After six years of disease and suffering, I find myself cured, practically overnight. What could appear as a grace or a miracle, is before any the fruit of a long process and the put into action of a radical choice ending a relation and a situation where to undergo unacceptable things maintained me in the toxic memories of my past of child.
The speed of my healing does not stop questioning me and coming along to make return on my childhood, on whom I am really and on my route of healing which began well before the disease.
One month before my healing, I was still in a pathetic state, in chronic fatigue, breathless full of oedemas, carrying with difficulty the twenty kilos which I had taken since the disease, in physical and psychic tension, literally at the end of my reserves. My vitality continued to decrease, while it was already well affected after six years where my body had known practically the disability, the pains, the insomnias, the neurological, cardiac, articular, digestive problems, in to feel me as a grandmother, knowing that many grandmothers were in better shape than me and that I envied it more of one in the street!
At the heart of the powerlessness
I met the confusion, the shame, the solitude, the powerlessness, the despair, the feeling of monstrousness and an almost total absence of empathy, so much my circle of acquaintances -rare-as on behalf of the medical profession. The suffering and the disease wake at the others some reflexes connected to their own fears, and these fears have a rather simple strategy : put all this at a distance, not to imagine that it could arrive at oneself. And as few of us were at the heart of their original suffering, that is then difficult to welcome that of somebody else, at the risk of resonating with our own knot of suffering, kept very profoundly in an inaccessible crypt.[1]
Furthermore, it is necessary to admit it, we are all rather badly equipped for the authentic empathy[2], and when we have some vague desires on this matter, our attempts are rather disastrous, we confuse empathy and seizure of power.
Thus the best way which finds the circle of acquaintances of a sick person, is to give her the order to become again "normal" as quickly as possible to restore their own safety, and if you do not obey, you are the living proof of a dysfunction of which you are only responsible, for height of bad reasons: you do not want to cure, you do not want to go out of the confinement of your suffering, you do not move enough, you have shells which prevent any relation, you have something to understand, you listen too much to yourself, you less have only to think of it and maybe even to think a little more of the others, in brief, you should be in a place or to the full other places except that where you are in reality … Supreme Violence!
I also met the death, or at least this imminent sensation which lets in to this space where we know that everything can fall over in about seconds, because the body flashes of everywhere and sends messages which we cannot decode but about whom(which) we know how to measure the urgency and the intensity. Nights with bradycardia in eight of the tension, where I feel the body spining between the stitches of minutes, or on the contrary, one night with eighteen of the tension and hundred and forty of the cardiac pulsations, the brain which mashes in the space, in perdition while waiting for S.O.S. Doctor who puts more than one hour to arrive... In six years, I had the opportunity to experiment diverse states, difficult to share, and I needed time to validate all my felt, so much these messages of the body were sometimes indecipherable (illegible), intense, but without a link with the mental or an emotion to succeed in putting to it of the sense or in bringing to it an adequate answer. For example, repeatedly, I had this feeling whom I was in danger, whom my body could break any time, and whom I would have had to ask for help; something inside told it to me, but I could validate nothing really, I did not call the doctor and if I spoke about it to the person the closest to me, I had not at all the sensation that he measured what I had crossed and I was never joined, as if what I lived was something trivial.
It is in these moments that I began to understand that in my childhood I had had to know these extreme states, unless nobody cares about it, or without an adult, by his own concern and by an appropriate action, gives a limit to the suffering or to the anxiety of death and by welcoming them by his presence.
How many nights, at these nursemaids, how many nights, in this nursery in Grenoble, where my fate did not maybe cost much, where probably to cry, to roar, to suffer, to let die itself, had no importance and left not concerned or not susceptible adults in the indifference?
René Spitz, psychoanalyst of the 50s, very well studied the infantile condition and the syndrome of hospitalism at the children separated prematurely from their mother. The children receiving care but deprived of emotional link develop physiological troubles and behavior, going to a phase of retreat and refusal of contact.[3]
Support my body
Fortunately my therapeutic route made me meet some people who were able to validate, by their listening, by their own felt, and sometimes the most subtle felt, what I crossed really, and so to allow to validate my perceptions. I had the impression to die, to be a leaky seal which lost all its substance and in spite of my descriptions, nobody heard and understood me or took me seriously. [4]
In the first two years, during energy care, I received two informations which mutually confirmed that coming from different people. " If I continued like that, I left my body ". I remember myself that far from panicing, it had aligned something in me. I could finally have a measure, a calibration of what I felt. The confirmation and the reality are undoubtedly less alarming than the confusion.
