Papa Coco's Recovery Journal

[Papa Coco]

Journal Entry for Friday, June 7, 2024

Some time ago I wrote a post where I talked about how I had inherited my father's physical war injuries 20 years after he was stricken with them.

To recap the story, at age 14, I noticed that my torso was not symmetrical. By age 20, I had developed chronic and debilitating back pain. Medical doctors had no cures except to put me on pain medications and tell me I'd be crippled by age 40. I decided to try chiropractic care instead. It worked perfectly. My chiropractor ended my pain without the need for any pain medications. As the years went on, I had two sons of my own. When the youngest was 6, my chiropractor talked me into getting x-rays for him too. On the day we were to review his x-rays, my chiropractor hanged my son's x-rays on one light screen and mine on the next one over. He compared how both of our skeletons appeared to be compensating for a missing right arm. He couldn't explain why we were compensating when we both had two arms each, so he asked, "What does your father's x-ray look like?" To which I replied, "I don't know, but he lost his right arm in 1944."  The chiropractor's jaw dropped.

I was born 20 years after Dad's amputation. I am the only of 5 children to have this genetic replication, and my son is the only grandchild that we know of to also share it. When I wrote my original post (which I can't find now because I can't seem to figure out how to search on it in this forum), I was asking the community if anyone else knew anything about this physical phenomenon. Some people wrote back and led me to the book It Didn't Start With You. I started reading it but didn't take it too seriously as I really didn't grasp the value of the book at that time.

Since then, I've also had to deal with a lot of anxiety and emotional traumas that I have come to believe preclude my own birth. I was born HSP, deeply concerned with what was happening around me in the delivery room. I'm told I was a spectacle that the nurses all had to come witness. I was this hours'-old infant lifting my head and staring them in the eyes like I was curious. I now believe it was less curiosity and more about wondering who was a threat.  I've only just recently discovered that Mom had been badly abused by my dad's family while she was pregnant with sibling #1, and had gone through serious anxiety episodes, even needing to be held down to keep from harming herself or others during moments of all her subsequent pregnancies. I have come to believe that each time Mom got pregnant, she went into an EF from the abuse she'd taken by her husband's family. She felt like her babies weren't welcome, and each pregnancy was more triggering than the last. I was the 4th live baby, so her anxiety was worse in me than in the previous three, and I came out of the womb already sure I'm not welcome on the earth.

During the past 6 months, I've been reading all the greatest of the books that explain trauma, some of which include: The Seat of the Soul, The Body Keeps the Score, The Others Within Us and It Didn't Start with You.  These four are of the most important reads of my lifetime. I have read or audio-listened to each of them multiple times. Each one is either all about the generational passing down of traumas or at least gives the topic respectable time within their chapters.

As I'm learning more about how the family's generations before me were treated, I'm losing my anger at them. It doesn't mean I have accepted that what they did to me in my life was okay, they are still guilty of inflicting a lot of harm on me and my little sister, and they are still being held accountable for what they did. However, the anger is waning. I'm aware that I am damaged by their actions, but I'm not taking it so personally anymore. They were what they were to me because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. No matter who would have been born in my stead that morning, their mishandling of my life would have happened exactly the same way. This was about them, not about me. I still need to heal from it, but I don't need to take it as personally as I did now that I know they had no idea what the heck they were doing.

[Papa Coco]

Journal Entry for Monday, June 17, 2024

I'm reading Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender, by David R. Hawkins.

Powerful.

It's changing me. It's helping me to finally let go of my attachment to my past. While I'm reading this book, it's helping me to let go of my current attachment to the pain in this world. The political insanity. The dying planet from Climate Change and wars... The threats are all happening for real, but I'm losing my attachment to it all. And this book is helping me to do this without becoming a narcissist. If anything, letting go properly increases my love for, and connection to, people, animals, and the earth.

