As a trauma survivor in recovery, I have spent a long time in the wilderness. It isn’t an actual wilderness. I am not a fan of the outdoors. Nature and my dissociative defense mechanism are not compatible. I am speaking of the wilderness that is often the subject of the spiritual texts. It seems that before most protagonists find their mission or purpose, there is some period of waiting. There is some period of preparing, of letting go of the old. And it makes sense to me. I don’t see another way. If the foundation is shaky, it cannot be built upon.
But I hate it.
I carry a large amount of masculine energy with me. I rejected that which was feminine many years ago in my attempts to avoid the loathing that my parents spewed upon their little girls. I figured that if the feminine was so easily abused and disliked, I would not be that. I learned over the years to be about action, to be about the willful accomplishment of goals. In my early adulthood, it seemed to work for a while. It worked until the children were born. But children don’t respond to the unbalanced masculine unless the goal is to rid them of any individuality. They must be raised with both. So I have worked hard to resurrect my feminine aspects. I have even found some balance. But I still favor action.
And so, I sit in an uncomfortable place. The wilderness is not about will. It is not about action. It is about waiting. It is about emptiness. It is about grieving what is gone. It is about a searching, not on the outside, but the inside. And most of all, it is about not knowing … anything.
The wilderness goes against everything society encourages us to become as human beings. We are taught to fight for what we want. We are told to work hard and we will achieve anything. We are persuaded to conquer the outer world and to ignore the inner world. Feelings are not to be faced. They are to be masked with achievements, prescription drugs and accumulated possessions.
So, what happens when we choose the path of the wilderness? I find myself going so deep in to the shadows of my soul that I am not sure if there is a way out. I find myself wondering if there is an end to the waiting, or if the waiting is real at all. I long for an impossible mission that I can achieve. I need the success. I need to feel accomplished.
And yet the answer is not that. The answer is to rest with the question. Lie with the uncertainty. Allow the clarity to come when it is ready. Ignore the impatience in my ego self, which can only feel comfort in accomplishment.
The guidance is to rest.
But I need to take action.
So there is a war within me as I travel this journey. It is a war between the self that believes in what has always “worked” for me and the self that knows I must have faith, trust in a greater purpose. Of course, only one self is warring. The other doesn’t need to war.
So, as we celebrate those who have accomplished so much and acquired so many things in this modern world, I am coming to understand that is not the hard stuff. I am beginning to see that the masculine qualities we strive to master will only get us so far. I am finally realizing that my greatest challenge is in doing nothing, waiting, sitting without a semblance of an answer. My greatest challenge is allowing myself to be and knowing that the wilderness ends. It is in knowing that I cannot know. And it is trusting anyway.
Yes Elisabeth, I can relate to being action oriented and growing up learning to value masculine qualities. Sitting still, waiting, & trusting are difficult. However, when I practice them, I see positive outcomes. I don’t need to control everything. I can wait for clarity like you mentioned and allow my wise inner self to guide me instead of taking charge and forcing outcomes.
Thank you for reminding me of the wisdom in your post.
I am so glad you do that Donna. It can be so difficult.
Thank you for this post. My healing process strips all that I thought I knew away and I have to surrender everything I was conditioned to believe. It is encouraging to know that this is the shared path us survivors are on and that it is okay to let things fall away. It’s encouraging to know I’m not alone with the struggles and the grief and the not knowing.
Jane, I have yet to meet another survivor with as many similarities in their recovery process as you have to mine. Even when we don’t talk for a while, I am comforted to know there is another out there. It is so helpful.
For me too. In so many ways you have helped me by sharing what you’re going through.
” I am finally realizing that my greatest challenge is in doing nothing, waiting, sitting without a semblance of an answer. My greatest challenge is allowing myself to be and knowing that the wilderness ends. It is in knowing that I cannot know. And it is trusting anyway.”
This is what I have come to realize myself as I go through my healing process. I have developed a nasty habit of working too much, too long, too hard in order to keep my mind busy as a way to suppress what I know I have to eventually deal with. I have always been very action-oriented growing up, I can’t stand being stagnant and having nothing to do. So, this post sort of confronted that habit of mine today and reminded me that I must balance this and find ways to rest (I still don’t exactly know what that is for me) and look to the inside rather than the outside.
Thank you, Elisabeth.
It isn’t always obvious how we need to rest, is it? I can relate to that. Thank you for your comment.
I tend to see that desire for purpose and order as terribly feminine, maybe because girls develop those skills so much earlier. Boys are busy flicking each other’s ears while girls are setting goals and pursuing them. It’s why more young women attend college than young men now. They can decide they want to get somewhere and then go there. Girls are very often natural organizers, while boys spend a long time chasing whatever distraction crosses their paths.
