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).

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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.

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Being body-directed while relating

I just scrolled through my blog so far and realized that every post seems to advocate a different approach:

-get to where you feel safe to feel (ok if you don't feel every last buried thing)
-say yes to feeling everything
-having a random improvement from reading something
-and finally, trying a trick to reduce the bad feelings

I guess what I get from this is that the trauma process has no definite prescription and it's not the same thing every day.

The body asks for what it wants when it needs it.

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Maybe that's why I've been having a hard time in my relationship while going through this. I've been so body-directed during most of this, where my body tells me "feel this," "do this," "do this other strange thing," and it all moves me forward, but it's very self-centered and about listening to the very sensitive needs of my body. But then my traditional mode of being with people has been to think the whole time I am around them, "What do they need? How can I keep from offending or losing them?" which is totally antithetical to this new way I am learning to be for trauma processes.

Maybe I will get to where I can have good give-and-take with others while still being directed by my body. In fact it probably will improve the quality of my interactions with others, since I'll be more in-tune. I do notice myself being more in-tune already and picking up on others' body language more and tuning into how they are feeling, not because I am in caretaker mode but because I'm feeling my body and I feel my reaction to their body too. (mirror neurons?)

I guess that's the way to go, building the capacity to relate while staying in the body. I might have to take it slow and start with pretty easy tasks, since I simply don't have any practice doing this. I'm back at less than a few years old - level of experience in this.

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Feeling feet and arms

After reading a friend's essay about psilocybin and OCD, I started feeling my feet and arms much more, maybe from the feeling of hope and safety the story conveyed, where mushrooms turned out to be a wonderful solution for some of the people interviewed in the story.

Maybe it was the feeling of inter hemispheric peace that got me to start feeling my body more.

It's so exciting to realize, "I have nerves down there in my feet!"

I actually have the capability to feel them!
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Poor mitochondrial function and ancestral legacy of trauma

Given that Acetyl-L-carnitine seems to help with PTSD and trauma, I wonder if people with poor mitochondrial function are more susceptible to trauma.

(L-carnitine improves mitochondrial function.)

That would seem to correlate with what I observe: These entire family lineages of people with low energy, poor mental health, accumulated trauma, as well as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune disease and other problems correlated with Type II Hypothyroidism (low mitochondrial function).

And these people tend to marry, because they have similarly low energy, low self-esteem, low mental health, etc.

It also could help to explain the seeming epidemic of trauma these days. While we have stopped the epidemics of infections with antibiotics (and people no longer die regularly from TB, etc.), we now have a lot of people surviving to reproductive age with poor mitochondria of the type that usually would have made them susceptible to death from infection, and these people are prone to having (and giving) trauma.

Parents' own mental illness and trauma seems to be one of the surest "infecting" sources of trauma for children. I feel like I picked it up almost directly in pristine form from my dad, like I have "exactly what he has," even though I don't know what he is traumatized about.

In an unsanitary world, I probably would have died from childhood infection. But instead I'm an adult with trauma symptoms ... that go down when I take ALCAR. Hm...

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