I want to be done with my old ways and ruminations. I want to be less attached to triggers and EFs. I want to be done lamenting over my past struggles and abuse. I've successfully pushed all the narcissists out of my life, and I no longer have a chair for them at my inner table. On the door of my imaginary clubhouse is posted "No Narcissists Allowed."

I plan to keep this feeling of release going for as long as I can, and hope, hope, hope that I can make it last indefinitely. It feels so good to just let my emotions come up unimpeded by my typical treadmill methods of trying to escape them, or push them back down, or change them. We let go of fears by letting them air themselves openly in the sunlight. We simply witness them. By doing so we validate them. They want to be validated. They'll leave once they've been fully validated. When we get good at doing this, we can feel ourselves getting lighter and happier with each time an emotion is allowed to work itself out, be heard, be believed, be loved, and then be let go of.

So far, so good. I'll be honest as time goes on, as to whether this uptake in my mental health continues, or if I'm just having a succession of good days that I'm speaking from today. But I'll be honest now, as I'm learning how to validate my emotions and fears, I'm having less and less bad days. I am enjoying a certain stability in being the same person from day to day, which is something I haven't really felt ever before.

I just wanted to share this. Like I said, I'll continue to share as time progresses so I can report whether this is a short-term or a long-term improvement.

I'm just another person looking under all the rocks to find anything that helps.

[Chart]

Thanks PapaCoco, I hope you realize how much you inspire and help me. When stumbling around in a dark swamp, suddenly a guy appears up ahead with a solid beam coming from a sturdy flashlight, fully charged batteries, and a confident and honest voice saying something like, "Howdy, you need some help findin' yer way?"
Seriously, it helps so much. You investigate the undersides of rocks... Me, I'm still just tripping over them. But I'm learning and in no small measure thanks you.

[natureluvr]

This sounds amazing, Papa Coco.  I, too, hope you maintain this state permanently.  You are giving me hope!  Thank you. 

[someonewholovesthemselves]

Dear PapaCoco
I find it cool to be able to be expressive and respectful of other people's feelings at the same time. Personally, I think that's a trait I would want to have too.
For me, as long as I don't hurt anyone's feelings, I'm gonna be myself.
Because tell you what, nobody is thinking about me at the end of the day.
I love your long posts, it makes me feel like someone cares (not lying). I don't mind them at all!
(Although I do feel ashamed because I'm not as reciprocal, I think it makes me feel like I'm being unfair)
I'm uncomfortable right now, because vulnerability makes me feel scared. That's just me, being me. I'm gonna sit with this feeling for a while.

Someone

[NarcKiddo]

That's a great update, Papa C. I hope this state continues, improves and becomes something you just do out of habit. Your clubhouse sounds really cool and it is important you can enjoy it to the full.

[Papa Coco]

Chart, Natureluvr, Someone, Narckiddo,

Your responses are fuel for me. Thank you for the encouragement. Sometimes I wish I was so emotionally stable that I didn't need other people's support, but then I realize, THAT in itself feeds the fear of abandonment.

The truth is that I need encouragement. So why fight it? I have encouragement in my friends here on the forum, and my wife, children, and a few friends I've made here and there.  GOOD! That doesn't make me vulnerable, which I've always mistakenly believed it did. In truth, it makes me "connected". We are social creatures. Wired to need each other. The damage that was done to many of us, is that our former caregivers hurt us when we tried to connect, so our brains got miswired to be afraid of the very connection that we were originally wired to strive for.

I think of the movies I've seen that touched my heart. They were never movies where the protagonist ended up alone. The movies that got stuck in my heart are the movies where the protagonist finds love and connection with supportive friends, lovers, family, etc. So, if my life is a movie, then I don't want it to end with me finding my joy by being alone and "strong" without the need for connection with others. I want my movie to end on a note that I've found peace within my heart THROUGH my connection with people that have willingly bonded with me. So...I just thought out loud here, and I realize that any interaction, even if it's as short as a hug emoji from someone who feels what I feel, is what I need to move toward my happy ending, that life will give me a sense of connection with others who share the emotions and fears and dreams and hopes that I feel.