Then, another sentence, which resumed moreover exactly what I said myself inside, namely that my body, energetically " looked like a 90-year-old woman " and it vibrated " as the people who are at the end of life ".
From this moment, I of course never gave up the idea "to understand", or "to cure", or to find "the" remedy which would improve me, but, aware that I was in a process which I ignored the scale and the duration, I centred my care to support this body, only this body, so that, while waiting for the possible end of the tunnel, I can keep the head outside the water and not sink. Shiatsu, drainage, energy care were my base, without losing my shaman spiritual route. And between these two poles, material - spirit, the everyday life, with its descents into hell, the exhaustion, the total loss of marks, the absence of support, this stabbing questioning of " how to hold ", " how to bring out there ", without being able to extract anything from the lead screed which seemed molded around me.
The experience of the doubt
In what, to whom, to hang up? I did not know it. I was any more carried by nothing, and in any case anything of which carried me before. Everything had collapsed. I would have liked I could read this sentence in these moments there: " Hold your breath in hell and does not despair ". [5]
I knew how to make nothing more with my body, everything became difficult and I did not any more manage to keep only one benefit from my route and from all that I had learnt.
It's as if I had been dispossessed of all my capacities. I was in an another space-time. In the point to doubt of my route and to tell me: " all this for that "!
Thirty years of progress to get to this point… which disaster … The judgment which assailed me was merciless. I had had to be on the wrong track. Missed something. The disease became the objective evidence of this error of switchpoints.
But so rather, instead of being a failure, I had dared to think that this disease arrived just at the right moment, because I had enough explored my story, enough found the way back of the feelings, the connection to myself and to my soul, and because I was ready to go even farther, to go towards more freedom and consciousness? I went out of a long relation, ready to take off. And I found myself nailed on the ground, with broken wings.
Somebody will tell me: " we give lessons difficult for the good pupils ". whatever! It regilt a little my ego in a very bad state, me who could not aspire any more in much, and at the same time it consolidated me in the idea that I was on my way, even if the path seemed blurred and the destination, unknown.
But before being really able to imagine that this experience was not a failure, it tooks me time and additional progress.
Because in the most lively of the experience, submerged by the symptoms and the suffering, confronted with those whose ego spread(displayed,deployed) inexorably in the "to make" and the " I know ", who the omnipotence had not been affected yet and who sent back to me that, they, had not fallen, I felt rather pathetic. I perceived how to be sick was perceived as an inferiority which consolidated many people in their feeling of superiority or their certainties. I did not have grip anymore on nothing and no one and I had few things in which to hang me up.
Slow return to one
I had nevertheless the attention and the presence on myself, in rare moments but in a continuous way, because when the suffering was too intense, I had no more one millimeter of distance and I found myself completely identified with what crossed me, for hours or days, until the suffering diminishes and then I could think again normally, believe that something could open again and that my life took its "normal" course. Several times the trust left me and profoundly I wanted to to give up the fight. If every morning I got up by reaffirming my desire to live, I asked to finish it, to be "called back" in the Great Whole, disconnected definitively. The life had no more sense in these days which were alike all and in which I was only surviving in an indescribable exhaustion.
Nevertheless, very profoundly in me, in a very tenuous way, I felt something, as a furrow which did not break and knew where it went. An invisible plow continued to dig my earth. Me, I was lost, destroyed, brought down, deconstructed, but something informed me that it was not a defeat, not a the fate, that it was the process and that probably the Life knew where it went. It was hardly audible and it did not look like some hope, but like an intelligence which knew the direction and which stayed up by my side.
