“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
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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.