Melting the Ice

I have begun to realize that I have no idea who I am, and this fills me with fear, confusion, and sadness.

How can it be that I am older than 65 and don’t know who I am? Well… lots of reasons: Maybe the most important is that, until now, my self-centered, fear-driven focus has been on others so that they wouldn’t leave me.

My identity has been deeply intertwined with being somebody’s wife, mother, sister, daughter, friend…obsessively working on how to become “better”. I believed that I had to be a better wife, better mom, better friend…then maybe “they” would accept me. I felt as though “they” thought something was wrong with me.

Convinced that I deserved the negative behaviors of others, I became paranoid and resentful. In this environment, especially around people who were vital to my “survival”, I lived in my lizard brain, more often than not. I reacted defensively. It became impossible to let my guard down, let people in, and at times, even to smile. “I’ll bite you before you have the chance to bite me.”

How do we find out who we are without evaluating our value based on the people we have in our lives? Do they like me? If so, why? If they don’t, why not? How can I change to please them? After all, we have to belong somewhere, don’t we? We have to have a tribe, someone who cares about us so that we can feel safe. And when we don’t have that, life can be scary…and I was scared…all the time.

Especially now after my husband has died and my two daughters are grown and living their own lives, I feel as though I belong nowhere.

So I wondered…what could I do?

My solution was to accept an invitation from a friend in Australia to live with her and her family for six months. What a contrast to my previous life! Now, I live with a family that shows me respect and love. Then, I was always someone else’s something…and whatever I did never seemed to measure up to others’ expectations (or mine, for that matter). Now, I can be me! And I am welcomed…an amazing feeling.

In the months since I’ve been living in my new world, I can see what a doom loop my life had become. And, in the end I was left with a question: “How did all this negativity get started?” Was it me? Was I different? Maybe. But did I deserve shunning and exclusion? I don’t think so.

How do we get out of a doom loop of self-hatred and feelings of worthlessness? We must first change our environment to a place with more positive feedback.

And, then, it takes a while to realize that when people treat you kindly, maybe it’s simply that they like you, maybe even love you…just the way you are! There is no ulterior motive, no passive aggressive-ness. It’s – plain and simple – a good person liking you.

“Are you saying that I’m okay, just like this?” Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.

When we get an opportunity to see our Self in a loving environment and learn how to accept love and care, we can start melting the ice. What do I mean by that?

When people asked Michelangelo how he could create such a masterpiece as the statue of David, he answered, “I created a vision of David in my mind and simply carved away everything that was not David.”

Every time we experience an overwhelming event, a trauma, we freeze! Dr. Peter Levine talks about how we live with frostbites in our body. I would even say that, after we have had a lot of trauma, we turn into ice. We retract. We build thicker and thicker ice walls around our Self so as not to feel pain and painful people.

The good news is that there IS a vision for you, me, us. Our authentic Self is inside that block of ice…hiding, scared that someone will find out who we truly are.

We do need to exercise a little caution when dealing with the ice: Because working with the blowtorch or icepick of negativity risks touching and even harming the vulnerable, true person that we are. Instead, we can bring the ice block out into the sunlight of caring people and let the sun “carve away” what is not us. We can re-discover our true Self.

I can tell you how I have been able to melt my ice. I have replaced the negative people in my life with people who accept me for who I am. And, equally important, I have had numerous somatic coaching sessions to resolve (melt away) my pain.

These last two years of recovery from my husband’s death have brought me to a new place of respect and love for my Self. The somatic sessions have helped me dissolve old triggers of self-hatred, self-doubt, and worthlessness and taught me to allow friends to love me back to life. Now, I am developing an intuitive ability to find clarity in what I want, confidence in what I do, and courage to be…me!

I can show you how somatic healing can help you come to a similar place of Self acceptance. If this sounds like something you would like to know more about…please contact me.

References for this article:

The quote about Michelangelo was taken from the website A-Z Quotes.

I heard about Dr. Peter Levine’s “frostbites” in a workshop I attended. He talks about the freeze response in a YouTube video titled, “Working with the Freeze Response with Peter Levine, PhD”, posted on October 27, 2022.