Nevertheless, even if I understood that it was a process, I also understood that I could die from it without having had time to find the exit or the peace of mind. At nights when I believed that I could leave, where I thought desperately that I did not have time to achieve me, no more than I had had time to make a will (it seemed to me suddenly inconceivable to leave so all my objects, without being able to confide them with tenderness to the closest!), it is not the fear which embraced me, but an emergency feeling, of unaccomplished, trying to understand in what, to whom my days had been of use up to here. Then, went up the frightening report that I was not "ready" to die. Not ready in the sense, "not all right", but in more and especially, "not prepared" to break and to be in peace with the path which would have been able to be mine till this last hour.
And at the same time, I had the feeling that I did not stop dying for six years, that whole pieces of my building sank, that I was planed of everywhere in my structures, that I was purified by a fire which consumed the former and the useless.
I learnt of my spiritual guide that it is at the heart of the powerlessness that the sacred makes its nest. I was there. On the knees, crying all my losses, not knowing for which grace to ask.
What is it thus that held me "alive"? I wondered permanently about what held alive the humanity in its biggest challenges. I had no answer. When I was at the end of my limits, I just said: how did they make?
The thought of Christiane Singer which I admire so much the writing and the route, did not leave me all this time. Moved by her last book " Last fragments of a long journey ", I stayed as bewildered by her end. I thought: if her, she left, what can I do, I, in front of what crosses me? It was a big lesson of humility to agree on the destiny of each.
My intentions, my "will", my determination, seemed to me good little thing in the face of what annihilated me. I felt no power. Even if we hear so often that we are co-creative, that we have an unlimited power, where I was, I had difficulty in measuring it and I was not very sure to contribute to it a lot!
I had the impression to move forward connected to different levels. On one side, my internal strength which did not want to weaken, carried by my impulses of gratitude in front of the beauty, offered by the short-lived on which I fed; on the other hand, a feeling of total powerlessness in front of the mystery of the life and the death, in front of all which was removed from me, in front of the strengths which suddenly wake up and assail you. I was aware to be taken between my my unlimited part, connected to the divine, to the eternal consciousness, and the part the most limited in me, connected to my personality, to my humanity, to my flesh, to my body so difficulty "controllable " and repairable!
I feel in me, really, or at least I saw very clearly, this impulse of life, these projects which waited to open, this drive which tried to find its fire, I saw taking place all the possible, they were almost at the end of my fingers, but on the other side of a border and everything remained impossible. I was the witness of my powerlessness, a strength stronger than my own desire. A lead screed recovered me, I did not manage to pass through and no thought could become a reality for sometimes very simple and ordinary things. I even had no strength to discuss me, I just wanted to roar to be as immured alive.
The meeting of memories
How to explain six years of suffering and descent into hell? By a lack of intelligence, consciousness, desire to live, of will to be cured? It would be so reassuring for the most part of people! So each could feel protected from what can arrive overnight, the disease as the death and especially the unbearable suffering stemming from past.
If the disease was the signature of a lack of consciousness, how to explain that so many very advanced people on the path, so many saints, nuns, or gurus, are confronted with it?! The disease remains stigmatized as an experience today which arrives at people who " are not in the good path", " who have something to understand ", " who are not in the light ", " which pays their lack of lifestyle ", in brief, I heard so many ineptitudes in this connection which could give to smile by their naivety and their peremptory insurance, but when we are at the heart of the storm, it does not make laugh at all. What is sure, it is that the only thing which is to understand, it is that there is something to cure.
And that we cannot cure with words and methods using the same ill-treatments undergone in the past.
Every being meets one day its limits. Or not. The illusions are numerous and we are so much limited that only the humility should be our guide in any event. It would be so preferable to say " I do not know ". Because those whom I met and who told to know, spoke about something which they did not experience. Just like I could make it myself a few years ago, before this crossing. Yet, it is the experience, only the crossing of the experience, that allows to speak about what crossed us …
In the process which was mine, nothing of the consciousness or the felt had disappeared. On the contrary, in time, both increased and went to meet this cellular memory which oozed of everywhere and which it was necessary to welcome. No snap of the fingers, no will could make me go out of what made me sick. We approach this type of stage with all the veils and the repressions left in the past, as long the past of the childhood, that the transgenerational, even karmic past.
