HI KP, yes, my motor vehicle accident was my "flashback" issue when I saw emergency vehicles with the lights on. All the physical pain of the MVA would come back in an instant! I stopped it one time when this was most dramatic (psycho-somatic pain) and I was driving by saying to myself, "It's just a memory." That is all it took for the physical pain to disappear and the muscle tension to melt away. How simple, but again, it is the confidence and intention, and as 221177 said, the foundation of self being strong at the time, that made it possible to think it and believe it strongly enough to dispell the psycho-somatic trauma/pain.
As we get stronger and have more opportunities to work through anxiety, we slowly build a base for a stronger overall self, not just inner child, and this is how we can have the potential to integrate all aspects of our personalities.
221177 mentioned going into our head or only seeing the spirit energy side of things. It's just human to do that. It's okay, and as you go on, you will be more comfortable integrating and synthesizing new learning into the whole person. The key is not to rush or expect too much all at once. If a new spiritual or theraputic practice feels weird at first, it's not going to take root for a while. It will feel "fake" and we just "fake it until we make it" or until it gets established in line with the rest of our personality.
I am so grateful for you all here. Thank you for helping me to see how this unfolds.
Muse, is there a 'beginner's affirmation'?
Thanks-
I recommend the book
You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay for all kinds of good affirmations. She has some for specific medical or physical complaints. But she also starts each chapter and each theme with one.
For a good overall one, she suggests looking in the mirror daily and saying "'Your Name,' I love and accept you exactly as you are." I have heard some people on the site say this is difficult. I don't find it difficult at all to do, but it does raise any contradictory feelings up, and those can feel difficult to shift. It can dredge up any buried emotions that are connected to self esteem that, to me, feel cemented into who I am. With practice, those feelings that come up can we worked through and processed, and RELEASED! Yeah!
She ends most affirmations with "All is well in my world."
For those of us with PTSD, this is very powerful. For me, PTSD is largly about vigilance and not feeling safe now due to intense unsafe feelings of the past, which has stuck around for good measure. This leads to all the attendant issues of PTSD. This is just my own personal view of it, and I'm willing to change it. For now, it works.
And, when I practice saying and thinking, "All is well in my world," or simply, "All is well," I create brainwaves that start to break away from my hypervigilance. The longer that state lasts, the better, and soon, I'm not in vigilance all the time, nor even most of the time. Sure, vigilance will come back, but I don't have to let it be the norm anymore. I am in control of at least more and more of my own thoughts and feelings.
A line from her book: "Each one of us has a three-year-old child within us, and we often spend most of our time yelling at that kid in ourselves. Then we wonder why our lives don't work (
You Can Heal Your Life 45)." Previous to that line, she tells us to imagine a three-year-old in the room, and it's parents yelling at it for a while. What will it do? Either it will become frightened and docile and try to stay out of the way, or it will tear up the place in anger and hurt acting out. She explains that no matter how we were treated as a child, and no matter how we reacted then, we can nurture our own inner child now and create great potential for growth now and in the future.
