different levels of messages from the body
Wednesday April 09, 2008
Dear Alice,
About a year ago I wrote to you about my illness and how I started linking it to the emotional wounds of my childhood. I read all your books, embarked in a therapy process that shook all my foundations and started dealing with my body – respecting it – in a different way. My disease now looks less scary but at the same time new important questions have emerged. I have spent my life ignoring what the body was telling me, but I have also ignored what my feelings and my mind where saying. I have always covered up or removed my unhappiness and my sadness and usually attributed them to external events or the people I was dealing with or, more often, my inability to be happy. Now, this very week, I start realising that perhaps I need to let myself be unhappy for a long enough time to understand what this unhappiness wants to tell me. Perhaps it is not the people that are with me in the present or present situations that upset me, but something from the past that I want to keep punish. Is it common that the pain appears first as a message from the body (illness) and then it digs deeper into our soul to push us to undertake a further journey, to become more conscious? Why nothing seems to ever make me happy, satisfied and peaceful? Now, more than ever before, I live in a permanent crisis of hope. I am truly unhappy, with no buts. And, at the same time, I also realise that now I can live with this unhappiness, I can stay with it – even if it is extremely painful – but I can. Before, I needed to remove the signs of unhappiness, even by suppressing all my emotions. Does it mean I can bear the pain better?
Thank you for any answers you’ll be able to give me. You have been a wonderful example for me and certainly the initiator of my journey. I return to this website today with the hope that once again you will be able to inspire me to continue my therapy and my journey to recovery, even if it looks scary once again…. J.
AM: Yes, I want to encourage you to continue your journey to recovery. It makes sense that you can now better bear the pain (the truth) because we can’t heal the wounds of our past by denying them or even laughing about them. We must learn to take them seriously.