For my part, the strength of this memory was so powerful, so mortiferous that nothing of it I had learnt, my faiths, my knowledges, my thirty years of "personal fulfillment" was not capable of "understanding", no more than " to welcome " what appeared so suddenly and so intensely in my life.
And I repeat it, no "will" has action on this process. The will masters nothing. To want is not to be able to. At best I could keep as closely as possible to me, in the most intimate of my being, an intention : that to be cured and to bring me out of it alive. And there, I was sure of nothing, because the strength of what crossed me overtook me.
It was as a river in flood. If the human beings did not plan a dam or if the dam gives in under the intensity of streams, or if the nature does not set material resistance against this flow, then this water is going to invade everything, is going to flood everything. One will need that efforts and of time to take the rap, to clean the space bogged down by what the water drained with it, to dry up, sort out, re-order the space damaged by the flood and the devastating pool of mud.
This is the way had come and had penetrated my past, distant past of the first days, the first months, the first years when no word is still present to tell what takes place, no logic to explain the abandonment, the forgetting, the absence of link, the banishment.
No word. Only the putting in abyss. Only the body which knows, feels and "thinks" by its cells, by absorbing every engram, to be - a day perhaps - decoded in an improbable future. [6]
What cannot to be think, to be tell, joins with strength, seemingly invisible at first. But everything is intact, left in deposit in the material of our body.
The strength with which is going to express itself this memory is proportional in the intensity of the trauma and in connection with the stressful conditions of the present environment.
These conditions are indeed tolerant so that the body and the unconscious perceive the similarity between the present situation and the past situation. It can be of the harassment in the work, the violence, the disease, a mourning,… The life is going to put us in situation of to feel again what was in a cyst and what we shall be brought to recycle, as waste which it is necessary to transform, to deal to clean up a place.
Thus was enough a particular situation, in this particular case extreme for me as Lyme disease to be dipped back into the vulnerability, the pain (not understood, exactly like that arrive when babies cry and when no adult knows how to bring of adequate answer), the weakness, the fatigue, the loss of mark, the total powerlessness so physical as psychic, all these conditions which make that we become an ideal and so easy "prey" for other people who are going to rush into this fault and to throw all their faiths, all their reactions, all their ill-being with an intensity which would not so express itself in other circumstances.
So the wound of an other one, its weaknesses, are going to be able to play as before the behavior of the parent with which we were in link in past and which hurt us. It is all the problem of the dependence that resurfaces. An adult limits (normally) his mistreating actions towards another adult, but much less towards child who cannot estimate what takes place, nor to react or to avoid and run away. The dependence is the source of most of the ill-treatments : human being / animal, man / woman, adult / child, professor / pupil, leader / subordinate, every time there is a domination and an abuse of power of which we cannot extract easily. In certain situations, our defenses are decreased, allowing this domination and to be literally sucked the lifeblood out of by the system of other one.
Immune system and integrity
Here, in this disease, it is all my immune system which was lacking, among others physiological disorders, because the nervous system was also seriously affected, I was lived as a parasite up to the heart of my cells, my brain.
Immune system right-minded to sort out the one and the non-one …
At which moment, better than the early childhood, this border is at the lowest, almost abolished, our "one" being diluted in the "one" of our mother, our etheric body receiving and building itself from the etheric body of our mother, our body and our psyche not being separated from those of our mother yet?
Let us call back that the immune system puts seven years to build itself, thus that we are totally immature in the first years of the life and that we learn slowly to differ.
If everything takes place "good" or "at best", we are going to break up, on the condition of being safe, to having a territory and being able to pass by the stage of "no" without being destroyed psychically. The stage of in which the child learns to persist appears in the neighborhood of the fifteenth month.[7]
Without safety, without territory, "No" becomes obviously difficult and the child remains stuck in a mortiferous inhibition.
Also let us remind that according to the experiences of Henri Laborit on the stress and the observation of three possible attitudes in front of a stress, (attack, flight, inhibition), only the inhibition generates psychosomatic consequences. [8]
So the disease was configured for me as a place of regression towards the childhood where I crossed again the living conditions which had been so mortiferous for me, without adequacy with my elementary needs and my deep being.
