“You Need Therapy!”

Shorty after I left where I was working in 2012, I felt overwhelmed with stress and emotional pain. Due to this, I head back to the spiritual shop where I had had a reading a little while before, and I spoke to the owner.

Her name was Sheila, and she was down to earth, genuine and supportive. I think I opened up to her about what I was going through and she recommended a woman who did Reiki healing.

Something Different

I had been working on my mind for a number of years, but this was no long cutting it. This was a point in my life when I believed that I needed to do some kind of body work; I was on the edge, so I needed to do something different.

I ended up having a number of sessions and this settled me down a bit, but it wasn’t what I really needed. I came to see that I was carrying a lot of emotional pain within me, and that I needed to find someone who would be able to assist me in letting this pain go.

Another Reading

A little while after this I ended up another reading, and this was someone who was recommended to me by another friend. She was aware of what I was going through and said that I didn’t need to see a psychic, what I needed was to see a therapist.

I agreed with her, yet I started to wonder what I had been doing for all these years. It turned out that this woman was a hypnotherapist, so I ended up having hypnotherapy.

It Got Better

During this time, my boundaries started it improve and my stress levels started to subside. For most of my life, I had had trouble with boundaries and I didn’t feel safe to be myself.

But although more of my true-self started to appear, I also began to experience more fear. This fear was the result of what happened to me as a child, as this was a time when it wasn’t safe for me to be me.

The Body Never Lies

It was around this time that I came across Alice Miller and I started to read her books. Through doing so, I came to see that the reason why I hadn’t been able to heal myself was because I was blocking out certain feelings.

When I was younger, I was told that anger was bad and this caused me to disconnect from my anger. Ultimately, I needed to embrace all of my feelings and not to label them as being either good or bad.

Denial

What had played a part here is that my mother had never acknowledged how abusive she was or apologised. Therefore, due to how I had been treated as a child and how she behaved as the years passed, I believed that I deserved to be treated badly.

Intellectually, I came to see that this was not the truth, but this didn’t have much of an effect on how I felt. In the books that Alice Miller wrote on child abuse, she talks about an ‘enlightened witness’, and this is someone who shows a child that not everyone is the same, which can stop them from completely going on the rails.

It Wasn’t Enough

An ‘enlightened witness’ will treat the child with love and care, and I would say that my father, certain guests that we had at our guest house and a number of teachers that I had as a child played this role. I continued to have hypnotherapy but it wasn’t long before I knew that I needed to do something else.

As good as the hypnotherapy was it didn’t allow me to deal with the emotional pain that was in my body. So I ended up going back to Sheila, and she recommended something called SHEN therapy.

Just the Beginning

This was when I started to face what was taking place in my emotional body. I ended up coming into contact with how I felt as a child and how I felt as a baby.

I was no longer living on the surface of myself; I starting to become a whole human being, perhaps for the first time in my life. At the time, I didn’t really know what was going on; however, now I can look back and see that I was going in the right direction.