Aspects of Healing

Aspects of Healing. That is the name of the chapter I am currently working on in The Courage to Heal workbook. And I have to say it's the hardest one yet. It asks you questions like..."what were your hopes as a child, and growing up? How were those hopes taken away from you?" It asks you in which ways have you been courageous, and what courageous means to you. There is a writing exercise where you are supposed to write for 20 minutes about how your hopes and dreams as a childhood were affected.

Obviously being abused affected my hopes and dreams. But in the midst of the abuse, I also was dealt the loss of gymnastics. I distinctly remember that entire process. Starting with the day my Mom took me to the sports medicine doctor to get X-rays of my feet, being told I had an injury that would not heal unless I quit the sport altogether, doing physical therapy, ice baths, and STEM treatments every single day, wearing a brace when I wasn't doing gymnastics. I remember it all so well. I remember my last day at gymnastics. How did I feel? I felt nothing. And I continued to feel numb for a whole year.

I guess I am realizing how traumatizing the second half of my 5th grade year was. Being abused, blocking it out because it was so terrible, realizing I was no longer going to be able to do gymnastics, finding out my parents wanted me to switch schools. At the time...I felt absolutely nothing. Today, I feel a very profound grief and sadness.

I wonder why I was so easily able to remember the loss of gymnastics, but blocked out SO much of the abuse. They both happened at the same time, I guess my brain just picked one of them to deal with, and figured I didn't have the energy to deal with the other one.

I am finding it really hard to finish this chapter in my workbook. It makes me so sad and just remembering what I went through, all the shit I went through, at that time...it feels too much.