Journal Entry for Tuesday, June 18, 2024

This morning I awoke in dread. Money dread. Health dread. I worry incessantly about my wife's and son's health. They both struggle with a disorder called Eller's Danlos syndrome, which causes serious lifelong pain, and a threat of shortening their lives. I feel like I wouldn't survive losing either of them at this point. I barely survived losing my little sister in 2008. How would I survive losing my son or my wife?

This was my morning opportunity to let myself feel the fear. As I was still lying in bed, feeling terror and dread that life will get harder, I stumbled upon the idea that I needed to stop allowing myself to use words to describe the feeling. It hit me that if I could just feel the fear, without letting my brain talk myself through it, that I might become better at letting fear go.

It was not impossible, but it was taxing. I was able to stop using words in my head for a few seconds at a time. My inner voices tried, and tried, and tried to interrupt the purity of the moment of feeling fear and letting it run its course. Every time my inner voice said anything, I could feel myself losing connection to the emotion itself. I continued this exercise for about 10 minutes, and during those 10 minutes, I feel like I got about 1 minute of quiet emotion without the distraction of my inner voices trying to break my connection to the fear. My inner Fixers. They're not doing me any favors now. I WANT to feel the fear and release it. So every time my inner helpers try to distract me from releasing the fear, I politely remember to ignore the voices. At first, I said "Stop" but then realized, Stop is a word. Using words to stop hearing words is like throwing dry wood into a forest fire to try and cool the fire. Counterproductive. So, then I tried to simply stop listening to the voices without using any words to quiet them. I could go about 5 seconds between voices, and I kept it up until I felt like I'd pieced together a good minute of wordless experiencing of the fear.

I got out of bed and went into my morning meditation. I write 3 pages of Stream of Consciousness every single morning. Since November 2023, I've never missed a single morning. What I learn during my forced writing exercise is immeasurably helpful. It seems to connect my conscious beliefs with my inner knowing. The wisdom we have down deep inside us is nothing short of miraculous. The trick, for each of us, is in what tools we can find that help us access our inner knowing. For me, these morning papers are one such tool.

In today's morning papers, I realized that absolutely every person alive is dealing with a ball of fear in their chest. The people who we call "normal" have successfully found ways to ignore that fear through inner dialogue, competitive attitudes, memorizing sports scores and song lyrics, making money, addictions to sex, beer, gambling, shopping, texting, electronic media...

These are the things of what I call "the treadmill." When we suppress fear, we just save it for another day. It has to be felt, validated, worked through and released. Pay me now or pay me later. Hiding from it doesn't cure it. My brain tries to mansplain the fear to my heart. My heart doesn't respond. It feels what it feels no matter what the brain tries to tell it. My heart just wants to let it go and stop rationalizing the ugliness of this world.

Today, in my morning papers, I discovered that what I really want to do is feel the fear without being afraid of the fear. What it felt like to me in the bed this morning was heat coming out of my chest and dissipating in the room around me. Like holding one's hand a foot above a hot stove, I could feel the heat simply emanating from my burning fear in my chest. I worked hard at not letting my inner voices use any words. As I said, I got about a minute of silence during my 10 minutes of meditation.

When I was a baby, I witnessed the world around me and I felt my fear of that world. I had no words to file the feelings with. So they were pure. Pure feelings, and pure witness. No words to explain them or numb them. So they became a part of my core wiring. They became a part that had no words to describe them. By that reasoning I now believe that if I can achieve that non-verbal experience again today, feeling and witnessing pure emotion without using words to pacify myself or to hide the emotions for another day, I just might be able to release them so I can freely discover the artistic and true nature of who I was originally born to be. My authentic self exists. I don't have to CREATE my bliss. I just have to let go of the tricks my brain has used for decades to hide from my authentic self. I don't have to create a new me. I just have to stop hiding from my original self.

