Hi, my dear cuddle friends!
First of all, I hope you like my picture💕
Currently, I am trying to write my book called Thanks for kidnapping me about my childhood trauma and I will share with you what I’ve learned about having fun in life and designing a life that suits me like a beautiful comfortable dress.
There are many paths that lead to healing, to deep inner peace. After years of childhood trauma, which included torture and abuse, I found my path to peace. I’m still on this path. There are daily practices I engage in to help me feel more at ease with my past, present, and future. Today, I’d like to share a few of these practices and tools with you.
The details of my childhood trauma, my kidnapping, and transport from one country to another, are not the focus of this article. I’m writing a book about the full story of how it happened and look forward to sharing my story with the world. But for now, the point of this article is to share a few of the practices I use to overcome the pain and confusion that came with my trauma.
I’m sharing some of the tools I use that helped me learn how to breathe again. These tools and strategies are how I pulled myself from the depths of despair, utter feelings of worthlessness, and an inability to be intimate with anyone. I went from feeling awkward and uncomfortable in my own skin to where I am now: A world traveler, a freelancer, a cuddle-advocate, and someone with a close circle of friends and a self-selected family.
Here are some of the tools and practices:
1. Understanding forgiveness
Do you understand what it means to forgive people who hurt you? Do you understand what it means to forgive yourself? I ask these questions because at one point I thought I understood forgiveness, but I didn’t. I thought it meant pretending to be positive about everything and stuffing my true feelings away. But that isn’t forgiveness. The result was I felt increasingly resentful and angry. It wasn’t until I finally gained a holistic awareness of forgiveness that I was able to fully let go and forgive my childhood captors.
This holistic awareness included many things, including opening up to other perspectives, understanding that my anger was only making me ill, and accepting what happened.
For many years, acceptance of what happened felt difficult. But in the end, it has been freeing. I’m no longer fighting with the truth of what happened. It doesn’t mean my abusers didn’t commit immoral acts. It simply means I accept my history for the good and the bad. It happened. I can deny it, but denial leads to more pain. Through this acceptance, I was able to start opening up and letting go.
2. Letting It Out.
As a child, I wrote twisted, horrible stories that I tore apart before anyone could read them. At the time I thought something was terribly wrong with me for writing these words. But I later realized writing was part of my healing. I was writing about how I felt, without filtering. This gave me a window, an outlet to release some of the pain and torture I felt inside.
I’ve learned that when we suppress anger, it piles up and turns us into a time bomb, which eventually explodes.
3. What We Do to Others, We Do to Ourselves
Through internalizing and understanding this concept, I realized that how I treated others was how I treated myself. For example, if I felt overly critical (including to my captors), I was, in turn, criticizing myself. This isn’t an easy concept to accept, but it is powerful and cathartic. Whenever I was in a state of over-criticism, I felt bitter, resentful, and downright miserable.
This includes harboring negative thoughts about people. The more I felt anger and hatred toward my captors, the angrier and more unease I felt within myself. I still struggle with this at times and keep bringing myself back to centeredness, to presence. I consciously work to release those harmful projections.
4. Understanding Others and Their Perspectives.
I actively focus on understanding others and where they’re coming from, what experiences they’ve had that shape their behavior. My captors had a deep, dark history of being abused as children. In many ways, they believed abuse was normal.
When I reflected on this and acknowledged that they too were hurt, then I gained more of an understanding of what drove them to do what they did to me. This doesn’t mean I believe what they did was morally correct. Of course not. But understanding their perspective helped me peel away some of the anger and bitterness. This opened the way for more forgiveness and less resentment. If we all did this, the world would be more peaceful.
5. Learning From Others
Nobody has all the answers. I certainly don’t. I read a lot of books and listen to audios on different subjects, including trauma. We are fortunate to have the internet and a plethora of platforms, forums, books, podcasts, videos we can access.
Hearing about other’s stories helps me to understand what they did to heal. I also appreciate authors and speakers who discuss the many intricacies of trauma and ways we can overcome it.
Healing is a journey! And along my personal journey of healing and life, there is always something that I can learn from someone else’s perspective and experience.
I don’t have a magic formula for healing. Nobody does. If someone says they do, run in the other direction. Instead, what I have discovered are a few key tools and understandings. These have helped me feel at peace with my story, my past, and my life. It’s my hope that one or two of these tools also help you!
I wish you peace, my dear cuddle friends!
-Lang Amor
