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My Pain is My Power
Two weeks ago I started seeing a therapist. During the two times we met, we talked and went over the details of my past. We started with memories from my childhood and moved towards the more recent past. We made a plan – a timeline of particularly traumatic experiences and we’re going to work with each memory and event separately. I haven’t had the opportunity to talk freely about my past and everything that has happened so far. I had a brief experience of therapy back in Ireland right after my sister died but at the time, I had no idea of the magnitude of traumatic stress I was experiencing.…
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“If I only could make them happy…”
My inner journey of healing and discovery is reaching a turning point. For the past 5 years, I’ve been digging and going deeper and more inward like it was my job. And it was my full-time job – I’ve taken this task of nurturing self-understanding and awareness so seriously, it became my primary focus and priority. Layer by layer, I’ve been stripping old programmes, paradigms, and conditioning. I was determined to get to the core of things, to the root of all pain and ailments, emotional and psychological. Last year in September, I stumbled upon one piece of the puzzle – my mother had suffered from a mental condition and…
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How my recent job rejection helped me heal and love myself
Last Monday I applied for a job position as a writer. It’s been many years since I worked as an employee and I’ve experienced a fair bit of disappointments on the professional front. But I thought all this was behind me now and since the opportunity was ticking my boxes and I met the requirements, I went for it with my best intentions. The hiring company was the online publication Bright Side and they wanted me to pass a test. After a couple of days of communicating with the HR, a broken link, and a slight delay, I got to the challenge. I didn’t pass it. But let me start from…
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An unexpected healing experience during the holiday season
I am writing this on 31 December 2018 and so far this holiday season has proven unexpected. For first time ever my partner, son and I got to stay at home for the holidays. No travelling, no other people’s traditions or expectations – we put the start and foundation of our family tradition. This is something I’ve longed for for a very long time. I’ve never had a strong family of my own and I barely have any memories of our time together, if there was any “togetherness” at all. Having my own family has always been like a guiding star for me – something I’ve always, even subconsciously, strived for.…
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How childhood trauma robs your power away and how to take it back
This summer I spent about a month at my father’s house with my son. It wasn’t our first time and, as I’d expected, it was tumultuous. A part of me knew it was time to stand up to some of the dysfunction in my family of origin and confront it. I could only hope that this experience was going to bring me some resolutions and it would prove empowering. And it did. For the first week or so the usual, generations-old, themes of guilt and shame, insecurity and inadequacy were saturating the air until it came to a boil. There were tears and screaming, anger and pain – suppressed emotions and…
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How trauma and codependency in childhood can cause toxic mommy guilt
I often question why I feel so much guilt as a mother towards my little boy. It’s not only crippling my own experience of being a mother but also sending inaccurate messages to my son which shape the way he views himself and the world. I feel stricken with guilt every time I feel the effects of my trauma. I blame myself for not being able to shake off the sadness or depression I feel, for the anger that sometimes I can’t hold or the negativity that my critical mind is keeping me a captive to. I feel shame every time I’m not at my best for letting my son down. When…
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The shame around being a “bad mother”
Sometimes I resent being a mother. That is not to say that I don’t love my child. Unlike my mother and some mothers who can’t love, I do love my son. With all my heart and soul, always and forever. I believe all mothers have moments when they resent motherhood. I believe that the contemporary expectation to be a non-stop happy and vibrant mother is not only unrealistic, it’s also severely shaming and stigmatising. It makes natural temporary feelings of dissatisfaction or unfulfillment fester into gnawing guilt. That makes me think how terribly unprepared and largely delusional so many mothers enter into motherhood, including me. I wanted my child with…
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Turning seasons and the possibility of new horizons
Weather in Bulgaria has turned and it’s been really chilly for the last couple of days – we woke up to a 1°C/33°F morning in Sofia. It will be getting slightly warmer next week but, even so, autumn is upon us. I just flipped the calendar into October (although there’s a few more days) because I usually remember to do it when we’re well into the new month so I used this rare opportunity of remembering in advance. Doing this I flashbacked to when I first put the calendar up on the wall early in January. And here we are, just a few more days and we will be in…
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What I learned from my physical and mental instability episode
(Long post alert) I’m just back from my holidays in Greece. We spent 11 days on the stunning islands in the Ionian sea on west coast of the country. I’d been prepping for this journey for months, organising diligently and planning fervently. I’ve waited passionately and eagerly until the day came. The complications started on the day before our trip. It appeared that our car’s documents were out of date and needed to be renewed. It was Saturday and we were supposed to leave the next day, Sunday. We decided not to risk passing the border with invalid documents so had to wait till the offices opened on Monday. That…
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Setting ourselves free from the pain of the past
I’ve spent a good deal of time digging up my past, exploring my psyche and searching for answers and truth. I found a lot of pain, sadness, hurt and sorrow. Not only that, of course, but I’ve been focused mainly on the difficult aspects since I wanted to heal them and release myself from the emotional prison I’ve lived in my whole life. For the first part of our life we don’t realise any of this, we simply act out these painful aspects of our past that were lodged into our subconscious. Sooner or later something happens to us to wake us up, become aware and heal the pain that’s…