This is a work in progress. It's taken me a lot of learning to get to where I can understand what I'm saying today. Letting go is not easy. But if we strive for perfection, we set ourselves up for a fall when we don't achieve perfection. So we strive for progress. That way, every day, we can celebrate that we are a little better today than we were yesterday. Letting go is probably the biggest challenge facing every human being currently living on the cooled crust of this ball of molten lava we call Earth. "Do the best you can with what you know. When you know better, do better." Maya Angelou.

Somehow, the fear is a part of the human experience, and if all the ancient religions have anything in common, it is that they all try to teach us to stop being afraid of our fear. Let it out. Give it to God. Give it to The Universe. Give it to the Ether. Whatever that higher power is, it seems to be our mission to feel our human fear and let it go into the light so we can free ourselves from it.

This morning it came clear to me that if I can feel the fear without being afraid of the fear, I might find myself able to feel my joy without using the voices to keep me on the treadmill of repeatedly flashing back and repeatedly using distraction and repression to keep that fear burning in a closet that I just don't look at until I'm triggered, over and over and over and over again.

Every word I speak, whether out loud or in my head, that dissociates me from my ball of fear, is a word on the horizontal path through life. The treadmill that burns energy but doesn't lead anywhere. Every little inch of movement I make to let go of any little trigger to that fear, is a step on the vertical path of healing. In each moment, I have a choice to just stay on the treadmill, or move a few inches upward toward my true, higher, original self.

I have not been on this upward journey alone. It seems that as I truly seek help, it seems to come to me. I meet people by accident who have something to teach me. Because of this, I am now a true believer in providence. I don't know who or what God is, but I know that somehow, when I seek, I find. When I truly ask for help from my soul, someone comes along and gets me to the next step. My therapist is a deeply spiritual healer. The first 6 therapists I'd tried were just talking textbooks. They were practitioners. My current T is a healer. My current primary doctor is a healer. I found a massage therapist who has healing hands. She's not a massage therapist, she's a healer. I found a hypnotherapist who has a strong connection to spiritual wisdom. I find these people by accident, when I'm truly asking for help with my fears and my traumas.

In this morning's meditation, while I was not clinging to words, but just focused on feelings, I was having memory flashbacks and visions. Some of the most distressing moments of my life came to me as if they were happening for real all over again. I felt the horror of Catholic school and of my CSA. But this time, I just let myself feel the horror. I didn't connect with it, nor did I let my inner voices try to push them away. I just felt the fear. For a few seconds, I didn't feel the fear OF the fear. I just felt the fear and let it have its moment. In a poetic way of describing this feeling, I felt like an infant who was crying but was in the arms of someone safe. Normally, when I feel the horror of the past, I feel like an infant who is crying, but no one is holding me or keeping me safe. Honestly, it felt like the fear was there, but I was safe in someone's arms. That's a HUGE improvement in my personal healing journey. The fear is still real, but someone, somewhere, is protecting me now. That's progress. Not perfection, but progress. I'll take it!!!!

That's my goal today. To let myself feel any fear that comes up and not connect with it.

I've been trapped under a blanket of trauma triggers for 6 decades. I'm just not willing to go one more year. The burn from the fear in my chest has destroyed my stomach and digestion. In Letting Go, Hawkins says that we use 3 tricks to keep from releasing our fears: 1) Repression/Suppression 2) Expression, and 3) Escape. When we use Repression/Suppression, we suffer with "...irritability, mood swings, tension in the muscles of the neck and shoulders, headaches, cramps, menstrual disorders, colitis, indigestion, insomnia, hypertension, allergies, and other somatic conditions." (Hawkins, Letting Go: Pg 11). Except for the menstrual disorders, I am the embodiment of all these physical problems. And yes, I can relate it to the terror I lived in as a child in Catholic school. I can almost remember the day the terror became the acid that began eating away at my stomach and organs.