But your point still stands. Uncertainty is especially hard on traumatized people, because the unknown has so often been really, really bad and also because sometimes the present is so difficult. You want to at least have a timeline, an endpoint, so that you know the difficulty won’t go on forever.
The anxiety it creates can’t just be ignored–that’s dissociating again. It has to be attended to. One has to be nice and see if it can be soothed. And it has to be soothed again and again because the uncertainty goes on for a long time. Take care. It’s hard and it takes a new approach: It requires compassion for oneself instead of impatience.
There are really good days when I am present and compassionate with myself (and others by default). I love those days. 🙂
Reblogged this on the tao of jaklumen and commented:
Please read. A subtext of the Hero’s Journey is Jungian archetypes and reconnecting with the true feminine and masculine. Robert Bly (Iron John: A Book about Men), Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine), Marion Woodman (The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine, with Robert Bly) and many others have written about this.
Elisabeth writes about taking the Path of the Wilderness, and resurrecting the inner feminine that she had rejected in the face of childhood abuse.
Thank you so much for the reblog!! I want to check out some of your references too.
Will be serving up some by tweets for your convenience.
Hello,
I am not sure where this comment would go so I’ll leave it here under this post. I was reading your blog today earlier on, and found some similarities and also some differences with my personal history. The difference is that I wasn’t a trafficked kid (ok, as far as I know, hope life doesn’t give me a little unpleasant surprise in the future through some memories, because once a lady who claimed to be clarivoyant told me I was raped as a small kid) and altough there was some abuse in my childhood, also the mother figure you describe is not my mom, because she always encouraged me to be independent. The similarities include that I was also bullied and I can understand perfectly what you say about not standing up to yourself because at home is much more dangerous if you do, the parents are not teaching you to defend yourself nor are they supportive of you if you do. I faced a lot of loneliness, I am an only child and travelled from place to place with my parents never returning to the same place again.
However my problem is the opposite as you describe in one post, where you say that for long long time you could not be without a man by your side, you thought for a long time that you needed another person to survive even if the person was abusive. And you had kids from an abusive relationship also.
Gosh I wish I had kids. My psychological burden is the antithesis of what you describe: I wish I would be one of those women who get pregnant even if it was of an abusive person. Women with babies are complete women. Women with babies seem to have it all. Women with relationships are respected.
Let me explain.
I am a single woman. I am a prostitute. If they want sex, men pay me unless it is very intimate. I cannot tolerate abusive relationships and thus end intimacy with males very quickly if I notice some red flags. I had encounters with narcissists, 2. My parents, yes, had abusive traits but educated me with chess machine, with masculine behaviors, with quite a lot of respect for my own ideas. But now at 35 years of age I have a problem: I cannot easily visualize a family life. A partner. I never had a partner. Not that I need one. But society values you more, and also it is fun to get to know another person intimately if the relationship is healthy. I don’t feel worthy of love deep deep inside. It is like I was different. It is like, sometimes, I wasn’t even human.
The last abusive relationship I ended after only 1 month of intimacy. In his last visit to my house the guy started manipulating me and using the trauma of never having had a boyfriend against me. At one point when we were “talking” (abusing, a little lying also) and he bought up the subject in a way that really hurt me, I was screaming, screaming from pain because that part of me that doesn’t feel worthy came out and when she comes out I just feel like screaming and beating myself with my fists. It is horrible. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Please. I need to talk about this with someone. Does this sound familiar to anyone, suffering so much after a trigger that you just burst out in screaming and crying and beating yourself? It is the first time it actually happens to me in front of an abuser, generally it always happened alone AFTER some abuser in the past had triggered me, but this time it was in front of his eyes and the guy was so scared that he wanted to run away because he thought someone would hear me and call the police.
It is terrible not being able to think of yourself as a woman with a partner, and therefore attracting all these wackos and emotional rapists that only want sex relationships where they end up winning in all senses. I feel something is missing from me, altough I am considered by others as a happy person and generally my thoughts tend to be positive. But I don’t like that horrible hidden dark part inside that lurks there in the shadows waiting to be triggered while I go on with my life as normal…
Does this sound familiar to anyone? I need to feel human, to feel like one of those women who walk around with the baby on the street and cook for their husbands. Reading your posts reminded me that not all appearances are gold on the inside, but gosh, when you see others, the grass is greener on the other side and society wants us to have all these relationships in which we are supposed to grow and all that stuff…
Wow Irina, This is such an amazing comment. I hardly know where to start a response. I would like to address three things you have said.
First, the traumatic response to abuse tends to fall in one extreme direction or the other. Either you can’t live without a partner or you can’t live with one. And even more confusing, survivors can spend time in both. I used to “need” a man and now I find myself desperately “needing” to be alone. My pendulum has swung to the other side. And that’s ok for me right now. I hope to find my way back to the middle eventually.
