Della WrenHere's something I don't talk about much - shadow work.
I call this digging in the trauma graveyard. Why?
The trauma graveyard is where we put all the pain and trauma that we aren't fully able to process at the time it happens. If you were a small child, that makes complete sense. Small children don't have the capacity to process big things yet. It's totally normal for us to bury a good amount of the trauma we experience, especially as children.
What we do is we bury the trauma in the graveyard and then to manage the unprocessed pain, we create a bunch of coping mechanisms. You know that people-pleasing problem you have? That's where it came from. The unprocessed crap you buried in the trauma graveyard and promptly abandoned because you didn't have the skills to manage it yet made you create a bunch of coping mechanisms like people-pleasing. Again it's a totally normal thing for a child to do.
Shadow work relies heavily on emotional processing. It is literally digging up bones in the graveyard and reliving old pain for no good reason. This gets you absolutely nowhere except stuck in the pain.
The focus on emotional healing as a sole means of healing will not heal you. You will not be able to cry it out enough to make it go away.
It requires two more things to fully heal from your old experiences: mental clarity and the shifting of the behaviors that you created based on the pain. Nuke the people-pleasing habit and you'll find the pain goes away without making you have to dig in the graveyard.
When you go to gain mental clarity you may feel some emotion and that's totally fine. The emotion comes and the emotion goes. Once it is done, there is no need to go trigger it more. Leave it there. Toss out the crazy stories the mind made up about the emotions that came up and move on.
There is no need to pointlessly trigger emotions for no reason. Emotions are a by-product of gaining mental clarity around our experience and shifting our behaviors. They are not the focus.
Please stop digging up bones in the trauma graveyard.
You don't need to do this to yourself. It's not helpful. There are better ways to heal that don't require you to drag yourself through hell by the teeth. Healing may still be very painful, but it doesn't have to look like this.
There are simply better ways to manage the healing process that don't have to re-victimize and re-traumatize you to work through them. Self-mastery is one of those ways.
Love to all.
Della
#shadowwork #trauma #diggingupbones #healing #emotions #selfmastery #clarity
Evelyn ☕
