Chipping away at the early trauma

Awoke this morning as usual with terror from early trauma. Went into it--I'm alone, crying out for Mommy, and she isn't coming. Why isn't she coming? It must be that there is something wrong with me.

I've felt discouraged and pessimistic lately about working through this trauma. It colors so much of my experience. It strongly shapes the way I view and respond to events. It controls me! I've returned to it and looked at it again and again, wanting to dismantle it, to soften its power. I have felt discouraged, yet I persist because living under its spell is utterly unsatisfactory to me and finding ways to escape its spell is the only thing I long for in this life.

This morning I tried approaches that I'd tried before without much success, and it felt like I had some headway. For the thousandth time I went back into that memory. For the hundredth time I tried the approach of comforting my child self.

And it seems I was significantly more successful than before. In my imagination I was able to self-soothe. I stopped crying out for Mommy. I felt the sensations in my body, and they were good. I looked around my room and saw it as benign, even safe. I told myself that Mommy had really wanted to come and soothe me but that she just couldn't--my adult wisdom informed me--Mommy was living a life that absolutely prohibited her from devoting all her attention to me, as much as she might long to. And besides that Mommy's conditioning made it so that she couldn't fully be with me on an emotional level, but that could be OK and I could be OK and I could and would grow into being with myself that way.

It seems that I had built up to this incrementally over the years, the latest bit being a Mind Clearing session a couple weeks ago during which I imagined in detail what might actually have been going on for Mom when she apparently didn't come to soothe me. As an adult I can see it is so commonplace that a parent with the best of intentions can't be their for their baby every time the baby is fussy. During the Mind Clearing session, I imagined that Mom was in the kitchen on the phone with the plumber she'd been trying to reach. She was very pregnant with my brother, and she was tired from a long, busy day, and she was in the middle of cooking dinner as well. And she was deeply disappointed, but at this point rather resigned, that she was often unable to soothe me due to my colic.

I imagined that scenario, but at the time it didn't seem to affect my child self's conclusion that there was something wrong with me. But this morning it did seem to affect it.

This morning I also imagined a baby other than myself in the same situation, imagined her concluding there was something wrong with her, and saw how obvious it was to me that her mother's non-response had nothing to do with there being anything "wrong" with her. This is also something I'd tried doing at least 100 times in the past, seemingly without effect. But today it seemed to have an effect. There was an easing of the terror and a sense of being safe and OK.