How I Chose to Heal From Witnessing a Traumatic Childhood Event (ACIM Side Entry)

Background: This article is a side entry reflecting additional healing I did in parallel to ACIM but unrelated to the text or workbook readings. My goal in my A Course in Miracles healing journal is to be as transparent as I can to help others heal and connect with love.

This entry outlines additional meditation and my healing process for a dark experience that arose during a recent A Course in Miracles workbook session.

How I Chose to Heal From Witnessing a Traumatic Childhood Event

It can be rough realizing horrible things happened to someone you love. Honoring the thoughts, accepting them.

It’s even worse when there’s a level of survival guilt and the stark realization - if you had only realized, perhaps you could have stopped it.

That’s the challenge of recovering from these situations as children. We know better - maybe, possibly? We get an inkling that something doesn’t feel right, but it’s being done by a trusted adult.

A parent.

A parent we need to honor and obey. Even if that means carrying deep, dark, painful energy scars created by them long into adulthood.

That’s the memory I have of my father’s sexual abuse of someone dear to me as a child. She was a minor, younger than I, and it was in the next room - door shut.

So it’s possible I’m completely wrong… but why then do I remember it like this? Repeatedly.

The mind looks for facts, justification, and validation. It scans the histories for a word, gesture, or visual looking for confirmation.

But energy functions differently.

Energy remembers energy, tone, frequency. The body and subconscious can intercept it, collect it, and store it without a thought.

That’s what this is, over and over again. But there are many mindful memories that work as secondary evidence to support it. From her, from him, from them together - it adds up over years.

It’s not isolated conjecture.

Right, wrong, factual or not, what is clear is that I need to heal from this. The energy was stored in me and has functioned as a blockage.

This is how it's coming up… again.

This first arose in me in 2018. I cried deeply for hours and was off my game for days. I tried not to vomit.

I was also amazed that my father’s aggression could go even further than I knew as facts.

It’s arising again, now… the week of Christmas 2024.

Healing

I know how to heal bigger and better now. Fully and completely. It’s time to get in deep and forgive it all.

Forgiveness is not about the other person; it's about me. I have found the person I often need to forgive is myself in that memory.

Even when I am a victim.

Here, my victimization is as an innocent bystander.

How can I let go of something unspeakable and horrid done to someone else? How do I forgive myself for what I “know” and feel?

How do I forgive myself for not doing something? For being ignorant?

Experience has taught me that judging oneself in a painful memory is futile. It’s not healing, and it’s not love.

Love is the only way to truly heal.

The Three Levels of Healing

Three levels of healing I’ve learned over the years:

Level 1: See it differently.

Look at the event through a different lens of yourself. See a childhood memory as an adult, as whatever your profession is, or another one of the many hats we each wear.

Reassess a survival mode trauma from the lens of someone safe and clear-headed.

For me, I can see it as a woman, as a daughter, as a lawyer, as a dancer, as a dog mom, and so on.

It shifts the intensity of the dark pain we feel related to it and allows our minds to see there's more than one way to see something. Perhaps, we didn’t get it “right” the first time, and we begin to let go of the intensity with which we hold onto the experience.

Level 2: Forgive yourself.

In survival mode and trauma mode, especially as a child, we wish deep down we would have listened to our gut, said no, or done something differently.

If only… kinds of thinking.

If only I did this, or said that. If only I had realized, remembered, run, etc.

This style of thinking is us turning the cause of the experience back on ourselves.

This is a double-edged sword - because the retention of the pain, the deep dark scary memories are caused by us, but we are not to blame for that. It's intuitive, natural, and subconscious.

Even more so when we are young, empty vessels designed to absorb the world around us through our limited minds.

That’s not fault - that's being. That’s being human.

And you were created perfectly. You are not at fault for what happened, nor are you at fault for the way you were in survival mode.

If anything, there is gratitude in survival mode because it did what it was designed to do - you survived!

You could not have healed if you had not survived. You could not move forward and bring all the love and joy you do each day had you not survived.

Yes, it would be nice if the price of survival wasn’t these dark scars and PTSD, but it's a small price to pay for the opportunity to live.

