Do you believe in life after loss? (Part 8)

Dear Reader

I wanted to take a minute to say thank you to you. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to stop by and read my story and share it with anyone who you feel could benefit from my experience. So from the bottom of my heart “THANK YOU!” Putting myself out here on the internet was scary at first. However the responses to my story and how it has been able to help others has inspired me to keep adding to it. It is also a good check in so those who know me personally also get to see my progress.

So continuing on with where I left off in the previous post with how I was feeling on the train being filled with so much joy and emotion, essentially complete serenity. To catch you up that week was a very nice week, it was almost like a liberation. However, an interesting discovery was made. I happen to reconnect with an old co worker of mine. It was great to catch up and be filled in on missing details on each others lives.  We had both lost our Dad’s and I was explaining my story from my perspective about how both Mom and Dad were no longer here and throughout life the amount of people that I have gotten the opportunity to get to know. There’s so much positive reinforcement, and all the sudden I stopped talking. My friend had to ask me if I was alright and apparently I was having one of those revelation moments where something was “clicking.” What it was was this, with the amount of people I have the wonderful pleasure of meeting and becoming friends with in life. Their support means a lot. It is like a substitute for the love my parents had for me and I felt like I was standing at a brick wall that was dimly lit with a torch. I could sense the “love” or the ball of energy from inside this wall, it’s like I felt the wall and it was warm but that is all I could sense. I wasn’t able to feel the full force of whatever it was filling me up (like riding on the train in the previous post, feeling that serenity, the overwhelming emotion). I found this to be interesting. I felt nothing, just space. No emotion or anything. 

Read more: Do you believe in life after loss? (Part 8)

In a previous therapy session I was asked to close my eyes and what did I see. My answer was a dimly lit hallway, like a school and I could hear distant echos, this experience of standing at this brick wall made we think of this time in session, don’t really know if it is a relation however there was a time the next day when I heard in the back of my head “acceptance” and “the wall of your/my heart.”  Now what I haven’t said up to this point was that I decided to purchase the audiobook version of another book that was recommended to me by a dear conworker. The book is entitled: 

What I found to be very interesting about this book is the relation of key elements in the Bible, from Jesus’s life to the relation to us as human beings. Now I don’t wanna give the book away, as in a book report. What I would like to say is how when I was reading the book myself I had one vision of it, but hearing the author read her own work in her own spoken voice emphasis and all. When I first read the book I wasn’t sure it was for me. Having read and listened to this book I am now convinced this was meant for my eyes and ears. In my workings with other books and the therapist I have begun to discover that I am a gardener. What I have been doing is cultivating my own garden. This book seemed to be a sum all for me reaffirming things for me to show me that what I have been working. Answers if you will. Let me explain. 

While I was listening to the audiobook version Dr Anita Phillips writes in her book:

“Heart is soil”

“Emotions are in heart, emotions drive thinking in the brain”

“Healed hearts can quiet troubled minds”

“First we think, then we feel, then we do”

“Always guard the heart”

“Renewing our minds begins with the heart”

“Emotion begins in the body not the mind”

These few lines when I heard her say them resonated with me.  The experiences of feeling the physical body pains, to my nerves spiking  out of control, sitting in the driveway with a panic attack (more than one time) realizing that as each event was alleviated I realized the books I have been reading were a help. The Garden Within seemed to be a cultivation of all the emotions and what I was feeling, having gone through, I was getting answers. Things made sense. It’s one thing to speak something or think something, it is another when it registers. Kinda like dealing with a full plate and many things have been scraped off and discarded.

For a long time I have been looking back through a lot of the events in my life. A few of those events stick out. As much as I love my parents I had had to admit to myself that I have been mentally abused and I have been verbally abused. I still love them with all my heart. I know that they did the best they could under the circumstances of the time when I was growing up. However they aren’t the only source to being mentally abused and verbally abused and I also know that I am not alone. There have been a lot of things I have had to do alone that I know therapy will help me with. To put it behind me. As I continue to undo the traumas of the past I am reminded on a regular basis of how much I am loved and supported. That is a great feeling. I know I am not alone with that, but remember the first thing I did when all this had started was make a phone call to a dear friend and learn that I was powerless. There is strength in numbers, there have been people, places and things placed along my path that I now can look back and see that one of those items was already there in life for me to assist me along the way. Back then I wasn’t aware. But now things are becoming even more aware. I know the path I am on is a long one. With the events that I have personally witnessed and shared some with the world I know I am on a path that was laid out for me. The times I felt like I was closed off or didn’t know where to turn. A door, window or turn in the path happened. If I was on a phone call, the call was placed, a conversation happened and many times in that conversation and answer came. 

I would like to give you a snippet of my last therapy session. All of this information in this post was sent to my therapist and she was made well aware of the events. When we started this last session, it was noted that there is alot of fear that runs through me. She asked me to close my eyes and asked me what was driving the fear. At first there wasn’t anything. About a min later I had a flash in my head of the plane flight back (was already stated in a previous post) and the dentist chair. The dentist chair was the earlier memory. She asked me to describe to her what that was like. For the majority of my life the dentist has been a huge trigger for me. So I began to explain that mom took me, from what I can remember I was maybe 8 or so at the time, and as I was explaining what was going on I felt myself begin to cringe and not really be over taken by the situation but remember very vividly what happened. It was an orthodontist, I remember being in the chair, mom was in the other room, I was stuck with a needle in my mouth, which was novocane. I just remember hearing the drill and how scary it was. I don’t remember hearing anything about what was going to happen and I just remember I was crying, I felt like I was being tortured. Which looking at it now doesn’t seem that bad but living in that moment I was horrified. Along with telling the therapist this information, I had a vision pop in my head about my mother and my father’s funerals. The therapist found this interesting because we were in the present looking back and items in the future popped up. Why? They are linked. They all share very similar items to them.  The therapist made sure to state to me that “I promise the brain we will come back to these other feeder memories for processing, but for now we need to continue with the original memory”

Being that frightened 8 year old boy in that chair , I was alone (meaning by myself), I was scared and there was no one to comfort me. The key thing here I didn’t know I needed comforting. That is what came out of the therapy session. This goes back to something I wrote in an earlier post about “not sweating the small things” I can see now after 40 years on how this small thing has turned into something huge. The therapist and I will be pending a lot of time in this area of my life. My younger self is still in a lot of pain, the traumas that I have experienced have been talked about, but there is no emotion that comes with them. I am not sure if it is because I am “numb” to the feeling or the awareness hasn’t allowed me to fully feel those areas. I do know I am not alone with dealing with my own past. It has governed alot of what I don’t do in life. Time will tell for sure on how moving through this will allow me to fully live. 

This dear reader is where I will end this post. A lot of things have happened in the recent past of this writing. I certainly hope that what I have written here resonates with someone that all it takes is a phone call or reach out to someone and start the process of the internal healing. As I write this there is a lot I can look back on and see where I have been and what I have gone through. Reading all of these books especially the last two, the Untethered Soul and now the garden within have helped me on my journey back to wholeness. I will be back soon with more to share. 

Until next time