Dreams

Today’s prompt in Hannah Marcotti’s Spirits of Joy ecourse was to write down five dreams. FIVE of them. I lay in bed with my daughter, the only one awake, checking my email. Five. That’s a lot of dreams. I pulled up my list app on my phone and quickly five dreams came to me. Through the day a couple more came too, but the first five – those are the big ones.

Later in the day I created my journal entry, with the list of the five dreams. I’m holding those dreams close to my heart now. I’m not sharing them with the Big World. It’s too scary – too vulnerable. Just because I’m not sharing them with Everyone however doesn’t mean I haven’t shared them with Someone. Someone I trust. Someone who holds my heart in his hands and is always ever so gentle with it. My love. My husband.

Ironically it’s taken me years, more than a decade, to realize I can truly trust him with my soul, with my being. Quite honestly I think the surgery I had a few weeks ago did more for my marriage than any amount of marriage counseling or self-help books. Post surgery I had to rely on my husband to take care of our daughter, to take care of me. I was in too much pain to do all the things I am normally on top of, normally controlling.  I couldn’t do it for a period of time, and I am so grateful for my husband.

I’m not good at being weak, I’m not good at being dependent on another person. I know this stems from not being able to trust my parents to take care of me when I was a child – the abuse and neglect created a highly independent person, who wouldn’t rely on any one for anything, even if her life depended on it. Through therapy I’ve worked through some of this, and slowly I’ve started to soften my heart, slowly I’ve started to let people into my soul. Slowly, ever so slowly, I have released bits of the Unsayable from my body, I have let my body and soul start to heal.

There’s a lot more work to do though. 😉

A couple of nights ago, after I’d put our daughter to bed, I felt so sad, so scared. I was quietly weeping as she fell asleep and once she was breathing that soft breath of sleep I went downstairs to my husband, curled up in his arms and sobbed. Big heaving heavy sobs with snot flying everywhere. I told him how scared I was. How scared I was that my body would never heal – that we would spend all this money on all these treatments and it wouldn’t do any good. The more I sobbed the closer I got to the real root of the issue, until finally, finally I knew – yes, I am scared, but really, truly I don’t feel worthy. I don’t feel I deserve to heal. I don’t feel I deserve to have health, happiness, joy. To live pain-free. To be whole. To have all my dreams, all I’ve every wanted to really truly come true.

Some of this unworthy feeling comes directly from the experiences of my life, and some of, a lot of it I believe, comes from generational transmission of trauma. This is when a trauma event occurs one to several generations back, and the effects of the trauma – the myth that goes with it – is passed forward. In my family there is a myth, on both sides, of the “not good mother”. On the maternal side I believe it originated several generations back when a great-great-great-etc grandmother was removed from her tribe because the “adopting” family felt that her mother was unfit and unable to care for her properly. Obviously, I’m only guessing that’s where the trauma originates, and I was only witness to the myth playing out through my grandmother and mother and how it played in my own head for a long time. There are other instances in my family, I’m sure many I don’t even know of – pains that created family myths that were passed forward.

The healing of trauma is so multi-layered. There are events of my life. The effects of the events on my parents and their parents lives. The trauma goes deep – as I said to one of my professors, it’s like some of it is in my dna.

I’m not a special snowflake. 🙂 I believe we all have trauma that needs to heal. We all need to release that pain, some of it built up for generations, and let our bodies and our souls heal, be whole, and find that Pure Joy.

I have dreams. Five of them written down. Some of them stored only in my mind and soul. I will let go of the story that I am not worthy. I will let go of the myth that I don’t deserve joy. It will hurt. I will heal. I will move forward, into Happiness, Wholeness, Joy. Will you come with me?

Let the Sunshine In – a photo by me of the view of our backyard from our office.