Written by: Alana Kitari, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Every year, millions of men and women find themselves in an abusive relationship with an intimate partner, often repeating a cycle from early childhood. ¹ This article addresses how to break these unconscious loops and heal your trauma through the power of mindfulness.
“The paradox of trauma is that it has both the power to destroy and the power to transform and resurrect.” ‒ Peter A. Levine
There are numerous benefits to the practice of mindfulness; however, you may not have realized how important this simple modality is for healing deeply embedded trauma after surviving prolonged, chronic abuse and violence.
As a domestic abuse survivor who was diagnosed with cPTSD, ² I know firsthand how impossible it feels to stop the mental torture that binds you in chains of fear, despair, anxiety, and chaos after breaking away from your abusive environment.
Just because you are physically safe does not mean that you feel physically safe, emotionally safe, mentally safe, or spiritually safe. Your body will continue to stay on high alert, in a perpetual state of the 4F ³ trauma responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) until you learn how to process the trauma that has been imprinted ⁴ onto your cellular structure and regulate your Autonomic Nervous System. ⁵
The road to healing is often obscured by our traumas, as we follow an unconscious pattern of attracting the same type of experiences into our lives (different faces, but same types of abuse) until we learn how to break free from our loops of suffering.
And the way you break free is through the power of mindfulness.
This one tool can dramatically improve the length of time it takes to heal from your past pain and torment and stop the unconscious cycles for good.
Can you relate to any of these experiences?
You can’t trust your thoughts as they echo the abuser’s voice
You have emotionally charged flashbacks that intrude on your mind
You are having nightmares, sleep paralysis or night terrors
You are in a constant reactionary state, being triggered often
Your mind feels like a prison, so you try never to be alone with your thoughts
You choose avoidance & escapism to cope (abusing substances, overeating, gambling, gaming, shopping, casual sex, etc.)
You’re too afraid to look at and feel all of your pain
You have panic attacks and are filled with anxiety and worry, often
You feel you are damaged, broken, and beyond repair
You feel unworthy of love, happiness, and joy
Whether you’re experiencing one or all of the above, mindfulness is your direct path to freedom.
Through my own healing journey, I have found three specific ways to incorporate mindfulness into my life that actively helped me heal from my cPTSD.
The best part? It doesn’t take any fancy equipment, and you don’t need money for a therapist, counselor, or coach; you don’t need to buy expensive courses or go to live events to be trained on any secret method, and you can use these methods anytime and anywhere, as often as is necessary.
Try these techniques, be consistent in their implementation, and watch as your healing journey progresses, bit by bit, until one day you realize that you have been liberated from your past pain.
1. Making the Choice to Heal
Healing is messy, chaotic, intense, and arduous, which is why we see so many messed-up adults wreaking havoc on their environments instead of putting in the work to heal. The path of healing takes grit, it takes courage, and it takes determination, but most of all, it takes a specific and deliberate choice on your part. You must CHOOSE to heal and keep moving forward at all costs.
I mistakenly thought I had already healed from the wounds my father had inflicted on me when I met my ex-husband. I believed that because I had genuinely forgiven my dad for my abusive childhood, it was the same thing as actually healing from the residual effects of what I endured. I was unaware that I continued to trauma bond with romantic partners and friends, unconsciously trying to heal my childhood pain until the severity of the living nightmare I was in came crashing down into my awareness one day. I suddenly realized that I had repeated another loop of suffering as I found myself in the same type of toxic relationship I had already experienced before. Except for this time, it was much worse!
That experience was so traumatic, so egregious, and so offensive to my very soul, that I vowed to myself that I would do whatever it took to finally heal my pain, and NEVER attract the same type of partner into my life again. I knew that if I didn’t heal, I would one day find myself in the same situation again, and that thought was so horrifying that I committed fully to my healing path.
There will be times when it feels too hard to keep going. When life is simply too much to bear, and when the shadows pull you back down into those familiar feelings of fear, doubt, and disbelief, you will have to choose again to seek out the path of healing.
Make the choice to heal as often as is necessary ‒ over and over again ‒ recommitting to your healing because you deserve to be liberated from your trauma and to live a life that brings you happiness and fulfillment.
