As I said last week, I would use my blogs over the next months to share the tools I use and how they have evolved over the last 10 years. I still plan on doing that. However, this has been a very growth filled week for me. This past month I signed up to be part of an Energy Immersion Program with Panache Desai (PanacheDesai.com) and I started some body work called Rolfing. I did not know why I was choosing to do this as part of my transformation process and recovery but my self-organizing system gave me the insight that these two programs were the next steps of my healing.
The Energy Immersion Program is a 21 day intensive program with a goal of releasing energetic density within your body, meaning releasing blocked emotions and energy. I was quite skeptical of all this but I have learned to trust my inner voice and wisdom. Each day there is a morning movement component to this program as well as a 21 minute meditation piece. Panache Desai also leads several 90 minute Question and Answers sessions, frequency fixes and energetic expansion sessions where we meditate as a group. I fully committed myself to the program. The first 1½ weeks I felt nothing but boy did things start to open up this past week. I think this program combined with my Rolfing sessions are creating quite a release of my stuffed and contained emotions and energy specifically around the feelings of anger, hate and murderous rage which I know I have intellectually but as Bessell Van der Kolk states, “The Body Keeps the Score.”
I have spent the last 55 years struggling to contain this energy from being released. I have constricted and dissociated from it my entire life. Now I am feeling the power of these emotions and energy and I need to somehow express it so it can come out of the cells that have kept it contained my whole life. I never expressed my rage at the abuse because I was trying to be a good girl and woman. I was also terrified of it. Now, I have to express it through some physical way. I really don’t know how to do it. I just know that it is time to do it. If anyone has any idea of healthy ways to express embodied rage, please feel free to share it.
My murderous rage, anger and hate are getting expressed in my dreams and in my talking therapy. I have not been able to cry for years. This Thursday, I sobbed for an entire 45 minutes. I felt such a huge release in my body. Since then I have discovered that underneath this murderous rage is the deep grief and sadness over the helplessness I felt since I could not stop the abuse no matter how hard I tried to keep everyone happy. Keeping all these emotions contained in my body is really what some of my chronic fatigue is about. I say some because I think chronic fatigue is also the result of living with early and long term trauma. Keeping all this anger, rage and grief in my body contributes to sapping some of my physical vitality. Can I let my physical vitality come alive? I definitely have vitality of mind and spirit. Can I give my body room to breathe even though it contains such emotions as anger, murderous rage and helplessness? I feel strongly that it is time for me to become embodied and to continue to live more vibrantly. PTSD causes me to be frightened by any physical arousal no matter what emotion and energy I am feeling. It causes me to be at high alert so I have spent my life separated from my body and its vitality. I have been in physical pain since birth because of trauma. It is time to release the pain energetically and physically. It is time for me to feel the gift of physical vitality and health. I am deserving and worthy of it.
Again, if you have any ideas about releasing buried anger, rage and hate in a healthy way physically or emotionally, please send along your ideas. I do have a punching bag so maybe that is a start. Martial arts may be a good forum for it. It is something I would like to start in the New Year. Maybe just observing in the stillness and then releasing the embodied energy of my anger, murderous rage and hate out into the universe is my best way of healing. I will do that in both my Energy Immersion Program and at my next Rolfing session.
Living Purposefully with Severe Chronic PTSD 
I know that in the past, a hard run or a long swim seems to help release some of the anxious energy in me. I’m just really starting to even be able to think about the idea that I’m angry, so I haven’t really gotten to a point of needing to physically express it. I can’t run anymore, but I am slowly getting back to swimmimg. Maybe just any form of physical exercise would prove helpful– martial arts, punching bag, anything? I’ve started yoga not that long ago, and that seems to be very helpful for me, as far as being more aware of my body and staying more present. If these are old ideas, I’m sorry, and I hope you get some other ideas that are right for you. 🙂
Thanks for the ideas. I always have loved to swim and I haven’t done it in a long time. Maybe I will get myself back to the gym. Right now, I am a big walker. I can only manage small walks now because of my chronic fatigue and pain but I do love it. Have a great day.
Swimming seems to soothe my fibro pain. I don’t know if it would be the same for chronic fatigue pain. Something about feeling weightless in the water, and moving just feels amazing to me. I don’t know. Good luck, whatever path you take for movement. I hope your day is great, too. 🙂
“deep grief and sadness”. I think you hit it. Underneath my rage there it was. My rage was a way of fighting it off, not accepting what happened to me. I stopped running from what was, because I cannot change what my ‘brothers’ did.
I need to stop running as well. I just need to trust the truth of my experience. Sometimes I am in disbelief of what I actually have lived through.
Yes, it is hard to believe.
I’ve heard of rolfing, very deep tissue massage? I’m not one to spend money easily, but massage has been something I’ve treated myself to over the years. Unfortunately my masseur has aged as I age and no longer goes deep enough to relieve soreness in my back muscles. Tomorrow I am trying a new place.
I used to think I had to pound a pillow or something to release rage. But that induced more not relieve it. Only when I went deep into the wound did the rage dissipate, disappear. Tears, grief, sadness, that’s where I went, and it was ok, better than ok, real. I had every right to move slowly, feel each moment. And the moments hurt.
They chose to act out on their little sister. Maybe due to their own rage at our partying parents who didn’t have the capability to give each child what they needed in terms of love, affection and a feeling of wholeness.
Doesn’t matter why. The fact is that they chose to do those things to me. I was not lucky to be born in a family where a sister is loved, and protected by brothers. I’ve seen it. I watch in awe when I see it, a brother loving a sister like just a sister. Not a sexual thing, or when grown, something to smack down, beat down, to insure their secret is kept safe.
When I finally accepted that, I hurt. It was not a hurt that went away after the tears subsided. There were more tears. And more time. And all my life I cannot change it. But I don’t care anymore. About them. I have much to be thankful for. And when I walk to the water on our little plot of land. All of me walks. I am thankful that the parts have come together.
A wound cannot heal when the skin binds over it, while it’s still infected. The silence my ‘family’ required was the infection. The talking, the airing of the entire wound, not covering it up before it is finally washed with enough of my tears, and the truth, that is when it is slowly, delicately healing.
Oops, didn’t mean for that to turn into a blog post.