Role-playing games
In this hypersensitivity revived by the disease, everything rushed in a aggravated way and the cellular knowledge of past, as well as the discernment and the knowledge of myself acquired by my progress, allowed to reveal unspoken, implicit, denial, incoherence, all which had constituted my acute but passive observation in my first years of life. I began to get and especially to live things, situations, behavior, which put me in big suffering, affected my integrity and obviously I found myself in the impossibility to be welcomed. Of course, I said to myself that it was me the problem, it was me " who was wrong ". I was not "adapted", it was necessary " that I had something to understand " (because we did not stop repeating it to me!!), that "I had to improve something", all these things which the child says to himself in the face of a parent who requires from him things against his deep nature and who uses the child to answer at his own lack of self confidence and at his dissatisfied needs.
So desire, love, presence, share, link, I was left at the door of all which could feed a relation.
I was returned to what my mother, by a deep cut with herself, had not been able to give me.
The impossibility to have the smallest places in the intimacy of other one, the ambivalence, the not recognition, the contemptuous and breakable word, the bad faith, the humiliation, the rejection of my body, the games of power, the manipulation, everything replayed in a more or less subtle, explicit or implicit way, through my powerlessness and my symptoms which grew up as the lack of empathy and presence showed itself as a bottomless cut where I could be neither seen nor welcomed for whom I was really.
Over time, I got that a structural, deep problem, prevented any link, possibly having nothing to do with love, even if de facto, it could not show itself and be offered, and that it had to see with the wounds of the past.
I was unable to see the correlation between my symptoms, which I put exclusively in link with a previous separation, and this current relation, and as well as in spite of the fact that I took back foot in life, that I took care well of me, the disease settled down in the chronicity, that my vitality decreased from month to month, that I continued to gain weight, and to swell (preferentially in the presence of the others!), and that my esteem of me was not more than a shagreen. Today, I can imagine that more I repressed what I felt and which did not suit to me, more my body decayed, as the child who is condemned to make die his deep Self, to continue to please his parents and not to disturb.[9]
" The better we know the story of our life, the better we can detect the manipulations, wherever from they come. It is our childhood which, if often prevents us from it. It is our old dream, never lived completely, to have good, loyal, intelligent, aware and brave parents, that can lead us not to see the bad faith or the unconsciousness (…). When the illusion so well meets our needs and our distress, it is longer necessary to open eyes. " Alice Miller, The drama of the talented child.
The manipulation concerns here all the strategies organized to monopolize the other one and make him available for us.
So I remained blinded, most of the time in state of confusion and quartered between paradoxical information.
On one side, I was the witness of behavior letting me believe that the other one was committed, while the person who was really available and requester in the relation, was me (moreover too much and pathologically available in view of all the space which the disease took, cutting me of the expression of my personal needs and leaving me, as the child formerly, in the only positioning that allows the dependence: be totally available on needs and on timetable of other one, to obtain some crumbs of love); and at the same time my body got all the signs of ambivalence expressed physically by the other one (because practically nothing expressed itself by the words), signs shown with strength and constancy, maintaining my suffering and a feeling of madness.
I lived more and more in situation of double bind. The more I gave, the less I received. And the more I began to rebel, to affirm my position and thus to answer less unconditionally to the unconscious needs of the other one, the more the other one left in the flight and the disengagement.
The body of the other one closed in front of me, while I saw as it opened systematically in front of other women, I saw how generosity, patience, efforts, were offered without limit outside, when I was entitled only to intolerance, impatience, stinginess and was mistaken for my vulnerability.
The disease had made me like " all small ". By the law of résonnance, what could be more effective to meet people, situations, behavior which were going to echo the way I had been treated when I was " all small "?
Go out of the disenchantment
But how far can we continue to protect the others, to undergo their wounds which hurt us and their mistreating systems even perverse[10], being afraid that our own truth could be hurtful for them? How far can we stay in the disenchantment? How far can we deny our needs and deep being? How far can we stay in the illusion? [11]
It arrives one time when, having expressed our needs and having had no answer, it is not possible any more. The internal truth asks for grace, whatever is the price to pay.