2. Becoming the Observer
This approach to mindfulness is all about observing your thoughts, feelings, and emotions in the present moment – but without judging them as good or bad.
The act of observing without judgment allows you to watch your thoughts & behaviors as they unfold without vilifying yourself in the process. For example, if you are in a highly reactionary state, you may explode in anger at someone who triggers you and then feel really bad about it afterward. At the moment, you are watching your reaction, observing how your body feels, hearing the words that are raging out of your mouth, and feeling the intense emotions gripping you; but you can do nothing to stop it from happening! All you can do is observe the meltdown as it happens in real-time.
Even if you can do nothing to stop your triggered behavior as it is happening, you can observe yourself in this reactionary state and then contemplate your reaction after you have had a chance to cool down. By realizing that these types of automatic reactions are a by-product of trauma, you can show yourself compassion and love instead of spiraling out in shame and guilt.
When you choose to start actively observing yourself, you will often receive swift backlash from the wounded parts of you. Your pain will attack you in the form of mental criticism and harsh judgment, and if you do not observe yourself with compassion and love, you can make the trauma deepen and prolong your healing process.
Learning how to witness without judgment is not going to come easy. It will take dedication on your part to keep practicing how to observe yourself and not listen to your wounded self. Over time, this process will get easier until you are able to be mindful even when you are triggered and choose a better response as it unfolds before you.
I have some great free CBT ⁶ resources that will help you introduce mindfulness into your healing journey. It allows you to track your triggers and analyze your intrusive thoughts and avoidance patterns in order to help you choose a better response the next time. Using these resources consistently will help you take back control of your mental health and systematically eliminate the echoes of your former trauma.
3. Reclaiming Your Worthiness
This last method of mindfulness is incredibly important and will help solidify your efforts along your path of healing from cPTSD. When you were still a victim, the abuser fed lies and fears into your mind, heart, and soul, which stripped away any feelings of worthiness you had that you deserved something better.
You may have resisted them at first, but over time the continual mental assault began to affect you deeply, and you started to really believe those lies and fears. Every traumatic experience with your abuser deepened your feelings of unworthiness, pulling you further down into despair and playing an internal narrative that this torment is what you deserve in a seemingly endless loop.
This lie ‒ that you deserved your mistreatment ‒ is a pervasive one. As an adult, we make poor decisions that are fueled by our unconscious patterns of childhood trauma, which leads us to these abusive environments. It can be really easy to get lost in shame and guilt for past mistakes and failures, especially if they actively harmed yourself or other people in your care (like your children).
As survivors, we can drown in these emotions if we don’t know how to reclaim our worthiness. The best method I have found to do this is to process the grief of our poor decisions. This method piggybacks off the second one, as it is imperative to stay in the observer mentality when uncovering our internal unconscious fear-based patterns of thoughts that directly fueled our poor decision-making.
Allowing grief to come to the surface and be expressed in a safe environment loosens its grip on our hearts and releases our feelings of shame and guilt.
Grieve for the younger version of you that was mistreated in early childhood, grieve for the loss of what could have been if you had not experienced that trauma, and grieve for the former versions of yourself that did not have the right tools to make good decisions, grieve for the choices you made that led you into a harmful environment, and grieve for the effects it had on you and your loved ones.
Feeling ALL the grief of your past suffering through the awareness of self-compassion and self-love is the most liberating tool of all. By allowing yourself to grieve fully, you will open up new awareness that leads to reclaiming your worthiness.
You will believe you are worthy of healing.
You will believe that you are worthy of compassion.
You will believe you are worthy of being loved.
Pursuing these three methods of mindfulness will allow you to reclaim what was once lost and rebuild your mental narratives to serve you instead of enslaving you.
Alana Kitari, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Alana Kitari is an Empowerment Coach, Mystic, Interfaith Minister, Speaker, Author, & Guide that assists others in healing deeply-ingrained trauma through a variety of modalities in order to live an empowered and authentic life. She specializes in helping her clients achieve deep internal transformation through ancestral shadow work, mindfulness, trauma recovery, & a variety of energy healing modalities operated through the lens of Divine Love & scientific understanding. Through her courses, masterclasses, and 1:1 coaching, Alana helps you turn your trauma into triumph.
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