. “Grief, I’ve learned, is just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
― Jamie Anderson . . This was a part of a post on a great blog I follow “Don’t Lose Hope”
I had a quick, emotional reaction (triggered). Four or five responses agreed that grief is just love with no place to go.
I am amazed, none of my childhood abuse and the grief that has followed me, has any connection to love.
We feel betrayal’s grief is love?
I feel the opposite, betrayal is closer to hate.
Is your PTSD grief just love with no place to go?
Now I see if we are grieving a friend maybe love with nowhere to go.
. Meditating for hours upon hours upon hours, intently focusing on my inner world, my crazy thought patterns unfolded.
The thoughts that arrive in my (your) head every day do not resemble a normal (non-abused) person’s thoughts.
Something is missing, why do we feel separate from the common collective, we are trauma outcasts.
It is like another entity lives inside us, fjones619 describes it like this:
“Highly sensitive and vulnerable, that thing that tries to limit my life, keep me from venturing too far from my comfort zone to keep me safe while at the same time makes me unhappy and unfulfilled from living a dull life without any real purpose.”
Do you feel a separate entity inside your PTSD body?
So our thought patterns are filled with abstract fear, a sort of confusing unknown, a danger that comes out of the ether every morning.
Hard to find purpose while fighting imminent danger.
This is a very confusing life for us, hard to have explanations or solutions available.
Real Purpose: I think this is one of our big deficiencies from childhood abuse.
My dad was so abusive he suppressed my true personality.
When I improved the first time, my personality changed from the suppressed introvert to an extrovert, my true me.
My purpose is extremely difficult to find in the middle of PTSD.
At 70, I have no idea who I am supposed to be or how to fit in.
Question: Do you have good memories? Which memories dominate your mind? . .
Two excerpts from “Meditation for the Love of it”:
“The work of meditation is to coax the mind into letting go of the perceptions and ideas that keep it stuck, so it can expand and reveal itself as it really is.
As vast creative Awareness. Pure light and ecstasy. An ocean of peace and power. The Self.”
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“One way you know you are experiencing the ego and not the Self is that the ego (ahamkara in Sanskrit) always experiences itself in comparison to others.
The ego never feels fully equal to others: it sees others as higher or lower, as better or worse, as friendly or potentially hostile.
The Self, on the other hand, just is.
The Self sees everything and everyone as equal to itself.”
“How traumatized parents interact with their children, of course, also influences their development. One of the most powerful nonfiction accounts of growing up with Holocaust survivor parents was Art Spiegelman’s serialized graphic novel Maus; it broke through a cultural barrier, helping others to open up about their suffering. Many psychologists and neuroscientists have examined the traumatized family, finding ever more subtleties, and the story will continue to unfold for decades to come.
An important question is whether epigenetic alterations in stress-related genes, particularly those reflected in the offspring of traumatized parents, are necessarily markers of vulnerability or whether they may reflect a mechanism through which offspring become better equipped to cope with adversity. This is an area we’re actively exploring.
It is tempting to interpret epigenetic inheritance as a story of how trauma results in permanent damage. Epigenetic influences might nonetheless represent the body’s attempts to prepare offspring for challenges similar to those encountered by their parents. As circumstances change, however, the benefits conferred by such alterations may wane or even result in the emergence of novel vulnerabilities. Thus, the survival advantage of this form of intergenerational transmission depends in large part on the environment encountered by the offspring themselves.
Moreover, some of these stress-related and intergenerational changes may be reversible. Several years ago we discovered that combat veterans with PTSD who benefited from cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy showed treatment-induced changes in FKBP5 methylation. The finding confirmed that healing is also reflected in epigenetic change. And Dias and Ressler reconditioned their mice to lose their fear of cherry blossoms; the offspring conceived after this “treatment” did not have the cherry blossom epigenetic alteration, nor did they fear the scent. Preliminary as they are, such findings represent an important frontier in psychiatry and may suggest new avenues for treatment.
The hope is that as we learn more about the ways catastrophic experiences have shaped both those who lived through those horrors and their descendants, we will become better equipped to deal with dangers now and in the future, facing them with resolution and resilience.