Splitting

It's Saturday - I've got a whole weekend to fill. Sometimes this excites me - but often I just feel the pressure of my free time. It's kind of a throw back to when I was a kid. From the age of about 8, I didn't have any friends that I felt comfortable calling on and hanging out with. Due to a number of incidents in my childhood I withdrew from contact, and felt that if people wanted to spend time with me, then they would call on me. I longed to go out, but was frozen - I just didn't know what to do. I often put pressure on myself to go out, I made lists of things to do each day, but still was paralysed by fear and uncertainty. So I made my list at the start of the day, couldn't follow through with it, and then criticised my lack of guts just as I went to sleep. It was a pattern that I took through many summers as a kid and teenager.

So, these feelings still come up from time to time - more accurately they are judgements. I judged that I wasn't wanted, that I wasn't welcome. I judged that there must be something wrong with me. These were my interpretations of my world through my young eyes. I so wish that someone had helped me interpret it differently back then. But they didn't, so I simply got confused and in the midst of the confusion, my searching mind just split from the pain of the emotion, pushed it down. It was the only way for me to get by.

This splitting is what psychological 'trauma' is all about. When a traumatic event happens to an individual lots of emotion rises up, but so do lots of questions. The individual tries to make sense of the situation - tries to find answers to the questions that fit in with current beliefs, and make sense of the emotion. The left brain is the analytical side, and the right brain processes emotions. So, the individual in the midst of a traumatic event is trying to integrate the left and right 'brains'. When a satisfactory evaluation of the circumstance is not possible for the individual, integration cannot happen, and instead a splitting occurs between the emotion and the reasoning. This split in the brain is itself the actual trauma - the event is just the stimulus.

On a side point, a key to dealing with homosexuality and restoring heterosexuality is to deal with the underlying traumas from childhood. This involves revisiting the buried emotion, releasing it and reinterpreting the event as an adult. This process enables the brain to reintegrate, and helps to heal the personality. Few people in life seek to do this in general, whether they struggle with SSA (same sex attraction) or not. But this is something that we can certainly do - and it will help to bring freedom in so many ways - therapy, support groups, experiential weekends, psychodrama are all vehicles for doing this.

So back to the present. I am much better at stepping out in relating to others. I have developed greatly in that since a teenager. I still make lists from time to time, but I actually can act on them these days. Some of the old fears, and old judgements remain, but I'm working on those. So, let's get going... I choose to enjoy this day!