After a suicide attempt and ending my relationship with my traditional therapist, it takes me six months to find a therapist who can help me deal with childhood abuse. I bounce from therapist to therapist until I finally reach a lady called Lynn, who is an energy therapist.
Bringing myself to energy therapy was a different and difficult route for me. I didn’t trust energy work. I was so used to the Freudian approach that I didn’t believe things like ‘relining my energy’ or a technique called ‘tapping’ would actually work, but over the first six months I noticed a more spiritual balance within myself. I had come to realise that I can pick myself to part on an analytical sense but dealing with the soul or spirit was unknown territory and something not widely talked about. It is a taboo subject because it’s not something that can be physically recorded.
Whilst in energy therapy I noticed that my flashbacks were changing, or perhaps my analytical approach to them was; I was becoming more in tune with my emotional state, feeling and listening to what my body “told me”—like gut instinct, for example.
We all know gut instinct exists but you will never find it holding up in a court of law as we all know there needs to be evidence of some form. It was with this knowledge of using my gut instincts and “checking in” with my feelings that I decided I needed these flashbacks to stop. I had to put a stop to them somehow.
I needed to find out what happened to me as a child. I already knew through my gut instinct what had happened but I had to relive the traumatic experience to put this psychological loop to rest. I had to move forward. My dreams and nightmares became vivid and I had dreams with false awakenings—basically I would dream but I knew I was dreaming, so I would ‘wake’ myself up … then I would still be dreaming but I perceived myself to be awake. Those were quite complex as I usually had nightmares of a horrific nature which would then swing around in a loop, and I would start to relive everything on a repeated scene. To imagine that you are awake but then to find yourself not awake was quite a disorienting and distressing process. After eight months of energy work and not a pure lucid dream in sight since the last one a year before, I had a breakthrough. I had the flashback I needed to be able to move on.
It was December 2017 and again it was a flashback in which I felt a man sitting next to me, his warm skin next to mine. I was a child again. As usual my thought process split into two. I tried to open my eyes and when I opened them, I saw my bedroom wardrobe in front of me with a huge, frightening looking face on it. It was at this point that I knew I was in my nightmare and flashback state, as in waking reality I don’t have anything on my wardrobe.
Mentally I was screaming, trying to wake myself up, as I didn’t want to relive this ordeal. I was petrified, but the other side of my thought process was calm. Instead of saying, “It will be over soon,”—how I previously thought—I said and thought to myself, “It will be over soon, but I need to know what happened to me.” I decided to close my eyes again.
I was then taken back to that frightful night. I was terrified but those two split parts of my thoughts seemed to merge into one. I knew I was living a past memory that needed to be seen for me to process it and literally put it to rest. My abuser stayed next to me and I felt him moving down the bed, the mattress tilting with his movements. It was then that I felt hi hands moving down my body and then him moving down towards my legs. I reminded myself that I am physically in the real world, in my bed sleeping, and I am totally safe—just stay with the memory. I did. I then felt a weight on the back of my legs. I was face down at this point. I could hardly breathe. It was then that I felt the most immense pain shooting up in between my legs, back, stomach and whole body; I screamed out in pain. I was pinned down. I then felt my abuser pull my legs, he was now off of me but still my body felt in bits. I felt numb, in shock.
It was at this point that I decided I had known enough. I turned around to face my abuser whilst collecting my thoughts. I told him to let go of me and that I am not scared of him anymore, and in the same breath I informed him that he will never be able to hurt me again. My words were, in effect, “You’re an arsehole and a child abuser, and you will never, ever be able to hinder my life again. You’re the past now and you will remain there because this is now not real.” I told him to go away. I wasn’t scared anymore. I felt brave.
Just as I wished him away, he went. I turned around and saw myself sleeping, like a dead weight on my bed. I can only describe it as a sense that it was as if my soul had left my body, although I am unsure as to how that happened or why I saw things that way. I flew back to my sleeping self, and as I did I woke up.
When I woke I wasn’t scared and I felt like a huge burden had been lifted. I felt overjoyed happy and relieved. I know I was raped as a toddler; it was something deep down I always knew but didn’t want to deal with—until now, that is. I suspect the burn that I received was a warning to keep my mouth shut. It is no surprise that I didn’t start talking until I was nearly five years old. I cannot change the past but what I have changed is my attitude to life and my nightmares.
Photo by Skitterphoto via Pixabay
Lucid dreaming is far more complex than I ever thought and something that I have only just discovered. I can connect with my soul and my higher self. I have had many lucid dreams since. I have managed to change the scene and rewind a dream, frame by frame. I have found this fun and amusing.
I have even been into the dark depths of the universe with the stars and planets and spoke to my ‘higher self’ mainly asking for advice on issues at work or just asking for general guidance.
My opinion is that when you have an ego state that’s been built in defence and survival mode for most of its life, what I can describe at best is that the soul and spiritual essence become blocked. I have broken down my ego states with the aid of psychotherapy.
I have worked through my traumas in this reality and that of the dream state, allowing me to live to my true authentic self. I could only do the latter part with energy work. I don’t think psychoanalytical psychotherapy alone works with PTSD, anxiety or depression, and I don’t think medication can assist either. Medication only masks the problem. It is not a long term solution.
What I think needs to happen to help overcome PTSD would be a combination of psychotherapy and energy work with lucid dreaming. This has been my cure to PTSD. Perhaps if I had gone straight into the energy therapy field first, I would have achieved this far earlier. Who knows. But saying that, psychotherapy helped me to unlock my past whilst making drastic changes to the way I lived my life. It has taken me nearly five years of deep emotional work to get to this point in my life and it has not been an easy journey. I have not had any signs of PTSD or nightmares since late last year.
If you are able to change the layout of dreams then you can also manipulate flashbacks as I did with my case. This is where the term “deep spade work” really comes in but on a spiritual/soul level. Trauma leaves imprints on your physical self and psychological self (such as in your hippocampus, amygdala and prefrontal cortex). It’s only natural that it would also leave an imprint on a spiritual sense, too.
