This is a continuation to my previous post:
I suggest reading it first for context.
I mentioned in my previous post how the experience of feeling I couldn’t talk to anyone about something was what had opened up two days earlier for me. I had over the past few years been keeping a ‘secret’ for someone of which I felt I could not share it without creating compromise/consequences – and instead – sought to support the person as best I could. Though, two days before my first body stress release session, the person had shared his ‘secret’ with others on his own account. It was only then and the day after that I really felt (or rather, allowed myself to feel) the full extent of my experience during the years I had kept this ‘secret’. And I started seeing how keeping that secret had affected my relationship with others extensively, because where I wanted to share myself entirely with them, I held back, where they sensed I needed support, I didn’t allow them to support me by not allowing them in completely. And when you don’t allow yourself to relax around those closest to you – it’s going to start affecting your overall experience of yourself and your life.
I couldn’t help but ask myself why I had ignored all the effects that keeping this secret had had on me and why I had kept it for so long despite how it affected me. Each time this question came up, I would tell myself that “I wanted to, but I couldn’t, it wasn’t my secret to share” and all the possible negative consequences of sharing it would flash before my eyes.
But then – after I had the Body Stress Release session, I could see that I had been there once before – during my dance training – holding something within me, where I gave up on talking to people and looking for support. And then I looked further back in my life and saw I had done the same in my childhood – where I felt I couldn’t share what I experienced at home, that no one would understand or might even blame me for it. As I recalled those childhood experiences, I simultaneously remembered how I had felt isolated from others, because I felt I was just not ‘like others’, that they never really would/could understand me and that I would never really be able to be completely open with them.
That placed everything again in a whole different light – because when you’re not aware you do something over and over again, how can you be certain that you’ve really made a decision to take a particular course of action? When the past keeps repeating and you don’t see that it is – are you really choosing or are you simply repeating a pattern driven by the past? Isolating myself had been how I had approached these situations before, the only way I had ever approached those situations, so that’s what I had ‘fallen back on’.
When I then took each of the three ‘events’ – my childhood experiences, my time at the dance school and the recent secret I had been keeping – and ACTUALLY asked myself if there had been another way, if I had really made a CHOICE – I had to admit to myself that I hadn’t. With each of the three events, I could see that I in a way assumed that I had no other choice but to walk alone with a burden. With each of the three events, I could see that I assumed that terrible things would happen if I would reach out for support, only ever seeing the ‘worst case scenario’ as the possible outflow. With each of the three events, I could see that I never really took the time to consider my options, but always quickly came to the conclusion that there was no other way. But what’s more – with each of the three events – I had blamed others for ‘placing me in such a position’ where I apparently couldn’t speak to anyone – never realizing that the only person who had placed me in that position… was me.