I’ve been working through the process of living with the legacy of trauma. The overwhelming, unbearable, and unbelievable thoughts and feelings. For a long time, I tried to push them away so they wouldn’t hurt me. And it worked for a good long while. Then one day, I found that pushing those feelings away was also pushing away the feelings that I wanted. Joy, happiness, calmness, peace. The challenge was that I expected myself to solve or fix these difficult emotions, since they seemed problematic in my life. When I couldn’t find a solution, I felt like a failure, which just added one more difficult feeling for me, and created a cycle of difficulty.

I’ve since learned that there is no solution to these feelings. These feelings exist in me because I was put in an impossible situation. The feelings make sense because the situation was, legitimately, overwhelming, unbearable, and unbelievable. So feeling those things is the exactly correct human response to the experience. If I don’t feel those things, then it means that I’m trying to push away my foundation, my fundamental human experience.

So, when there is no solution to the feelings, what does one do? I’ve found that welcoming these feelings lessens the cycle. I don’t have to feel like a failure because I’m having emotions. I’ve also been lucky enough to have found a therapist who does Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT, or “tapping”). This has allowed me to welcome the difficult feelings and emotions while still keeping me in the present, reminding my body that I’m here now. Previously, the feelings and emotions brought me back to the previous, unresolved trauma. I lost the feeling of being a grown up. Instead, I was once again the vulnerable little child. For the last couple years, my therapist has helped me work through a variety of things that have given me the ability to now welcome the parts of me that I pushed away for so long.

She also introduced me to the Tapping World Summit which had slight variations on the tapping technique. These variations helped me improve my ability to hold myself gently. From that, I find that I can tap and ask my overwhelming, unbearable, and unbelievable parts to come visit me. I want to make sure that they know that they’re important and that they don’t have to be loud for me to pay attention to them. Especially since the tapping helps me stay present in my grown up self while I invite the difficult parts of me to share their knowledge and wisdom of the human experience.

I once read a story about a Buddhist nun who would pray for adversity. As I remember it, it was because adversity clarifies the mind and heart, and shows you what is important. When I initially heard that story, I thought to myself, “who would ever pray for adversity?” I’m still not sure I’m ready to pray for adversity since I’ve had enough adversity for the span of my life already, but I understand her perspective in the mornings when my body is tense, and I ask for my “adverse” feelings to come visit. When I do that, and I’m tapping, things soften. Each day, a little softer.

Some days, there are new layers that fire up the emotions and I feel like I’m moving backwards and things are getting worse. But in the larger arc, things are softening. Life is easing. Because I’m listening to the fear, anxiety, sadness, grief in these overwhelming, unbearable, unbelievable experiences. And that’s the solution. Just being with them. Not trying to fix them, not pushing them away, just being with them. And my body slowly is learning that they are just human experiences and that they are all safe, and that I’m safe — even when I invite them to visit me. Maybe even especially when I invite them to visit me.

Hm. I had great plans that I was going to structure this writing as a “Why” section and “How” section and now it seems like it turned into a story that kind of fuses those together. I like to read articles that wrap up nicely. But since this is a bit of the story of my life, which is unresolved, I think I need to leave this article a bit unresolved as well.