Healing

I don't know what I did to deserve it- the screaming, the cursing, and even the physical punishments that came every night. What could I say? I was only 7 at the time. I would like to blame it on the alcohol, but all of his friends drank with him and they didn't ever get mad and hit their children.

On repeat every morning he woke up with a hangover and minutes later he would crack open another can to get rid of it. This continued until I was in High School. Did he quit for his family? No. He quit because he thought he was dying. For months he could barely peel himself out of bed because of the way he felt. But, every day I came home, he was a different person. He didn't hit us anymore. He didn't yell at us like he used to. He didn't scream curses at us either.

So, I blamed the substance. I held onto the idea that if alcohol made him this way, it makes everyone this way and it in itself was something that should never be touched and whoever did touch it was no friend of mine.

I didn't find anything otherwise until I was 23. I started my journey towards healing and found along the way that it was irrational to stereotype and assume that based off of my experience with alcohol that every experience thereafter would be the same.

But that in itself is what a stereotype is. According to psychologists, a stereotype is a generalized belief about a particular category of people. It is the expectation that the people within that group, i.e., people who drink alcohol, would all share the same traits, in this case anger and abuse. We often use stereotypes as a form of protection, and turn them into biases. Biases by definition are prejudices in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair. At this time in my life I learned that I had turned my stereotype into a bias and I was being unfair and judgmental towards other people.

I also had learned that holding onto the pain and repressing the experiences I had was doing too much harm. Holding on to trauma and repressing it is like clenching your fist. The longer you keep your fist clenched, the less blood goes there and the harder it is to reopen it.

That's when I decided to start hypnotherapy. I found a certified hypnotherapist and had my consultation. Afterwards, the therapist felt confident that one session would be enough to rid my mind of the problems that it was having so I had my session booked under the title, "Forgiveness."

In the first 10 minutes of the session, I had my eyes closed. I was to picture my father in the chair across from me. We were sitting there staring at eachother and I had to tell him all the things I was mad at him for. I had to relive all the repressed experiences. I didn't have to say them out loud, but there were so many surfacing at once I kept getting distracted trying to block out the pain. I switched to speaking these out loud. Sobbing, I told my father all of these things that I remembered that had happened.

But, when it was over the roles were reversed and I had to respond like I was my father. I know he loved me, I know the shame he carries for the things that he did in the past and in my mind, he told me that. He apologized.

Then it was time to go into hypnosis. After laying back in my chair, I journeyed into my subconscious with eye fatigue, breathing, and counting. Relaxing further with every number between 1 and 10, I sank into my mind. First, I was shown two forks on a gravel road. I took the left hand path first, the path labeled "forgiveness". On this path I saw my husband and children playing in a clearing. A few minutes up the road, I saw my whole family, including my father, laughing and sitting around a fire. With that, the scene in my mind changed and I was taken back to the two forks. The therapist encouraged me to take the right hand path to see what I would miss if I took it. I walked along and saw all the same things, my husband, children, but with that I saw rejections from me going to family events, I saw myself still living in fear and anger until the bitter end of my life. I was happy in my life. But, I had missed out on so much with my Mom and Dad. I knew that the path of forgiveness was the right one to take, so as I emerged back at the fork I knew the permanent path.

The left hand path then led me into the control room of my mind. Core memories I had were illustrated in paintings and pictures that were hanging on the wall to my right, in the middle of the wall was a large mirror, and to the left of me were control panels and 3 dials. I could see many familiar faces on my wall- my grandma reading me books every Saturday night, my grandpa handing me one of his t-shirts to wear as a nightgown, snowball fights with my grandparents and brother, making my grandpa do school and getting to be his teacher, laying in bed before it was time to go to sleep and telling my grandpa stories about squirrels, baking cakes with grandma, laying on my bed with my mom talking to her about my life, watching Bigfoot with my dad, going to the woods with my parents and being at peace, marrying my husband, and even having my first child. I even saw the bad core memories- my grandpa getting sick, the day he died, laying on his hospital bed beside him, singing to him and telling him those same stories about squirrels, and even miscarrying one of my twins.

The hypnotherapist instructed me to visit the dials next. I walked over and on the wall saw the 3 dials labeled fear, anger, and sadness. I was told to turn them all down. On the panel next to me, after I did this, I saw the happiness rise within me. I walked to the mirror.

The therapist told me that my mind would manifest my healer in the mirror and the healer would fix whatever problems I had left inside my mind. Just like that the mirror changed and in front of me was a large owl. The owl took me in its wings and an abundance of light circled around my entire being. The light filled my mind and no longer was I plagued by the emotion I had felt 30 minutes before.

After this, I was pulled back into full consciousness and I emerged with all the weight I had been carrying gone. I have no longer felt tense around my father and am able to talk of the memories without any emotional attachment to it. So, if by my writing this you feel inspired to heal from something, to seek freedom from baggage you have been carrying around, I encourage you to try out hypnotherapy. It changed my path. It can change yours as well.