I'm babbling. Time to quit talking and go get my day started. I see my Therapist today. I'm excited to hear his feedback on my non-verbal meditation of this morning. I truly hope I'm on to something now. I'm ever so exhausted from living in my trauma triggers and mood swings. I just can't take living like that anymore. It's too tiring. I want to find my original self and flourish. I want to go from surviving to thriving.

PC.

[Blueberry]

Papa Coco, this is a brief reply to your post on June 8th. This is where you previously posted about your F's missing right arm and repercussions for you:
www.cptsd.org/forum/index.php?topic=14623.msg118025#msg118025

If you can't follow my link (some mbrs on here can't), then look under Self Help & Recovery > Ideas/Tools for Recovery. You started a Journal there and that's where that post is. I'm pretty good at using the Search tool here on the forum, but I won't attempt to teach you it this evening (it's late evening for me rn).

I don't think I ever responded but those repercussions on you and your son are shocking   but it's also kind of fascinating about what our brains / bodies do. I find that about some of my own trauma stuff, when I can take a step back anyway and view myself maybe the way a reporter would.

[Chart]

HS Dude! PC! You just did it again!! That was the most inspiring, elucidating and moving descriptive of Fear I've ever come across. I read through it twice and will again I'm sure. There is so much I want to reflect on and respond to. But work requires I sleep now. I await Fear tomorrow morning. And I will have a different experience tomorrow morning, not better or worse or who knows... but when Fear comes tomorrow morning (and it WILL come, it always does) I will have your words, like little bullets (weird metaphor I think but that's what just popped in my head) prepped and ready in my hand. "Feel the Fear without fearing it..." Thank you PapaCoco, thank you so very much.
-Chart... embracing tomorrow morning...

[Hope67]

Hi Papa Coco,
I wondered if you'd finished that book you mentioned called 'Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender' and whether you liked the whole book?  I am considering borrowing it from my local library, thanks to your mentioning it.  But wanted to check whether you liked all of it.  Sometimes the endings can be disappointing, in my experience.  I think I will try to read it. 

I would also like to say that I am inspired by your meditation practise, and how you're facing your fear in that way.  It takes courage to do that, and I wish you the best with continuing with it. 

Sending you a hug 

Hope 

[Papa Coco]

Blueberry, Chart, Hope,

I've read most of the book, Letting Go. I had a little trouble with one of the later chapters where the author sort of oversimplified our ability to control our physical health by simply believing we are healthy. He wasn't necessarily wrong, but he grossly oversimplified our ability to control our health with thoughts.  Other than that one chapter, he's given me SO MUCH wisdom that I am still 100% in love with this book.

I'm getting better and better now at letting myself feel the emotion without judging it, stuffing it, talking to it, trying to change it, or supress it...What I've started to notice is my heart hurts while I'm feeling the emotion without trying to control it. At first I thought I was just suffering with a lack of exercise. My knees hurt so bad that I don't walk for exercise anymore, and I thought my heart was failing because of that. It's been 6 days since this started, but as of yesterday I've noticed that it feels more like a jolt of caffiene or the beginnings of an anxiety attack. BUT I've also noticed that it happens immediately as I enter into feeling the shame and pain and sadness of my 64 years on the earth.

As I'm feeling the shame, and not trying to talk to it, change it, reject it, hide from it, my heart immediately begins to palpitate. I'm no longer afraid of the feeling. I'm no longer trying to stop the palpitations. The book mentions that when we try to stop a fever, we stop the body's ability to use a fever to burn viruses. So trying to stop the feeling of heart palpitations would be me trying to stop the heart from detoxifying 64 years of shame and sadness. Now I like the feeling because I know it's my heart releasing the toxins that have been harming me for decades.

