Brené Brown writes that in order to be vulnerable, we need to first find safety, both physical and emotional, and that we need to share our stories with those who have earned the right to hear them.
I’ve been sharing my stories for many years with fellow survivors of childhood abuse and sexual violence. These women in the groups I’ve facilitated, in person and more recently online, have certainly earned the right to hear my stories. It is through the tentative sharing of those stories that they first reached out to me with theirs, as relieved as I was that they were not alone.
I have helped facilitate them through the halting process of post therapy healing – it’s a lifelong journey, much like sober living – and we have been there for one another as we slowed down enough to reconnect with our feelings by reconnecting to our bodies.
Ironic isn’t it, that the one act that provides safety through the experience of trauma, the stifling of our vulnerability, is the same thing that impedes our healing. Vulnerability is an ESSENTIAL component of healing.
It’s only relatively recently that I’ve been able to be vulnerable as an expression of who I am. That doesn’t mean I “let it all hang out”. I’m still discerning in my vulnerability with others. What I mean by vulnerability as an expression of who I am, is that I am able to remain vulnerable to my feelings – feel all the things – because the alternative is numbing, and we cannot selectively numb our feelings. Bypassing pain means bypassing joy, and I have spent enough years without joy!
When I first expressed the fact that it was only post therapy that I was able to find ways of reconnecting to my body, and that it was in that reconnection that I felt safe enough to access my feelings and open myself to the possibility of joy, I was amazed at how many women reached out, asking me to share with them. That while therapy had provided a space for them to explore their experience, there was very little re-connection or integration. They felt just as wounded, just as numb. They were still just going through the motions, feeling “outside of themselves” not fully connected to themselves or to others.
Because this was such an excruciating and confusing process for me and there really was no blueprint, I’ve made it my mission to help women who feel the same way. It’s been an incredibly rewarding experience.
As a child and a young woman, I never imagined that there were others like me, that there were women who shared those dark, unspeakable secrets. I was so shut down from my feelings, I was pretty much sleep walking through life. Going though the motions. Much like a sociopath, I had learned to fake feelings, so my lack of emotion went largely unnoticed.
We all deserve to find joy. Pain has been so much a part of my life and my identity, never completely numbed, the edges just hidden by all the different things I used in order to hide from it. Now, having reconnected with the full range of emotions, joy is not only possible, but an authentic experience and I am able to connect with ALL my emotions, both the joy and the pain, and fully FEEL my life.
It’s still a journey, a decision I make each morning when I wake. It’s all too easy to slip into old patterns. The world would have us believe that happiness is the only valid way to experience life, to measure success. But pain and grief and amazement and contentment and boredom and overwhelm and peace and pride and so many more emotions are a part of this amazing life we live. We can live from a place of hope and joy even through the fear and the sadness that life brings. We just need to open up, to tune in, to allow ourselves to feel. Everything.
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