I recently had the pleasure of attending an excellent talk by Author, Colm Tobin. Amongst a number of other inciteful issues, he spoke about a time in his life when he recieved help from the Psychiatrist Ivor Browne, to face and process the loss of his father. Ivor Browne likened this work to removing a stone from a previously flowing stream – a stone that had stopped the stream in it’s tracks and forced the water to either alter it’s course or sometimes stop all together.
The traumatic events that we do not process healthily, that we do not truelly experience and feel, become like these rocks and although we think ‘oh that was years ago, I have dealt with all that’, if we haven’t really felt the feelings and learnt to get through them and continue on our way, they have a habit of remaining until we do so, and they can take alot of our energy to keep them in their place. Also our ‘flow’ is slowed, diverted and diluted. In order to learn from all our life experiences we need to actually experience them in the first place, sometimes this is just too painful to contemplate, so we tidy the event away into a drawer and we develop all sorts of clever strategies for not getting it out and really looking at it.
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