I drive 3 hours each way to my house on the coast. I listen to audio books while I drive. Last night, while returning from the coast, I listened to the first 3 chapters over and over and over again. These are the chapters where Hawkings explains how to feel the emotions and let them dissipate on their own, rather than try to control them.  He mentioned that the body parts where we've held most of our distress for our lifetime will feel the release of the stuck energy as we allow the emotions to breathe and release. I realized that my life's duress began when I was about 2 or 3 years of age and I began to understand that my family was teaching me that I'm not good enough to have what I want, be who I want, or be loved by them or by God itself. Without putting words to my emotion, I can really, truly feel how it broke my heart as a toddler to realize I wasn't good enough to be loved. I've lived with a broken heart for 60+ years since. I've done a million little things to try to suppress or repress that broken heart. But now I'm letting that broken heart talk to me. And now my heart palpitates whenever I allow it to talk to me.

I've read many books by authors who teach that our bodies will tell us what they need if we'll just shut up and learn to listen to them. In the first few chapters of this book, Hawkings even says that when the part of the body is listened to, it begins to change immediately. That sense of freedom from letting go of a stressor changes our blood chemistry and releases toxins from whichever organ has been holding on to the duress. For me, anger and frustration have been held in a toxins of my liver, kidneys and pancreas, while the broken hearted sadness and shame I've lived with for 6 decades has toxified my heart.

As I feel the release of these toxins, my heart palpitates. I expect it will take a few weeks to process all the toxins, otherwise 60+ years of poison would kill me if released all at once, so I'm happy to feel the palpitations in metered doses. I will say they are getting stronger right now as I am getting better and better of allowing myself to feel the emotions without trying to understand or control them.

I'm finally learning how to put actions to my beliefs. I've known about how our bodies keep the score for most of my life, but the words about "letting go" have been just empty words. I didn't truly believe the words could actually heal me. But I'm learning now, after reading The Body Keeps the Score, The Seat of the Soul, and now Letting Go, I'm starting to lock in with exactly HOW to turn those words into action and make them really, truly work.

[Chart]

PapaCoco, In the levels of understanding we get deeper and deeper. So much of what I'm struggling with still remains at arms length. But your clarifications makes so much sense to me. The mind does finally wrap itself around the concepts and ideas, and after a long period of incubation, finally passes to actual integration. Incredibly happy for you AND, even if I'm not there yet, to know it's possible.

[Papa Coco]

Journal entry for Thursday, June 27, 2024

Letting go is starting to feel like I'm opening up a Pandora's box.

I first began letting go of emotions that I knew about, but as I let go of the top layer of emotions, I expose new layers of emotions I hadn't realized I'm still living to.

Today I'm hard-focused on my sense that I can't fix my life until "something" changes. What that something is eludes me. I think that my procrastination to do things that I know need to be done is partly due to my lifelong belief that I will be able to do more when "something" changes. But what? My physical brain, the one that lives on the hedonistic treadmill of physical happiness, believes that I need more money. If I could just get rich, then I could be free to declutter my house. How stupid is that? Writing it for others to read puts it in my face that I have a belief that I'm too poor to throw away things I don't need? That's just crazy. But the fact that it's crazy doesn't mean I don't feel it. I feel it. I know it's crazy. So, I'm putting it into my conscious mind to let go of it now.

Okay...I'm a pretty smart guy who has read hundreds of thousands of words written by dozens of experts who would probably tell me: "Papa Coco, you are suffering with a combination of lack-consciousness + separation anxiety." The lack-consciousness comes from my childhood of being taught that my family didn't have enough money to let me play with the other kids. I couldn't go to ski lessons with them, music lessons, or join sports teams, or scouts, or anything at all, because "We can't afford it" was used ad nauseum. It wouldn't have been so traumatizing if it were true. My parents had plenty of money. They just didn't want to spend it on stupid little me. This led me to live my entire life believing that no matter how hard I worked, I'd never make enough money to have any fun. So My emotions today still repeat that line to me: I'd clean my house if I had enough money to throw away things that once had value. That's where the separation anxiety compels me to hang on to yesterday's treasures. I don't build car models anymore because I'm not 14 anymore. i haven't built a car model in 50 years. Why do i keep the little box of glue and paint and pliers? Because I'm still waiting for something to change so I can be safe to throw them away.