It is by bringing out of this invisible loyalty that it is possible to end the toxicity of past and that we can cure. " Each has to pay the price of its desire " said the psychoanalyst Willy Barral.
The loyalty had held me in a misunderstanding of myself and persuaded that I was the source of the problem, that there was something to change in me and that always by accepting more the requirements and the bad faith of others I would maybe be kinder and finally loved. The loyalty maintained me in the confusion, incapable to separate me from the toxic system which had served me as reference, and it deprived me at the same time of the discernment and the necessary resources to go out of the system.
Due to listening of myself, due to validating again all my intern felt and my feelings, to give the priority to what my body express and not in what the outside seemed to expect from me, the truth appeared little by little and raised as rocks buried under an earth more and more loose. The obvious fact of the non-welcome which I lived, swelled proportionally in my body which swelled in every collapse of the presence of the other one.
This priority restored in the felt, extended until the intuition, my antennas raised themselves. It was time ! given that several people had already seen and anticipated for several months what I would be forced to live and to see my own eyes, in the humiliation.
And my antennas told me that I was again in danger, that the other one, in its systems of flight, had put a lot somewhere else. On-surface denial, and nevertheless I had, profoundly, the conviction that something took place. The sky was suddenly loaded of a new energy which alerted me. As the child knows intuitively the estrangements and the treasons of her mother and understands that the reasons which we give him are never the real, I knew with acuteness that something built up somewhere else, and that I was subtracted from the truth, held in the secret of a psychic process which finality was the abandonment and my sidelining.
When I felt it, cutting the space in front of me from top to bottom, a sword got up. At the same time as an indescribable anger.
When the sword got up, did I arm myself my arm either my arm was armed by a strength bigger than me? Maybe it was the Life which protested in me, which required due and asked to find necessarily space in a system so mortiferous.
The strength which crossed me seemed me phenomenal, at the height probably of the opposing strength which was to gobble me down and let me died. I was stuck in indescribable, untranslatable hell and something in me got up and said: stop!
Within hours which followed, a sentence fell: " you are free and cured ".
The price to pay was of the same nature that when in the past I tried to say no to my mother and when I found myself in a system of vengeance and punishment. I paid generally dearly my attempts of freedom or autonomy, and my mother made me understand, at once clearly, that I was not any more " her daughter " and that she preferred me somebody else, a cousin generally, on whom she cross-posted(poured) her generosities, her presents and her attention.
So after this limit posed, I was "replaced" within one week and I also “paid" financially the end of this relation, by a debt which was not completely paid off to me. Finally, only practices which were common in my family system and the realization, the crystallization of which I could see here, in good conscience, and especially find the emotional way back that it woke, I mean furies and destroyers. These angers, lived inside, crossed me for days and days, in so intensive way as I considered capable of hurting others and especially myself. A massacre took place inside me. I had the impression to sit on a bomb, from which the load escaped and of which I was not any more in control.
But a part of this anger stood me and had returned me my dignity, my integrity, by ending the lie and the denial.
The healing
The "magic" of the crossed process, although very painful and traumatizing, it is that overnight I could again walk normally, to carry heavy things without not being overcome anymore, lowering me and raising me easily, I found my strength, my impulse of life, the streets of the city opened again in front of me, me which had remained stuffy during six years in a very restricted space and I took pleasure to return in feet of my meetings.
My body took its rights back, took out its "trash cans", did the cleaning. An asymptomatic cyst for years ignited all at once, in the point to become as big as an egg. My natural treatments did not get through it, and after the visit at the dermatologist and the antibiotic cream, some thick pus passed by during at least three weeks.
Really "disgusted", literally, by this end of relation, I was every day with nausea and my body began fasting, probably digesting things more important and more subtle than solid food. In one month, I had lost ten kilos, found a face, I had no more oedemas, I collapsed no more in the slightest effort, my skin which had become cracked as that of an alligator, had become again fine and soft, my opaque eyes had become again brilliant and my voice had become firmer and settled. A transformation that the people who had seen me one month before did not miss to point out me, as two of my therapists who noticed that it was " in the daytime and at night " and that I had been capable for achieving a real "revolution". For the first time, I did not really need a validation, so much the obvious fact was intensely lived in my body and that I felt this revival unconditionally.
