Saturday, July 27, 2024
Is the United States backward, compared to Europe?
(To evaluate: how a given country handles engineering?
Old United States Design
Friday, July 26, 2024
Tuesday, July 23, 2024
Grief & Childhood (from daily ACA email)
"Genuine grieving for our childhood ends our morbid fascination with the past, and lets us return to the present, free to live as adults. Confronting years of pain and loss at first seems overwhelming."
We may have been going to meetings for many years, lamenting the slings and arrows of our recovery life. Perhaps we thought we were "Living life on life's terms": doing the best we could.
But often, progress seemed to come in dribs and drabs. This left us with a sense of frustration at the little spiritual progress we had made, despite our best efforts.
But what may have been missing was the willingness to genuinely grieve for our lost childhoods. Grief work is not about just learning to tell our story, but about starting to discover and express the underlying trauma and emotions. Doing this level of work is the true path to freeing ourselves.
When we are no longer held in place by the disembodied stories and the undercurrent of repressed feelings, we can begin to take positive action, change our life's terms, find joy in the present, and feel alive for possibly the first time.
On this day I will tell the real story of my childhood trauma. In doing so, I will free my True Self and enjoy this day my Higher Power has given me.
We may have been going to meetings for many years, lamenting the slings and arrows of our recovery life. Perhaps we thought we were "Living life on life's terms": doing the best we could.
But often, progress seemed to come in dribs and drabs. This left us with a sense of frustration at the little spiritual progress we had made, despite our best efforts.
But what may have been missing was the willingness to genuinely grieve for our lost childhoods. Grief work is not about just learning to tell our story, but about starting to discover and express the underlying trauma and emotions. Doing this level of work is the true path to freeing ourselves.
When we are no longer held in place by the disembodied stories and the undercurrent of repressed feelings, we can begin to take positive action, change our life's terms, find joy in the present, and feel alive for possibly the first time.
On this day I will tell the real story of my childhood trauma. In doing so, I will free my True Self and enjoy this day my Higher Power has given me.
Tuesday, July 9, 2024
What does it mean to be afraid of your own feelings? How does childhood abuse play into that?
[Answered on Quora.com by Melinda Gwin]
Abuse subjects children to incredibly intense negative emotions at a tender age. No one has appreciable coping skills at that age. We haven’t had time to learn them. We cry and expect relief.
Unfortunately, child abuse usually comes at the hands of caretakers; the very people children expect and need to save them, to teach them to calm down and soldier forth with courage, are the ones inflicting the pain.
Lessons are immediately learned: No one can help. No one will help. Even the spaces that seem safest are minefields waiting to explode. Tread carefully or run and hide, as any fallout must be managed by you alone. Nothing is safe and no salvation exists.
The resulting emotions aren’t exactly positive, and the early betrayal from caretakers makes even positive emotions suspect. If one protector could turn on you, causing that much harm, how much more dangerous is everyone else?
Love and trust become suspect, vulnerability becomes folly, because those emotions and conditions were exploited to deliver incredible pain early in life. A world without safety is a world without pleasure; all emotions, without exception, are or presage pain in this state.
Detachment, even dissociation and derealization, is a common way to manage this catch-22. It makes life less frightening by dropping the intensity to zero, though it accomplishes that by precluding joy and despair alike.
When no one protects us, we try to protect ourselves. Fear of all emotions, good and bad, is an attempt to shield oneself from betrayal and the vulnerability that allows betrayal.
Abuse subjects children to incredibly intense negative emotions at a tender age. No one has appreciable coping skills at that age. We haven’t had time to learn them. We cry and expect relief.
Unfortunately, child abuse usually comes at the hands of caretakers; the very people children expect and need to save them, to teach them to calm down and soldier forth with courage, are the ones inflicting the pain.
Lessons are immediately learned: No one can help. No one will help. Even the spaces that seem safest are minefields waiting to explode. Tread carefully or run and hide, as any fallout must be managed by you alone. Nothing is safe and no salvation exists.
The resulting emotions aren’t exactly positive, and the early betrayal from caretakers makes even positive emotions suspect. If one protector could turn on you, causing that much harm, how much more dangerous is everyone else?
Love and trust become suspect, vulnerability becomes folly, because those emotions and conditions were exploited to deliver incredible pain early in life. A world without safety is a world without pleasure; all emotions, without exception, are or presage pain in this state.
Detachment, even dissociation and derealization, is a common way to manage this catch-22. It makes life less frightening by dropping the intensity to zero, though it accomplishes that by precluding joy and despair alike.
When no one protects us, we try to protect ourselves. Fear of all emotions, good and bad, is an attempt to shield oneself from betrayal and the vulnerability that allows betrayal.
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