Just One Look Forum Archives

I wonder if anyone have experience about how "looking" can heal old traumas?

In my case I had some traumatic experiences with drugs 15 years ago. By the time I was in my late teens my fear life were manifesting in different ways:

1. I was afraid that people would not like me, and that I be "cast out from the tribe", so I compensated with trying to know many people and always changing my behavior in a way I thought people would like.

2. I part of my mind was always on the lookout, and judged other people to be either better than me, or me being better than them, so I could try to prevent "losing the dangerous game of life" while experimenting with drugs I had a bad trip on ecstasy(MDMA) and and later with LCD the first time I tried them. It was verry terror like and paralyzing. I was tripping and had a felling the world is not what I think it is.

And them I felt like all people (on tv or friends) started discussing together, how they would tell me that they knew but not me. Tthey were smiling and laughing, and I felt evil. like a secret was going to be revealed to me that I was about to be "terminated" and that hey said this life I had had, was only a mean joke that they enjoyed playing with me. (in the trip I could not see that "me" being the unique center of the universe was kind of absurd.

Later I had the same experience on mushrooms but then it was not projected to people, but more of a big unknown evil void that would swallow me. I stopped taking drugs for the last 10 years but the underlying fear of life, combined with those experiences often make me feel unnatural, scared and a pretending fraud while being social.

Some time ago for some reason (stupid) I tried MDMA again and the same paranoid delusions happened again. Fantasies of everyone talking about me, etc. I tried looking, but then I got so lost in the fantazies I forgot about doing the looking. I had hoped the looking would have cured those paranoid fantasies but I would think it is the fear of life that manifest in that way. I think the feeling of me not experinecing reality as it realy is, is right, but then it goes wild into a paranoid fantazy about me being totaly seperate from life, and uniquely different from everyone else (it feels dum to say that know, at the time I guess I know logically it is not true, but the feelings override the logic). Well, does anyone with trauma feel that the looking helps for that or would some kind of trauma treatment be better for those things?

Just a thought. I found that listening to John talk over and over about the fact that everything that happens in the personality construction is totally beside the point was helpful. For a long time I was very resistant as my habits and impulses to do something about a particular behavior were so strong I just felt I had to 'do' something to fix the situation within the personality even if nothing really worked. My grand-daughter had very strong panic attacks around ten years old and I would be very present with her and in guide her with the breath to reconnect with her body and look at her sense of herself (with age appropriate language of course) She hasn't had any episodes since. I would say don't pay much attention to any phenomenom.

Much love,

Maureen