Reframing the Hardest Parts, cont’d

Reframing the Hardest Parts, cont’d – The Eyes Are the Windows to Our Soul

One of my favorite chapters in Becoming an Empowered Survivor (BCAES) explores my reframing experience, healing my relationship with my grandfather. He was the first person who sexually abused me when I was a young child. He died in 1994, more than 15 years before I began the most intense and focused part of my healing journey in 2020. The abuse I suffered from him, including that sexual abuse event and my associated emotions and negative “I” statements, was the first trauma that I healed. It was my awakening during a hypnotherapy session to the reality of having been abused by him that dropped me on my healing pathway.

Reframing the Relationship

In BCAES, I wrote about reframing the relationship by working through his eyes. Engaging in EMDR with my trauma therapist, I reframed his eyes from predatory eyes—me as his prey stalked through eyes that scared the hell out of me for many years—to googly, toy eyes as you might see on a stuffed animal. This visual imagery in my mind moved me from having paralyzing, fearful thoughts about him to being somewhat amused by the crazy movement of those toy eyes when I later thought about him. As my healing progressed further, I released all fear of him such that he no longer had power over me. 

But since then, I have continued to have experiences reframing this relationship. At first, I was confused about what I still needed to heal, but today, I believe these events are occurring so that I can share with you the power and extent of healing possible for us, including how we can heal spiritually through our souls. Perhaps my soul, too, continues to heal.

Radical Forgiveness

As part of my decision-making process to write BCAES, I researched books about forgiveness. I was thoroughly dissatisfied with the results because most talked about “steps” to heal, suggesting some linear process or advanced opposing viewpoints about forgiving to heal or healing to forgive. Linearly progressive steps and these opposing views are not how healing works in my experience. But, buried in all this, I found one book that piqued my interest. It’s a book about radical forgiveness, and what the author, Colin Tipping, asked me to consider is… well… radical. 

Reading his book is where I came to understand and believe that my soul made a pact with my grandfather when I incarnated in this lifetime. Where we agreed that his physical form would be the first person to abuse me. So, if that’s true, then the theory is that there is nothing for me to forgive. Instead, our souls simply did the work we agreed on in this lifetime.

I came to accept this because I believe that my life’s purpose, my soul’s work in this lifetime, is to have been a victim in the moment of trauma and abuse, survive, and then heal so that I can share the power of healing with others. Perhaps with you. I know it’s a radical proposition, but it is one that I believe and take comfort in, knowing that my soul has just been doing its work.

Shortly after I completed writing BCAES, which includes the longer story about reframing his predatory eyes to googly eyes and my experience with radical forgiveness, I had another spiritual experience related to my grandfather. This time, I was doing Reiki energy work with a gifted woman led by her spiritual guides to help others like me. 

Spiritual Awakening

During the Reiki session, as my therapist worked over my body, my 5-year-old inner child came to my mind. I’m always happy when she comes to me because I have not known her long. In fact, for years, I was puzzled when I heard other people talk about the inner child because I had never met mine, so I had no idea what they were talking about. 

I met my inner child, or children in my case, at the end of my hypnotherapy session when I stepped back into my safe space just before coming back to conscious awareness. They were standing on the beach when my hypnotherapist told me to go there in an effort to calm me down from the terror I was experiencing. It was as if they were there to meet me for the first time and to help ease my terror. It was as if they were there to tell me everything would be okay despite the hopelessness I felt as the hypnotherapy session ended.

On that beach, I met me at five years old, ashamed, alone, and with her head tilted toward the ground. It took some time as I healed, but today, most of the time, she stands with confidence. There was also me at eight years old, with a “f@$! you” attitude and burdening the shoulder of protecting us. I love her protective nature, but she protected us by putting my feelings associated with hurtful and damaging events into boxes and pushing them into the wall I built around me. The wall was a fortress. It did a great job of protecting me but was the cause of my inability to develop deep relationships with people. It prevented me from experiencing true love. This was a great coping mechanism until it wasn’t. Eventually, my wall became a crushing burden of unhealthy survivorship. 

And then there was me at seventeen, fiercely independent. 

I see them clearly when they enter my mind, as if they were standing before me. Most of the time, it’s all three of them. Occasionally, however, it’s just one of them. It’s as if SHE needs to tell me something she only knows. The five-year-old me was the one in my Reiki session that day.

She—or I—was walking through an open-air building leading to a playground. Children were everywhere, running and playing excitedly on swings and merry-go-rounds. And there were so many balls. Gleeful children tossed around lots and lots of beach balls. 

As I walked through, I saw a little boy sitting cross-legged, facing into a corner, his back to me and slumped over at the shoulders. I was drawn to him, focusing only on him in that sea of the other children. As I approached, I knew he could feel my presence. Then he turned to look at me. When our eyes met in my mind, my physical reaction as I lay on my therapist's table was to gasp for air, and my body jerked with great surprise. I was startled. Instantly, tears streamed down my cheeks (and into my ears as I lay on my back) because I knew who he was. I could not believe what I was seeing. His dark, tousled hair framed his eyes, which surprised me the most. His eyes were soft, innocent, and… full of love.

It was my grandfather when he was a five-year-old boy.

What??? How??? Why???, I thought.

I realized that he had known all along that I was behind him, and as I approached, his head hung in sorrow. I knew that was his silent, unspoken remorse for what was to come when he abused me. Remorse not only for what he did to me but also because with that single event, he knew that he would lock me away behind a wall of unhealthy survivorship that I would build for the next forty-five years—and deep sorrow because we never had a chance to have a healthy grandparent/grandchild relationship.  

I was startled to see the love in his eyes and then his sorrow. I had never experienced either of those in reality, and I had never thought of him as anything other than the predator who I had known. Yet I understood what was happening. His soul wanted me to see him for who he was before he, too, became a survivor and lived through the trauma and suffering that made him that man who I had experienced. 

I cried because I felt sadness for him and what his life had been. I had sadness for him, his pain, and all the pain he caused so many in our family. At the same time, I felt sad about the absence of joy in his life. I had compassion and empathy for him as a survivor, more profound than what I had ever felt before because, for the first time, I saw him as a child before he was hurt, just like I had been before I was hurt. 

As the scene closed, our five-year-old versions stood in harmony, their backs facing toward the real me. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, close enough to touch one another but not holding hands. They weren’t ready to touch each other, but I felt harmony. And I knew that the message came from my spirit guides – they wanted me to see this – me and him, in our five-year-old versions, standing together in harmony.

The eyes are indeed the windows to our souls. 

You can read the backstory to this blog in Becoming an Empowered Survivor. Tune into my next blog because my spiritual healing of this relationship is not over yet…