So forgive yourself; let yourself off the hook. Whatever happened happened, and guilting, shaming, and beating yourself up will not make you or the experience better.

Forgive yourself.

Level 3: Find love in the experience.

If the shooting experience I had exemplifies anything, it is that love is the shortcut to healing, and it heals deeper and more wholly than any of the other two levels.

In the shooting experience, as I was reliving the fear and pain in my head in the days after, I decided to relive the event looking only for love.

What I discovered was that every one of the dark, painful, fearful moments I had - fear of my life, my physical well-being, fear of my mother being shot in front of me…

Every one of those pains to my gut had one thing in common - they hurt because I loved something.

I love my life, I love my body, and I love my mother. I began to feel gratitude for everything I had that made my life worth living, worth fearing I may lose it or diminish it.

Instead of feeling into the fear and pain, I went deeper to feel the love behind it. Almost instantly the pain dissipated. It was gone.

I sometimes look at parts of that day with love and appreciation for it.

A life-threatening survival mode day has become a loving memory.

That is the power of love.

What level can I heal now…

That’s the level of healing I was looking to do here with my father’s actions - love.

I sat leaning into the feelings I had in the memories. Feeling the darkness, looking for the loving light.

I couldn’t find it.

As a woman, sexual abuse is an atrocity that attacks the soul. He abused everything - his power, his access, his manhood, her body, her soul, her innocence, her future and well-being.

So where's the love?

I couldn’t put myself in her shoes. That is not the perspective I need to heal from. I need to heal from mine.

Why was my knowledge, awareness, and lack of awareness anything to do with love?

I sat quietly, asking my inner guide to lead me.

I was flashed back to a memory of my 4th San Pedro Ceremony in Peru. My spirit brother and I had developed a true healing relationship over many hours and ceremonies together.

It was his turn to admit to me he witnessed something as a child he still needed to heal from. He witnessed his stepfather sexually abuse his younger sister growing up.

It eats him up inside still.

He was the male - the boy. He’s “supposed” to protect the girls.

This is also a male-driven culture where men and women still take on traditional gender roles. He felt the shame even deeper because of it.

He's supposed to protect her and he failed…he failed as a man.

I sat there supporting him in his tears, reliving the painful memories. No one has to heal alone.

Being in a good place in my healing that ceremony, I somehow knew what to say to him. It all suddenly became clear why he was there those dark days.

I pointed out that had he not been there - no one would have believed his sister. She’d have been belittled or shamed.

She'd be forever required to stay silent or risk shaming by her family and community. No one would believe the woman over the man here.

No one would believe a young girl over the man of the house.

But now there was a man who could speak for her. A man who had come forward and confronted the stepfather, shared the truth with their mother, and had given his sister a safe place to heal from.

Had he not been there, none of that would have been likely.

He was the man of the house and he was doing it better than his stepfather ever could.

Because my brother was there, his sister could find love. Live in love and avoid shame.

She was better off today because her brother was there. And the love between them was undeniable.

All because the brother witnessed what he did not realize he was witnessing years ago.

This time, with me, it was time to say those words to myself… and to the victim.

My awareness of the actions behind those closed doors means someone can be heard and believed. Someone can heal, and I can help them.

They can know they were not alone. Not now. Not ever again.

That is how I can bring love to this memory. I am the love, and I can help her find hers when she is ready.

I choose to now sit in the healing of love. Finding the love can help me heal, and it can help her heal, too.

A wave of warmth gradually washes over me as the next days pass. 

It’s not just relief at releasing this burden, but a sense of purpose. This pain, this memory, it's not just mine. 

It's a shared story, a wound that connects me to the victims, to my spirit brother, to countless others who carry similar scars. 

And in that connection, there's strength.

My role isn't to erase the past or pretend it didn't happen. Healing means holding space for the pain, to witness it, and to transmute it into love. Healing is possible, and love can emerge from even the darkest corners.

In the next few days, that healing became clearer and clearer in my body. Things truly shifted and had physical manifestations. 

I wrote about it in two side journal entries here:  As My Heart Opens, so Do I and My Body Lets it All Go.

With Love, Acacia