Soul Writing for Healing

Part 2: Dark Knight of the Soul

My experience with the Dark Knight of the Soul was one of hopelessness, emptiness, and great fear. I did lots of research to understand and give myself comfort. I came to understand that we are mulitdemensional and multifaceted, and I needed to address the physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects that make up the whole of myself. Healing occurs when I give my body the conditions needed to heal itself. The challenge is finding what works for me or anyone of us to create those conditions.

I began my healing journey by first scheduling reiki once a month to move the stagnant energy; I routinely scheduled shiatsu and cranial sacral, which helps with emotions. I began to study ACIM, which helped me understand my thoughts and ego stories.

The experience was teaching me and showing me it was okay to feel and move through the pain. The emotions that were pushed down and never properly processed were coming to the surface, wanting to be seen, felt, and experienced. It took courage and patience to feel the pain and look at myself honestly, and everything in my life, I put so much value on what was only hitting the surface. I learned that my worth is not based on my accomplishments, performance, or what I have but because I am worthy as I am, even with all my wounds and imperfections. I was growing to understand myself and finding ways to soothe my fears and wounds.

It was when I took a course in Inner Child Work that opened up a new level of awareness. I began to understand the impact of my childhood neglect and trauma, and it began to make sense why I had the thoughts, behaviors, and choices I was making. I had not even recognized some of the effects I had experienced as trauma. I had not understood the brain development of a child who experiences emotional neglect and trauma. I had normalized everything about my trauma responses and impact; I thought it was who I was, behaving and making choices believing my responses and decisions were valid.

Here is how trauma works in the physical aspect of a traumatic event, hormones flood the body, and the memory is imprinted in the amygdala, which holds the event's emotional significance, including the emotion's intensity and impulse. And this is why triggers are felt physically in your nervous system; an example would be flight, fight, or freeze. It showed up for me as anger, anxiety (fears), sadness, or grief. When I would be triggered, it was a reminder of a past hurt still tucked away in my body, unrecognized, unseen, and unhealed, that shows up in the current event, situation, or people around me, making it seem like it was current. In this triggered state, I'm responding through the woundedness of the past hurts, the child-self still reeling from the unresolved pain she endured. These responses are child-like, irrational, and usually heightened.

I came from an environment with lots of anger and walking on eggshells, and at the same time, unable to express my own feelings of any kind. I was the recipient of the emotional volatility and was not allowed to verbalize anything I was feeling. This infused me emotionally with much anger and rage; this would be my first response to outside triggers. Even if I didn't outwardly respond, I turned the anger toward myself, angry that I was feeling angry.

Trauma also affects the Soul aspect of your BE-ing. It separates you from your sense of self and shows up as feelings and beliefs of inadequacy, unworthiness, or fears about feeling your feelings (numbness). This manifested in the stories I told myself, self-blame, not being good enough, shame and guilt about mistakes, and errors in judgment. Not being valued, respected, or seen as the loving woman and person I am at my core, my inherent worth. I was treating myself in ways that I was treated as a child; I took on the emotional neglect I experienced and learned from my caregivers and turned it onto myself. This is most damaging to me; my choices of behavior toward others and what I tolerated from others left me vulnerable to being re-traumatized in many ways.

This is how self-image was formed, all unconsciously, until I recognized and was willing to do the inside job of change and heal from the trauma that impacted me in such a detrimental way. This is where Soul Writing became most encouraging.