TRANSCRIPT
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So many people today live extremely unhealthy lifestyles, and that actually works to the advantage of keeping your trauma split off. But if you really need to connect with those traumas, feel their pain, and be able to grieve them and resolve them, living a healthy lifestyle does a wonderful service.
So what does a healthy lifestyle mean? Well, of course, all the other things that I’ve mentioned so far are part of it, such as journaling, self-reflecting, and analyzing dreams. But there are many simple tools for doing it. Simple for me to say, much harder to put into practice. But let me give a list:
Getting a good night’s sleep every night, going to bed at a reasonable hour, getting a good long night’s sleep, and waking up in the morning when the sun’s up. Eating a healthy diet, having good healthy food in the body, putting good nutrition into yourself. We can avoid drugs and alcohol. We live in a society where it’s so common to drink alcohol; it’s considered perfectly normal. But what is the purpose of alcohol? The purpose of alcohol is to keep us split off from ourselves, to allow ourselves to believe that we’re happy without actually doing the inner work.
Avoiding that? Ooh, it can bring up a lot of frustration. It can bring up social alienation. It can bring up internal pain. But sometimes that’s just what we need for self-therapy.
Being single? That’s actually not so easy. Being single, being celibate, not going out and having sex, not projecting your ancient unmet childhood needs through the sexual lens onto someone else and hoping that person’s going to rescue you. That’s the reality of what most sex is and what most relationships are. So if we can avoid that, we do ourselves a really wonderful turn in our self-therapy process because it brings us back in connection with who we really are and what our real needs are.
This is a risky one to say, but I think it’s very, very important: taking distance from one’s family of origin, getting away from your parents, sometimes your siblings too. Now that can be very painful for people, but again, often it’s vitally important. Because if you’re so close to the people who did the basic wounding of you, who were the ones who basically traumatized you, it’s very, very hard to understand what they did because you’re too close to it.
Sometimes we need a lot of distance to gain the perspective to really understand what happened to us and who we really are. When we’re really, really close to the people who traumatized us, often we see things through their eyes. When we take distance, and sometimes a lot of distance, we gain the perspective to see who we are as individuals, what our traumas really are, what our wounds were, what our neglects were. And this is vital for self-therapy. It’s like focusing the camera; it allows us to really see in crystal color where we came from and where we’re going.
Having good friends, strong allies. Now the reality is in our world, where the norm, the 99.99% of norm is very dissociated, there really aren’t very many wonderful allies out there. But there are some. And if we really work hard and really go out and look for good friends and look for good allies, there are people out there who can support us, who can understand what we’re going through. It’s not easy.
The problem is sometimes gaining really new friends who really love us for the reality of who we truly are. That entails letting go of old friends, people who really weren’t so supportive but were our primary allies in life. And it can be very damaging to a healing process to have one’s closest allies not really be supportive of one’s self-therapy process.
[Music]
The last tool for self-therapy that pops into my mind is having fun, going out and having a good time, enjoying life, seeing the beauty of what life has to offer. Because self-therapy, so much of the time, it’s just a painful, unpleasant process. So we need to balance it out with some enjoyment. Going out for an occasional good meal, having a good walk in the park, looking at flowers, smelling the roses, spending time with people that again really care about us, and doing it in a light-hearted way. Playing music, listening to music, maybe even watching some good television, watching a good movie.
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