Rescue Missions
Today I began the work to integrate the memory from age 5 that connects to the belief that I'm worthless, even dangerous to people. This is a core false belief I have about myself due to the developmental trauma I experienced.
We've been watching The Walking Dead during the pandemic. CK is always looking for series to comfort watch, I usually watch them vicariously as I do other things. She'd started that with TWD, but I got more and more pulled into the characters. I mentioned this to my therapist today who was surprised, I agreed that I'm generally not a horror genre person, but I find the show really compelling. I'm very interested in how the worst monsters are always the humans.
I brought it up because a thought about these trauma therapy sessions stuck me a few days ago. This work I'm doing is like a rescue mission in a show or movie. It's going to be really hard, scary, and I'm going to encounter the monstrous behavior of the people who hurt me. It's worth it though, because I'm rescuing my child self who is stuck at age 5, terrified and unable to move forward.
Even when I uncover new memories that are painful to bring out into the light, I'm doing the work of freeing my child self from terror. Along the way I might get to discover the ways in which I was learning to be resilient. My memory of age 4 revealed how I was already strong, resourceful, and a badass.
The memory from age 5 feels much less monstrous than the one from age 4. When my therapist read it back to me I felt a sense of near relief. While this memory is terrible, because it is a time when I was feeling like I wasn't worth keeping safe. That aside, it doesn't feel like it has anything lurking within it to bear witness to.
Revisiting myself at age 5, feeling terribly unsafe and terrified, it helped me feel even more resolve to do this work. I'm not leaving me stuck there.
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