I was "as before", in the sense where I found again something that I had totally lost at the time of the disease, and of course, I was not any more the same, transformed by the event and an internal freedom which was in germ and which wait to deploy.
However, everything is not solved in my life. A seized childhood, with needs denied in the deepest, leaves tracks. I thus have to conquer my present and my future. The life is powerful and fragile and nobody knows which is the next stage, the next test, because it is the Alive which comes to look in us what must be endlessly transformed. Funnily, I just ask the universe for a small break, which seems to me deserved well … I feel safe of nothing. Just attentive.
To take out memoirs of past goes " to relive his suffering ", as says it Arthur Janov[12], to go finally towards the autonomy. And " The real autonomy is preceded by the sensation of dependence. The real liberation is only once overtaken the profoundly ambivalent feeling of the infantile dependence." says Alice Miller.
Why can the experience take place, why this memoirs can be reactivated in a so intense way? It is Danièle Flamenbaum, author of the book " Wished Woman, desirous woman ", who put me on this track of understanding. If something is woken in a relation, it is not because there is no love. It is on the contrary because at one moment we touch this sensation of love or something which looks like it, and because as a consequence, we are returned to the first love story of our life, that from our mother.
But to find the real way back to love, it is necessary to find the way back towards oneself and the Self who was forgotten along the way.
" It is from this spontaneous, quite natural access, in his feelings and in his personal desires that the human being draws his internal strength and his respect for himself. He has the right to live his feelings, to be sad, desperate or to need help, without being afraid of perturbing somebody. He has the right to be afraid when he feels threatened, to get angry when he cannot satisfy his desires. He knows not only what he does not want, but also what he wants, and allows to express it - that it is worth to him being loved or hated. "
Here is the real invitation to freedom, to which we are still many to be invited, to cure and to grow up.
" We can change nothing of our past, do that the damage which were imposed on us in our childhood did not take place. But we can change, "repair" us, get back to our lost integrity. For that purpose, it is necessary to decide on us to consider closer the knowledge which our body stored on the past events, and to bring it to the foreground in our consciousness. This way is certainly uncomfortable, but it is the only one, it seems, who allows us to take out finally of invisible prison of our childhood and to transform us, of unconscious victim of past, in a man or a woman responsible, who knows his story, and lives with it ".[13]
Michèle Théron
Gratitude
A way lived in the solitude does not mean that we were not accompanied …
I thank all the people who were on my road, those who love me as those who hurt me, because all allowed me to move forward on the path of consciousness.
I thank the soul of P. for having participated in my cure
I thank JC for having shown me the path of the heart
I thank Ch. my friend, my sister of heart
I thank my therapists, D., Ch., C., and their benevolence which was as a balm
I thank M. my spiritual guide, to have allowed me to remain connected to the sacred
I thank the invisible presences, the mystery of the life and all which overtakes me,
I thank my parents, who gave me the Life
I thank my body, its intelligence and its strength
I thank the earth which carried me …
[1] See Boris Cyrulnik's book " Save - you, the life calls you ", where we see how the suffering can remain inaccessible for years; he quotes in this connection Nicolas Abraham's work " The bark (peel) and the pit(core/nucleus) " which establishes the best psychoanalytical theorization of the notion of " crypt ".
[2] We are equipped in fact from the childhood for the empathy, but our educational mode, the relational ill-treatments, cut us of this natural resource.
[3] René. SPITZ had demonstrated it by studying the functioning of nurseries.
In a model nursery, he notices that the children deprived of their mother present a sensibility increased in the infections (37 % of mortality) with compared with those of a parents' house that he followed simultaneously ( no death).
This is the way he grouped a number of grave disorders, engendered at the infants by a prolonged stay in a hospital environment, under the name of "hospitalism".
He indeed notices that in spite of attentive care, the children separated from their mother do not manage to develop normally. Their physical growth is slowed down, the resistance in the diseases decreases, the intellectual level decreases, the language remains rudimentary, the balance is present almost always.
