These are things and concepts I'm learning and seeing, both in myself and in other places, from other people. This topic is incredibly important I feel for people who've had chronic issues with trauma: physical pain, emotional or sexual trauma, physical trauma, on the list goes.
I personally feel that you can go into a protection mode or strength and acceptance mode. Both of these are ends of a spectrum. The third way in the middle that I'm discovering is to be strong, but allow yourself emotions when they arise. A standing posture of anger or pity for oneself doesn't help, but conversely, it doesn't help to be unable to express emotions.
Here's some thoughts:
- Anger at personal frustration or setbacks allows you to withdraw. It allows you to take an entitled position, that you don't have to deal with what's happening. You can disengage and just withdraw into anger. This shouldn't have happened to me. I can't take anymore. This isn't the same as healing sorrow. Jay shared some of these thoughts with me this evening when I asked him if he felt I was mentally tough. They were hard to hear words but very insightful.
- Helen Keller (1880-1968)—an author, pacifist, suffragist, member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and a woman who was deaf and blind—was such a model. Once she discovered her own depths, she seems to have leapt into the second half of life very early, despite considerable limitations. She became convinced that life was about service to others rather than protecting or lamenting her supposedly disabled body. Keller’s Swedenborgian mysticism surely helped her grow and “fall upward” despite—or maybe because of—her very constricted early experience. Helen had to grow; she had to go deep and broad. She clearly continued to create herself, even though she could have so easily complained about how little she had to work with. Where did God end and where did she begin? It is an impossible question to answer. Helen and God somehow worked together. - Taken from Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations, March 25, 2018