Yesterday’s meditation led to some surprises that allowed me to “connect the dots” between things that I had no idea were related, and gave me a major Ah Ha, about my life.
Last Sunday was the last day of level I of my hypnotherapy training, and I volunteered to be the client in a demonstration of interview technique. I needed an issue to be interviewed about. Nothing much was going on with me at the time, so I just picked “stomach discomfort.” (It was bothering my very slightly at the time.) To give you a little background, my stomach has be bothering me, on and off, for years. It comes and goes. Occasionally, usually when I under stress, it flairs up into a hard knot, but much of the time it’s not particularly noticeable. Sometimes it becomes a heavy, bloated feeling that can last for weeks and completely erases my appetite. Despite all the years I have been doing this stuff and the work I have done on myself, I have never been able to get a handle on what was going on. In terms of body issues, it has been the oddest duck of all. I could never so much get so much as the tinniest hint about what was behind it. It was just *there,* seemingly without cause or roots.
In the interview process the teacher probed enough to give me some new insights into how it behaved and when it started. I hadn’t really thought about that before. When asked, it seemed to me that I first noticed it when I was 18 or 19 and going to community college. Then I would often get a knot in my stomach sitting in class and heartburn during tests. At the time, I figured that it was caused by having to hunch over in those small chair/desk combination things that schools use. Being six feet tall and left handed, the 4 inch different in height between my elbow and desk caused me to hunch over quite a bit to write notes or take a test. And that’s where we left it, it was just a demonstration after all. I made a mental note to look into it when I got home.
Yesterday I had my chance. Once I was relaxed and in the zone, I was quickly shown that it went back quite a bit further than I thought. I was insistently presented with an incident happened when I was about five years old, even though I thought it had nothing to do with it. I believe I’ve written about it before: it involved me taking a toy from some other yard in the neighborhood, my parents finding out and punishing me while I refused to tell them where I got it from, and my going to considerable lengths to sneak it from my parents return the toy without my parents knowing about it. This incident has been on my mind lately, partly because it seems to me that I behaved rather oddly, almost like a robot, in a way. The more I thought about it, the less sense it made, and, yesterday, I made have discovered why.
With enough digging, I uncovered, what appears to be, a case of sexual abuse involving me, a neighbor girl about the same age and a grown man. Pictures might have been involved. I say maybe because it’s really not clear and I don’t really see a need to make the events clear, what I think is most important is how they effected me.
What I see now is that something happened that I felt really bad about, and I decided that the whole thing was my fault, (there might have been threats involved) especially what happened to the girl. Though it only happened to me once, I suspect now that she had been suffering under it for quite some time. I had wanted to, or liked it, at first, I think, so afterward I decided that emotions were bad, desire was bad, and did my best to I shut off all those emotions from that day forward. Hence that robot-like way I felt during the toy incident. Which, I believe, took place right after the abuse incident.
Other things that came up. One was a disgust of naked bodies, especially young ones. Another was the distrust, fear and/or significant discomfort I had felt around any girl that got close to me while growing up. I suspect that, if it wasn’t for the overwhelming influence of male hormones, I probably would have steered clear of all girls, forever. Though, oddly, I have always felt more comfortable around women than men. On some level, men have always felt threatening to me. It’s not a huge deal, just a vague unease that I don’t have when I’m just around women. This also explains why my relationships have been so dysfunctional for most of my life.
I’m sure that there’s more to discover about this, my stomach is acting up even as I write this. That said, I have since felt a subtle sense of peace in my soul, and getting to sleep last night was noticeably less troubled than I can ever remember it being. So I accomplished something.
As hypnotherapy students, we are warned to never use our skills to attempt to recover lost memories, for good reason. That is why I have worked to steer clear of as much of what happened as possible. I truly only what to know enough to uncover what decisions I made and why I made them so I can process them out, and, at the very least, to get my stomach to stop bothering me.
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