I completely understand the longing for “normal”. I tried to get that too. Unfortunately, it doesn’t change what is happening on the inside. Starting a family before we have addressed trauma can lead to a life full of intense triggers. I choose to do the recovery work, but not until the triggers from the children almost overwhelmed me. I encourage others to establish a relationship with their inner child before having their own children. It helps immensely.
Last, I experienced those same explosions of emotion. I was holding so many emotions inside that I just could not keep them contained all the time. My children made the emotions worse until I addressed them in a healthy way. I would guess that your inner child is trying to express and is doing that through emotional outbursts at the moment.
I have some offerings on my website including a forum and guidance sessions for survivors of trauma. Feel free to email me at beatingtrauma@gmail.com
Thanks, now I know at least it is not so unusual to have this type of fit. It is like the body has so much energy that the fist helps to sort of release it even though in my case I feel that I am never going to get what I want because I am evil or don’t deserve or something. It only aleviates the superficial momentary turmoil. After the incident, when the guy and I had not seen each other for about a week, my mind was still so messed up it resembled more a washingmashine, and I was a little uncoordinated and in pain for a while, but I wrote to a person called Ellen Lachter because I started wandering if this part could be even a different person. It is so intense to be overcome suddenly by all that pain and longing and anger at the same time that it almost feels like facing a different person. Ellen Lachter recommended me a person called Arauna Morgan for a consultation through Skype, and that is definitely on my wishlist altough now I can’t afford financially to go into proper therapy. And also, those guys work with cults and MPD, and as far as I know, my case is not MPD, I never out of the blue started acting as a 4 year old, for example. But still now I am into this stuff because I can’t carry on this way. Need to do something,
and what you say about longing to be “normal”, hell yes, I know what you mean, sometimes I tackle it frivolously like “I want a Ferrari, I want a motorbike, I want a husband, I want a radio, I want a child” as if these things were only social commodities and all of them were sort of equal. That makes me powerful because I start fantasizing that if I win the lottery I could buy myself a fake husband anyway. But deep inside I know that it is not that simple. That there are emotinons inside that need to be unlocked. And perhaps when I unlock them everything will just flow and I need not think of going to the supermarket of life to sort of acquire all these goodies, they just come on their own.
I will log into the forum and hang around there for a while. Before searching for any therapy I must know where to search. Oh gosh when I was 18 and all this nightmare of prositution started I remember that fat guy full of pimples in his office, looking at his watch and yawning with an idle indifference when asking me “mmm… ok… and those… experiences at the brothel… how were they?” The consultation cost a fortune and he just wanted my parents’ money. Didn’t care. And then I also remember this friend of my father who, after knowing what I had done, in a dinner, when they were speaking about careers and my parents were not looking at his face he made a comment: “I want to professionally dedicate myself to the SAXophone” and moved his tongue really fast at me. I don’t want to find these disgusting dudes when I seek help. I want someone who understands and whith who there is a connection, if it takes time to find I don’t care.
But definitely have your e-mail. Thanks for the answer, I go to the forum. Good luck in your own journey.
We would love to have you there. I understand your concerns about therapy. When you decide to venture in that direction, make sure the therapist understands trauma and dissociation and it not afraid of memory recovery if it comes to that.
So much coming to mind and heart with this post. I am the opposite with regard to wilderness, both nature in real life and our own wilderness. My heart feels like it belongs there and I want to stay there, which has its own set of problems.
With regard to feminine, I am reading an amazing book called Eating in the Light of the Moon. It is focused on eating disorders but it speaks directly to the abandonment of our feminine selves and so many deep issues rooted in trauma. I think you would really love it. I’ll try to write out a few good quotes later on; when I read that portion, it stirred something so deep in me, something so entirely abandoned but also so wise and ancient in knowing. I first read it on Tuesday and it is still running through me.
I do love it when words do that. I had that experience last night. I read something and it gave me chills and stopped me in my tracks. It didn’t just speak to my brain. It spoke to all of me.
Another post to which I can completely relate! It is uncanny how I find your posts when they are so relevent to my current situation. I have for some time struggled to differentiate with the concept of ‘sitting with’ and waiting, and avoidance. I questioned continually whether I was avoiding a situation because of fear / anxiety / negativity / feelings of powerlessness etc etc, and whether to push myself into action, or whether in fact this was a time to wait and sit with the ‘not knowing’. It was only last week that my therapist and I discussed this! I am now feeling that I can better make more discerning choices about what I am experiencing and that sometimes inaction is the appropriate response. My therapist called it a fallow time which, for me, is such a meaningful explanation. Fallow meaning – left unseeded after being ploughed to regain fertility for a crop.
I like that that idea of fallow time. I have struggled with this more than most aspects of my recovery. I think it takes a real connection with our intuition to do this well and that takes so much recovery work.