CASANDRA K. MACALAN "Ray of Light"

Holistic Health Therapist:
Empowering You to Heal

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How Trauma Keeps Us Stuck by Reliving our Past and Preventing Us from Manifesting the Future We Want.

So many of you who follow me, know that I am a trauma expert. Not only have I studied it, but in many ways even more importantly, I have lived it. I have in fact based my entire life up until fairly recently actually, as a trauma survivor. 

I was a phoenix, rising from the ashes of my childhood. I was resilient. For you GenX’ers I was like the toy Weebles from the ’70s whose tag line was: "Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down".

My personal motto was the Latin phrase, vulneratus non victus: which means wounded but not conquered, also bloodied by unbowed. I saw myself could survive anything, and I did. I survived deliberate torture by my father both mental and physical. I survived cult like indoctrination and sexual abuse by my stepfather. I had so many horrific experiences, that I have lost count of the number of times I attempted to take my own life since the first time at the age of 4. 

I found life to be a pure struggle, and after my last suicide attempt in my early 20’s, I just kept living out of pure spite and stubbornness, until the birth of my child at 31. They say you shouldn’t live for your child, but I am unashamed to say that she was the first thing that had ever happened that actually made me want to live. Her birth catalyzed my studies of the healing arts and the beginning of my career when I realized that pure survival was not enough. I needed to heal so I could actually live, and be the mother she deserved.

Now I have been in practice for almost as long as she has been alive, and I can say that I am not surviving, or even just living, but actually thriving. Helping people find their own journey through pain, suffering, illness and dis-ease has been such a powerful practice and I want to share with you some of the things I teach for those of you that still suffer and want to free yourself.

One of the things I had to realize was that I viewed every experience of my life through a lens of my trauma. That may sound dramatic, but it doesn’t make it not true for us all. Imagine you are at the eye doctor’s and they are having you look through the lenses at the letter board. Now, imagine those lenses have an imperceptible and transparent image on them. Everything you see becomes based on what occurred before. Each experience in life is colored and affected by a memory you don’t even realize you are looking through. 

These images create our basic beliefs and expectations of what the world holds for us and… what will happen to us. How much hope we have? How much faith? Perhaps you find you have some when it comes to certain things, and none when it comes to others. Each time you have a belief that bad things will happen around ANY part of your life, I can assure you that you are looking through a lens of your past and gazing into the future with it.

Every negative belief you hold is based on the past. The present is just an experience, not a predictor. When you believe bad things will happen, have trust issues, reoccurring experiences surrounding the same types of fear, struggle with anxiety, pain or depression it all has to do with past trauma.

And by the way, It doesn’t matter how severe your trauma was or wasn’t. It has taken years for me to actually realize the severity of mine. Living through traumatic events often takes on a kind of commonplace or expected feel as we minimize it in order to rationalize it, in order to not be broken by it. 

I cannot tell you how many times I might have described a horrific past event in a monotone voice to someone who sobbed to hear it, while I looked on thinking, “Surely they are overreacting, I mean it wasn’t that bad.” 

I couldn’t allow myself to think of it as bad for many years, because I was afraid to. So instead of releasing, integrating or healing, I just kept surviving.

Trauma doesn’t have a value system, it just is. I think of it like spice. For some people (like me) something can be incredibly, uneatably hot. For others, they might not even be able to taste it. It doesn’t matter if your particular spicy childhood seems mild or hot to anyone else but you. If you are still unable to free yourself from it, then baby, it was hot.

I have also learned that there can be a great deal of unconscious ego investment in pain and suffering. Like I mentioned that I was attached to my survival ability and resilience, etc. 

For so many people, a large part of their sense of self is intimately connected to their problems, whether they occurred in childhood, or were due to a failed relationship or financial ruin. It is who we are and what we had to survive and often we will be damned before we let go of it.

In many cases, even though it might seem completely irrational, the last thing we want is to become free of it, because that pain, trauma, and wanting, is our identification of self. It is WHO WE ARE, we think. We lived through it. It created us. 

To let it go, to finally free ourselves of looking through the lens of the past into the future, would destroy the ego. Thus our mind tells us that it would destroy our sense of ourselves. Our identification is inexorably linked and locked as one with our painful past. Until it isn’t. (Breathe).

So one of the first tools I ask when someone tells me something they believe or “know” to be true that goes directly against their stated wants or 

wishes for themselves or their lives, is… “when did you first learn to believe that.” This is an excellent question to ask yourself because it takes the fearful belief out of the present and places it where it belongs.. In the past. 

Does this discovery work on these limiting beliefs each time they pop up? 

You might ask, “how do I know I am thinking of a limiting belief born from past trauma you might ask? Check in and ask yourself, how you feel when you are thinking this thought. If you feel scared, angry, sad, defeated or depressed, then that thought is in contradiction to your greatest and highest good. It is not a thought that is based on the present moment. It is not your highest truth. It is you, looking through a shadowed lens of what happened before and seeing a replication of it happening again. 

Now you may find it is hard to release these fearful thoughts. They might even feel presentient, like they are telling your future to you. But they are not. They are a dirty vision of what can be a completely clear future. Your ego will fight you though, so don’t be surprised when you try to challenge letting a belief go, and it tells you you can’t. Or letting a memory go, and your mind kicks and fights to hold on to it, because damn it you were victimized. Trust me. This sense of self you have connected to your pain and problems is NOT WHO YOU ARE. 

So, challenge these beliefs. Find the core memory and lock that shit up, if you can’t just let it go yet. Bury it in a safe 6 feet underground, and free yourself to be able to see tomorrow with all the possibility it holds for your new future.

I started this live by telling you that I have just recently been able to fully free myself (as much as I can tell) from my trauma. Sure thoughts and memories may pop up here and there, but I no longer care. That’s just it. I don’t care anymore. I don’t care what happened in the past. 

For 2024 let’s all let our ego’s find new things to chew on, like how remarkable we are. Like how we can manifest anything we want, most especially different from what we have had or have believed to be true until just this moment. With this clarity of vision, you can now create what you want and truly deserve.