PATHWAY TO JOY AND HEALING

For a very long time, I ran from my life.  My childhood was filled with abuse and trauma, and my adult life was not much better with divorce, failed relationships, unfulfilling career, and strained friendships.  Well, why wouldn’t I run from this?  What I was running from was my unresolved emotional pain and fears from this and past lifetimes.

I moved about every three years from city to city, and from relationships to relationships.  This is called escape as there are three main methods of coping with or handling negative emotions from unresolved emotional pain, called escape, repression/suppression, and expression.  Please see my earlier post on “Understanding How We Handle Emotions.”  Other forms of escape include engaging in addictions, affairs, or simply leaving situations and people.  I know this because I became an expert!

Only in the past two months have I decided to stop running as I have begun to realize no matter where I fled, my pain and fears were still there, and the trauma of my past followed me wherever I went.  It has been the same result for 20 years, and now I realize that I simply used the same method of coping in the form of escape, and it is no longer working for me now.

For the past four years, I have been staring at my emotional pain and learning ways to heal this pain.  It has been terrifying at times to open Pandora’s box of the horror of my childhood abuse, my father’s sexual infidelities, and my mother’s mental illness and emotional chaos.  These have not been easy issues to grapple with, but the spiritual journey is an arduous and sometimes frightening one.  It takes courage to face what we have failed to face maybe for many lifetimes.

I realize now that this is the lifetime that I must face my truth, fears, and reality! This change has been nothing short of miraculous and quite dramatic.  I am buying a house for the first time in my life because I am ready to settle down and put down roots because I no longer run from my fears.  I am making deep connections with friends, colleagues at work, and in a real relationship, maybe my first one.  These are signs that my emotional healing work is changing my perceptions, behaviors, and decisions for my life.  (Copyright 2015 Living Wide Awake with All Rights Reserved)