Letting go of the past, binaural/subliminal mp3 tracks

I've been getting a lot out of binaural beat recordings and actually also these binaural+subliminal message mp3 tracks from amazon.

I don't know exactly what's behind the subliminal message tracks (barely audible statements?), but I do sometimes have some new insights or feel totally novel ways after listening to these.

I picked out some that relate to what I know I need to work on, common issues for people with early trauma and reactive attachment disorder:
Letting Go of the Past
Positive Expectations
Anger Management
Start Loving Yourself
Relationships Insecurity and Jealousy

I find that sometimes I am the most resistant to the tracks that I probably most need, like "Letting Go of the Past." It's probably because these are very deep strategies I have and even if I know they are not great, I can be scared to give them up.

Listening to the one "Letting Go of the Past," I had some really novel reactions, thinking in ways I don't know if I have thought before.

My main thought is:
Wow, I didn't get what I wanted as a kid, and my chance is over. I'm never going to get what I wanted as a kid, since I'm not a kid anymore. That's sad that I had that deprivation back then, but also I can give up the pointless effort of trying to fix it.

I don't need to have a condition where "things are not ok until I fix this wrongness and deprivation that happened to me." (Lots of people including me are into that, where they feel like if they just get this next thing or get this extra accomplishment or fix something else in their lives, then maybe finally everything will be ok. It's like a mouse treadmill.)

It's more like, true, I had wrongness and deprivation in the past, and that's ok. I don't have to do any additional activities in my life now because of what happened then. I don't need to get justice, fix it, erase it, prove it wrong, etc. I don't need to wreck the present by trying to change something that can't be changed: the past.

It's also kind of a loss of hope, losing the hope that one day my childhood would be ok. One day I'd assemble all the parts and have a loving Dad, a boyfriend, everything as I wanted it, so that I'd finally feel satisfied. I'm not going to get that. Where many people have happy fulfilling childhood experiences, I am always going to have some holes. I have the particular childhood experiences and memories I have, and they are mine. I'm only going to be able to guess at what it's like to have a different kind of childhood experience, just as others are only able to guess at what it was like for me.

I think it can be hard to let go of the past when you had traumatic situations, because it feels like justice has not been served yet. You're like, wait, we can't go onto the next stage, Mom/Dad -- you haven't paid for, much less acknowledged, what you did at this stage! It's like you don't want your parents to get off relatively free for their crimes simply by escaping into the next time chunk. It can be maddening because when you finally get your finger on what it was they did, they're already several time chunks past it and the statute of limitations has sort of passed. You're left with a vague sense of duty to the early you who knew that something was wrong and this can be very gripping.

But all there is is the present and it does no good to live the present in the service of the past. The past you doesn't exist anymore so she's not going to know if she gets justice or not. Trying to fix the past is like having a bad dream and then spending your life trying to get justice for what happened in the dream.

The past is basically a dream at this point. Everyone will see it differently. It's ok if you feel indignant about it. Chances are there was lots to feel indignant about. But beyond pointing out clear, objective things that happened (confrontation, works better when what your parents did was clear), there's not a lot you can do. Instead, I guess the thing to do is to watch out for yourself better now. Learn the lessons of the past. Instead of trying to fix the past, try to fix the present, and maybe the past won't bother you so much?

I don't know. These are all new thoughts for me (written while listening to the track).

- - -

I also had this feeling of hurtling into my present self, of myself being stretched between now and somewhere far away, and having it recoil and jump into the present, like a Slinky that had been stretched out and then released to come back to where it was.

- - -

Reliving abandonment trauma with a positive outcome

Alright, so at this point I know I need to create a trauma blog to express what I am going through.

I just can't say enough how intense this is, trauma therapy and the nervous system reorganizing.

It's something like a very long drug trip that never ends, where you never go back to how you were before.

I feel good being able to describe what is happening with adequate analogies. If only I can get an analogy:
1) It finally makes sense to me, and
2) I know that I can pull that out of my hat if I need to explain it to someone else.

Another one I came up with earlier was that these abandonment triggers are like going through drug withdrawal in rehab, but having the drugs you are withdrawing from given back to you and taken from you randomly, so that you oscillate between your nervous system crying out for them and going through physical (HPA axis, digestion, energy, physical symptoms) withdrawal and then what feels like complete relief and euphoria and everything being as it should be again. (Where when you feel that the person is distant and you can't talk to them/be around them it's like drug withdrawal, and when you are in touch with them and things are good between you again it's like being satisfied again.)

The more trauma I process, the more strongly I feel these two poles. The "complex PTSD flashbacks" are so intense and so physical that I worry I might be physically harmed or get sick from them, and sometimes I do develop a sore throat. But as this article states, the feelings are always easier to handle if I just allow them and don't try to make them go away.

It's funny because the past few times when I have gotten back in touch with my partner after a time of crying out and needing them "no matter what" (it feels), I have felt such intense and wonderful physical relief. I felt it again now just thinking about that situation, of not just feeling safe but feeling capable.

It sounds perverse but I feel so capable and great in the world when I can call my partner 20 times when he is in the library and doesn't want to be called and finally he picks up. That is like "Major Success" for a baby. That's what the attachment system evolved to do. I get a very big built-in reward for doing that. My body says, "Good job baby for not giving up, for continuing to cry. You saved yourself from certain death. Here are some wonderful chemicals for your trouble. Keep it up!"

Maybe I can just run through a "positive outcome" for attachment trauma in my mind over and over, where I'm a baby crying in the forest ... or where I'm in "that place" (people with trauma might know what I mean), and then I cry out and reach out and someone or something comes and then All is Right With the World again.

They say that that kind of therapy is useful for survivors of adult trauma: where you relive the event but do something that shows your capability to protect yourself, like using martial arts on an actor who is play-acting your traumatic scene with you.

It's almost too much to imagine reliving that story with a happy ending. That "place out there" has seemed until now way beyond the reach of any human being, somewhere that only existed for me. It's just delicious to imagine that someone else could be with me while I felt it that perhaps if I cried out while I was there, someone would come.

- - -