The Architecture of our Psyche in Abuse and Recovery

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any ~ Alice Walker

This Red Thread Letter shares my thoughts about this topic, drawn from 25 years of working with women and children in the domain of creativity. My intention in sharing it is to provide a context for ‘viewing’ recovery through the awareness of how abuse impacts psychic, spiritual, and physical structures.

When we are hurt our natural patterns are interrupted. The shapes we make with our mind, body, and field can become dented and fragmented. We are not as we were before.

This is the same for any kind of transformation, we are different than we were before. How do we work with, the new shapes, if we have very little knowledge of how to work with them, and what is, the shape of a being?

After trauma, the original shapes of wholeness, are there in our energetic patterns. We can choose to return to them with awareness, yet knowing, that we will never be, quite the same shape. The shape that has been impacted, creates a new shape of being, that in time, we can work with, heal, and be informed about and by. Synthesis can happen when all or most aspects of being are communicating.

When we are hurt, lines of communication between systems are often interrupted. Signals and messages from within can become scrambled. The internal narrator turns fierce. Innocence is impacted and we can lose ourselves somewhere along the way. The self we may lose is the part of us that knows how to navigate our psyche. The one who has some co-creative capacity with organizing consciousness. The loss of that capacity can be devastating, and feel like a loss of soul.

This scattering of how we were once knitted together, is now impacted by trauma fractures and spreads throughout our entire being. Mostly in ways, we have little consciousness about, or capacity to influence at the time. Most of us do not know enough about how trauma is going to impact us, to take action before the damage gets worse, as it is happening, or right after, or even years later.

Imagine something like this… A mosaic of stories, no longer whole, shards that puncture our animating personae, our potentials appear limited, wing clipped. Arrows that seem to come from nowhere enter and impact the architecture of our psyche. Our physical symptoms amplify, coding stories into impressionable cells. Yet we know, we can bring alchemy to catalyze the wound, but how. We need know-how.

Whether the trauma was physical to the body, trauma makes it physical to the body and the field. Imagine that we are a body within a soul and that our field is the interactive domain connecting all of who we are, a network of interconnected lights, ideas, structures, stories, synapses and so much more than we know.

Precious, gorgeous, unique structures that house us, keeping us within the realm of gravity for this earth experience. What a journey?!

This fracturing populates our entire identity, the space in which we have our being is impacted on all levels, good, bad, or otherwise, ‘impact’, the force of any kind changes how we are living in these structures. Structures mean both physical and energetic.

Recovery for many of us can be challenging as we work on one part, then the next, having to piece together the seemingly separate pieces of healing. We go to many different healers, We go “Here for the mind, here for the body, here for energy” and then we have to weave the braid ourselves, and often, we do. Many healers do integrate the many layers, and we are blessed if we find them, when both they and we are ready for such an undertaking as the restoration of the architecture of identity.

The time for new healing paradigms is already present and we are living within them now, made possible by all the healers who have charted the course to THIS MOMENT.

Let’s look further, in consideration of the awareness of the architecture.

When the healing strands come, upon what do they build, or land, upon what armature are the changes put in place, to return to and nurture? So much to ‘hold’ in the mind as we work to return to a wholeness we feel was once there, if even in infancy. How long ago was that wholeness in place, and how long before it can begin to make itself whole again? Maybe now.

What if the rebuilding of the being must begin with an awareness of the design of the human being? And must this design be so complex, or in a spiritual tradition with beliefs and contracts and vows? How do we even talk about it?

The design you are is personal to you. Though we share many traits that we can extend to one another in hopes of one story supporting another. You are the one who remembers you into wholeness. Which, after being hurt, is often elusive and perhaps being healed enough can be enough. Seeking FULL healing, maybe a challenge for most of us, and we wait and wait and wait to live our fullness…what if we can be healed enough? Is that a closer view?

You may not have an image of your design pre-wounding, this idea may seem abstract and perhaps even woo-woo. Simply the awareness that you have a psychic architecture, a physical and energetic shape that holds your identity, including, personality, story, and consciousness may be a huge part of initiating the next level of authoring your healing. This awareness becomes an invitation to restoration, to being in inquiry about what this looks like for you.

The beautiful news here is that YOU are the one who heals you. You have already known, that there are things only you can do.

This isn’t a concept. Yet without the awareness of what makes up a person, it can be challenging to SEE IT. To deepen this, in our community, we paint it and draw it and move our bodies with the new awareness. For now, this is an invitation to simply KNOW that your architecture is there, as a memory of your whole being, and is waiting for your awareness.

Creativity is one of the powerful ways to consciously and actively engage with your psychic architecture. Think of this as the space around you, which holds you in place, enclosing your sack of stars with your skin suit. When you create, you engage with, as in, TURN ON the capacity for co-creation with your often hidden domains of being.

We are talking directly here, about curating your own consciousness. To do this you can’t just think about it, or vibe into it, you MUST engage with it, as in moving particles around to begin to re-arrange how they have been functioning.

It is time for gathering the shards to repair the vessel, with our own hands and I do mean HANDS. Bringing your hands into motion to reshape how you are living within your being. Action, physical action, is needed for healing to begin to happen across all levels.

Imagine lights, that have been out or dim, beginning to light up inside of your skin and around you. This is very real, biophotons are lighting you up. Through the very act of reading this and considering new possibilities, even if you are stretching to grasp them. REACH . . . .

Recovery often follows conscious actions, informed by a willingness to be inside inquiry. Furthered by asking, our very brain, heart, and body to reach with us into a space and place we haven’t been before. Healing happens in the future, even just a few moments into a space we have yet to visit, let us go there together.

When we create all the dust in all the locked rooms of self, gets stirred. Our giant broom in the shape of a paintbrush cleans out the darkest corners, bringing movement, light, and color.

Shiloh Sophia