This last phenomenon goes hand in hand with a major delay in the field of social relationships. The balance is the result of an emotional deprivation or an instability of the existential relations with the people of the circle of acquaintances.
In the syndrome of the hospitalism, the child sometimes hurts (he bangs the head or tears away(extracts) from tufts of hair) and disorders disturbed persons settle down: after the shouts and the tears of confusion and anxiety, the resignation settles down with the apathy, the refusal of food and the indifference. These disorders are stressed all the more as the separation arises prematurely and as it is long-lasting. For R. SPITZ, after the fifth month of separation, the disorders are irreparably fixed.
[4] " The child has an innate need to be seriously taken and considered for what he is. " What he is " mean : his feelings, his sensations and their expression, and this, from the stage of the infant. In an atmosphere of respect and tolerance for the feelings of the child, this one can, in the phase of separation, give up the symbiosis with her mother and carry out(achieve) his first steps towards the autonomy "; Alice Miller, The drama of the talented child.
[5] " To cross the worst moments of the life, which advised saint Silouane, one of the biggest spiritual of the orthodox tradition? In any case not to pray - how to pray when we are not more in relation, when in our interiority we have nobody anymore to whom address?
And there also, his word applies to every human being, whatever is its faith or its disbelief - " hold your breath in hell and does not discourage! ": you have the feeling that nothing more holds or hold you, but there is this breath which crosses you and keeps you nevertheless alive : concentrate on this breath, inspire this air which comes to you moreover and, by expiring, chase away what blocks you and suffocates you! You do not deny hell where you are; you do not cultivate the hopeless thought that nothing else exists : You put all your attention on this tenuous but stubborn breath which still speaks to you about the life. And it is through your body that the breath of a Presence is going to reach you little by little as the peace will invade you. ", Lytta Bassest, This link which never dies
[6] We resort to mechanisms which allow us to avoid the reality when it is unbearable. We repress the harmful information and we store them, while waiting for to be able to treat them. Arthur JANOV quotes an experience led in a laboratory to illustrate his words on the expulsion:
" (…) In a laboratory of biology, an amoeba, unicellular being, swims in a Petri dish. A researcher adds some ink of China drops to the water of the bowl. The amoeba absorbs the pigment and keeps it in a vacuole. Then he replaces the water polluted by some fresh water. The amoeba evacuates then ink granules, takes back its normal state (…) ".
Farther, he returns on this experience to compare it with our human being's functioning:
" The behavior of this microscopic unicellular body so primitive is nevertheless revealing and allows us to understand better the human neurosis, because it is, under the angle of the evolution, the prototype of the human future. The way the amoeba handles the foreign intrusion of the China ink is similar to the one with which we handle our traumas. In both cases, an agent of stress causes in the body a mobilization of the defenses and modifies his normal functioning. The amoeba locks the unwanted granules into vacuoles; we repulse the harmful information and store it in our brain (…) ". Arthur Janov, in The Body remembers, p 18, p 26
[7] The stage of "no" denotes the acquisition of a capacity of abstraction, revealed by a faculty of judgment. For Spitz, "no" is the outcome of a long process of somato-psychic maturation which opens the way towards the human communication. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Spitz
[9] "The adaptation to the parental needs often leads to the development of a" personality-like-if "(…) The child behaves so as to show only for what we expect from him (…) His truth Self cannot develop and differ because it cannot be lived. (…) There was a drying up, an impoverishment, a partial breathlessness of their possibilities. The child was hurt in his integrity, and it amputated him of the spontaneity, the life force". Alice Miller, in The drama of the talented child.
[10] I restore here in this term its sense stemming from the Latin etymology: in the sense of " changed for the worse " but also in the sense of "distorted", of the Latin pervertere, to overturn, to return, to turn upside down.
[11] Alice Miller reminds that the mistreated children are " without the slightest condolence for the child that they were, and this is striking all the more as these patients show not only a faculty of little common introspection, but another rather big capacity of empathy ". But " they do not take seriously their fate of the childhood, do not have no slightest emotional understanding of it (…). The original drama was so perfectly interiorized that the illusion of the " good childhood " can be saved ".
[12] Arthur Janov, The body remembers, be cured by reliving its suffering