When I think back on my childhood, I get a duality of feelings that might seem illogical and impossible to exist together. But yet, they do.
One part of me, still feels like a victim to my parents: They severely abused me through my first 18 years of my life: physically attacking my body, compromising my integrity through their intense humiliation, filling me with shame and distrust with their emotional violence, hating me to hate myself and others. Living with them, every second I feared for my life, constantly terrorized by the threat that I could spent any next moment in danger and agony, helplessly surrendered to their arsenal of abuse.
Until my early adulthood, my feelings of shame, constant danger, humiliation, hate, worthlessness and mistrust were severely limiting my life in all kinds of areas. And I just did not know what to do with those feelings. Stuck. Unalive.
Yet, once I started to free myself around my 30th year of my life, I was required on a very deep level to feel, accept, and take my position regarding everything that happened.
Taking my position, turned out to be the opportunity of a lifetime.
When confronted with the fact that my integrity was compromised on such a deep level, I can only respond with something so powerful, and so constructive, that it can withstand the full destructive forces of what was done to me. Anything less than that will keep me in misery, staying unalive.
Most of all, it should be authentic. I definitely should not depend on anyone else: As soon I leave the speech of a guru, exit any church, or put down some bestseller book, I am back on my own two feet again and will collapse under my own misalignment.
My response can only be an extension of the essence that I am, my unfolding experiment of being life itself. And since I am evolving, my response is evolving as well, allowing myself to make mistakes and receive victories. This is the only power that is real to me, that I myself can evolve and put into action, that I can take responsibility for and depend on.
So I was required to take a position, regarding my childhood full of abuse. When I think of getting punched in the face, being kicked while laying on the ground, waking up with wounds on my back, getting intensely humiliated, living a life in which no one really loves me, never smiling, preparing suicide, feeling completely alone, getting emotionally penetrated, and being in intense hate and fear: I discovered an immense richness in comforting myself with acceptance, trust and dignity.
All of my feelings are true, all of my feelings matter, all of my life really happened and is becoming part of my dignified truth. Giving myself so much love, I can allow myself to cry and sooth myself in face of so much horror. I do my best, and it is 100% my right to fully live. Through this, I feel that the only thing that truly matters to me, is living from my softness and protecting it. And by that, honoring the softness in other people as well. Because this balance will allow beautiful life to come into existence, as I know from restoring my own inner balance.
In the end it is not about what happened to me, but how I respond from my core, because that shows and helps me to discover who I am. Because if my response does not work, if it will not eventually give me peace, then it is not who I truly am, or else I would not be life. And in the end, it is about who I am, exploring my beautiful softness.
I am the light through my own darkness.
So next to many other feelings, paradoxically, an immense gratefulness is growing for this opportunity of a lifetime: the deep invitation to discover who I am. Logically: after having discovered so much about myself, how couldn't I be grateful as well?
I call myself to step into this world from my deepest softness: Being able to feel what I am to the core, irrespective of any context, is a wonderful existence I want much, much more of. I am not my abuse, I can survive anything and stay in my truth.
I will live my truth,
any moment of my life.
That is my responsibility,
my power,
my joy,
my life.