirits who love that family may choose to be born as a part of that family and focus their energy on healing that spot.

And then, of course, we are born, and we forget where we came from, why, and why on Earth we have to deal with something that is so loveless, so painful, so rough!!  

Upon arrival here, the healing task requires meeting the energy that we have chosen to feel face to face—which often results in a shock—then finding the motivation, the faith, the clarity, the confidence, the courage, the strength, the love and the spiritual support needed to accomplish the task.

Oftentimes, when we meet that energy for the very first time—especially when it happens early on—we get so shocked and so traumatized that we dedicate a lot of subsequent time of our lives to running away. We run away from the task—and furthermore, we run away from connecting to the energy that we need to accomplish the task, from developing the qualities we need to accomplish the task, from the memory of the task, and thus, we run away from ourselves.  

On the emotional level, the shock can be so tremendous that it screws up our "feelers," it rewires our neuronal pathways in a confusing way, and makes us accept, on a subconscious level, that there is no real love. We may feel unworthy (regardless of what we consciously think). We may feel that good people always fail. We may feel that wicked people always have more power. There is a sense of fundamental brokenness, a lack of fairness, a lack of protection, a lack of real love.

And so we suffer. Depending on our personality, we either shrink ourselves into sadness or turn into top dog bullies so as not to hurt. We dedicate our lives to distractions, to martyrdom, to glitter, to anything that allows us to not face the task.

But the thing is, the Spirits haven’t forgotten that we had promised to work on that issue, and if we run away from the task for too long, we start meeting the energy that we came to heal in our own lives. If we came to heal abuse, we face abuse. If we came to heal betrayal, we get betrayed. And as long as we run away from remembering our task and, importantly, from connecting to our very real powers that we had been given in the spirit world to succeed at that task, we keep meeting that energy in our own lives. And we scratch our heads, we cry, we shake our fists, we wail, we think, why on Earth, wherever we go, different people treat us the same way?

And the reason is not that God or anyone in the spirit world is angry at us, it is simply that we had promised to heal a part of the world. The Spirits know that we have the ability to do it, and they nudge us to remember, to believe in ourselves, to remember our own healing power.

We just need to find the courage to look at what we came to heal, terrifying as it may be when looked at without love. We just need to remember that we have the power.

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