I don't know what I think needs to change, but my brain just can't let go of its belief that something needs to change for me to be free to be myself.

Physically, I believe something needs to change, but I can't pinpoint what that is. Would a windfall of money even make a dent in my belief that something needs to change? Am I still reeling in the pain of learning that my own family saw me as an object that they have to take care of, or lie about or lie to just to keep me controlled, rather than treat me like a lovable child? My wife and friends and son and Daughter-In-Law and grandsons love me deeply, so why do I still feel like I'm unlovable until something changes? Something needs to change for me to be loved? Really? Something that never reveals itself? It's trauma. It's not real. I'm loved, but trauma keeps telling me I'm unlovable. So I need to let go of that emotion. It makes no sense to the brain, but it makes sense to the heart. So I need to open the heart and let that emotion talk to me--unfettered.

In my journey through learning the art of successfully letting go of past emotions, I believe that I know the answer to this: That all I have to do is take this emotion: this belief that I can't live my life my way until "something" changes, and go lay down in bed or in a tub of hot water and just let myself feel whatever it is I've been trying to intellectualize or forensically dissect. What I know about that feeling right now is that it is a feeling of incredible sadness. I feel like I'm 3 years old and I'm becoming aware that my family sees me as a burden and God itself hates me for being what/who I am.

What I've been learning is that the emotions themselves are the culprits that need releasing, and that the logic behind the emotions is not only moot, but that trying to dissect the logic is its own stumbling block. Trying to get the brain to understand the heart is not the way to release. Just letting the emotion breathe and dissipate, without trying to judge or control or talk to it, is how to release it forever.

Here's where "Let go and let God" has a place in my heart. These words, which have never held any meaning to me before, explain for me that if I'll offer up the emotion, without trying to understand or explain it, that "god" (whatever/whoever God is), will be there allowing that emotion to dissipate like pressure from a pressure cooker.

For the past few weeks, letting go this way has been helping me by giving me stronger sense of my true self. I'm actually feeling what's actually in me, without my brain trying to fix it. I feel like I'm getting to know the real me. And it's changing me. I'm becoming slightly more stable and less controlled by my EFs.

Letting go of emotions has been changing me at the core. And I suspect, I will be going through layers upon layers of buried emotions for a long time. The good news for me is that progress is progress. With each dissipated emotion, I feel a little bit stronger and more emotionally stable. If I have to let go of an old emotion every day for the next thirty years, then I'll have an improved life, every day for the next thirty years. I'll take it. I might not reach perfection, but improvement is very, very welcome.

[Chart]

This resonates deeply with me. I want to respond to much of what you've written but my daughter wants her hug and kiss goodnight. Just two quick thought-observations: For me, Tapping helps connect my two hemispheres, left/logic and right/emotional. I now use this for all sorts of things. I've incorporated your ideas of release and letting go and find I nearly Always get "answers"and relief to the weight of shame or abandon or fear that hourly gets hold of me. It's like Two people helping one person (in this case my Amygdala). One helper equals one helper. But TWO helpers equals 2.5 helpers. That doubling gives 20% More.

Hope that made sense...

And now I've forgotten the other thing...

I'll be back...

[Little2Nothing]

Papa Coco, I can relate to your dilemma. The more I allow myself to explore my trauma the more layers of emotion are uncovered. 

Trauma is a multifaceted injury that affects every part of us. If we were all dealing with one event it might be less difficult to deal with it. That's not to minimize a single episode of trauma. However, years of abuse will take considerable time to explore. 

Sometimes it seems that trauma embeds itself in our DNA and is attached to every system in our body. Rooting it all out may not be 100% possible. 

I have come to believe that this crippling defect can be greatly minimized and reconciliation with our core self is possible. It will be a long fought battle. In the end through persistence and support from our brothers and sisters in the battle we can be victors.