Silver Linings
The process of Healing: When you stop looking at your despair through mirrored lenses it stops looking like despair
SILVER LININGS
When you stop looking at your despair through mirrored lenses it stops looking like despair. When you remove the filter of blame, you enable yourself to release trauma… and when you do that you replace it with empowerment, enlightenment, and wisdom.
Yes this absolutely is true. It’s the profound “dawning” that happens when you come through trauma of betrayal, cruelty, distrust, hopelessness, etc…. It’s a literal a-ha moment type thing, but almost too big, obtuse, that your brain can barely contain it; so it’s like a peripheral glimpse… but once it comes through focused enough to trigger a gasp where you freeze and go so silent you aren’t even breathing, it’s there inlaid for good.
You begin to notice that thinking back or reflecting on things that happened, it’s not as devastating. It feels easier. And you wonder am I healed/healing?
You’ve always heard about needing to do the “good work”, needing to “focus on healing”… as if it were a tangible thing you should be able to pick up like a book and read the next chapter until it’s done. It never made sense… like…. HOW does one “do the good work”?
So you forget about it and just do your best to reflect and comfort yourself in that painful time. But when eventually you experience what I was just referring to you will also realize you were doing that work all along! And this crazy paradoxical balancing… either/or… back and forth… forth IS back… like an epiphany… you grasp it and you cannot victimize yourself anymore.
You no longer feel inclined to do so. You suddenly understand what they mean about forgiveness. You never really understood or believed in it before. With forgiveness there is a shifting of tragedy… what you embraced as YOUR tragedy is now released and you watch it flutter away, like when you throw toilet paper off a building in NYC, there it goes down down. If you keep looking at it… if you can contain those monstrously profound new ideas long enough in one sitting… you will observe that long ribbon of tragic tissue settling on shoulders that aren’t yours.
Gently and without notice it drapes across his shoulders now; the betrayer, the narcissist, the user, swindler, the manipulator, the one who coaxed your affections, your allegiance, your genuine love, to trust in him, and in the apparent reciprocation he emanated.
How does he not notice the paper scarf resting about his shoulders? Because without the wisdom which allowed you this symbolic scene, it doesn’t exist.
He doesn’t even comprehend his own illness, and definitely never cared about yours. But it’s there. And now you realize… this tragedy you’ve been carrying… the stuff that traumatized you… was not about you at all. The tragedy was (and continues to be) all his.
You see now how unfortunate, how broken, how inept and shameful he is underneath the mask. You can also now accept your own accountability for that incurred trauma and you begin to finally understand about forgiveness… first you forgive yourself. For bringing yourself to that party. For being there. Because swindled or not, it was, after all, a choice, your energy, spent by you. Once you’ve gotten this far, you start to understand about forgiveness… for the personified culprit of your despair/trauma. When you forgave yourself there was no one else to forgive. What happened to you that was out of your control was a consequence of his disfunction. Not yours.
When your heart broke it was only in the reflection of HIS brokenness… whatever he did was not about you; and so your persecution never existed. When you stop looking at your despair through mirrored lenses, it stops looking like despair… when you remove the filter of blame, you enable yourself to release trauma… and when you do that you replace it with empowerment, enlightenment, and wisdom.
It’s a profound journey… this healing; it’s a trip you don’t even realize you’ve embarked on until it’s almost over. And upon your return, expecting an empty house, you open the door to find someone is there to welcome you home after all!
Recognizing them immediately You smile because you know you will never feel alienated or alone anymore! It is yourself. Only you. But no longer alone perhaps because for the first time you don’t need anybody else. To feel connected, contented, and complete. This is healing. And it is key to transformative growth.
It happens behind the veil of your consciousness… and will only happen if you can maintain your integrity, stay true to yourself, and resist the desire for vindication. Vindication is real, but righteous only when it materializes as a consequence or after thought. And it will! Naturally. come to bless you… when you begin to recognize your demise as key to your growth, spiritual awakening, happiness, and genuine truth.
I don’t think we ever come to these profound thoughts left to our singular own devices; it is not simple science. Perhaps it requires an emotional stirring, like despair, betrayal, heartache… perhaps we call upon the spirit to dress this kind of wounds… the profound woundedness called trauma which threatens to destroy us if we fail to recover, to heal. There is always a pull towards vindication… which is natural, even righteous, but only when it comes by way of consequence, after effect, happenstance. Otherwise to enlist vindication as a healing agent is to be misguided, and can threaten to destroy you in its wake, turning you into the very thing you sought to punish or humiliated.
True vindication only comes by way of reward for finding your way through the forest not with a torch fired of resentment and blame, but by trusting in the moonlit path of your own humility and grace. XOGG