Full circle

I'm grateful in a way that I don't have a lot of close friends with whom to talk about my emotional rollercoasters. I cycle so quickly that even my best friends would consider me mentally unstable and dismiss everything I have to say. Times like this I love the internet. It suddenly hit me why I have such a primal reaction to being put aside by the people I feel most attached to. So I googled "how to deal with abandonment issues in relationships." This is what I found.

AKeRU is a Japanese word that means “to pierce, to end, to begin.”
AKeRU is the name I’ve given to the five hands-on mental exercises that turn the pain of an ending into the beginning of positive change.

AKeRU makes its debut in both JOURNEY books.

AKeRU works with the natural flow of life process, enabling the individual to restore a sense of self, increase life, and find new love.

AKeRU recognizes abandonment as rebirth. It taps into your capacity for growth.

There is an AKeRU exercise for each stage of the abandonment process called S.W.I.R.L.

For the SHATTERING stage, there is an exercise for staying in the moment that helps you manage pain and enhance the quality of your life.

For WITHDRAWAL, there is a written dialogue that taps into your oldest and truest feelings – feelings that have been interfering from deep within your personality all along, and allows you to turn them around. If you make this exercise a part of your daily life, positive change is inevitable.

For INTERNALIZING, there is a visualization exercise that re-directs your psychic energy and helps you focus on your deepest dreams and needs, build toward real achievements, and change life direction.

For RAGE, the task is to use your rage energy to take constructive actions in your life. To help you do this, there is an inventory that helps you discover a powerful new voice, the Outer Child. Outer child is the part of the personality that acts out the inner child’s anger and frustration. Your Outer Child takes emotional hostages instead of forming healthy relationships. Outer Child is the culprit who sabotages your attempts to bring love into your life. The deconstruction of your Outer Child defenses allows you to change your behavior, resolve insecurity, and become ‘unstuck.’ (A 100 item Outer Child inventory is included in JOURNEY.)

For LIFTING, the task is to increase your capacity for love and make a new connection, which includes a Five Point Action Plan.

Really, it's an extension of grieving. When someone close to you dies, it's obvious to you and everyone why you're hurting, and there's conventional wisdom behind coping and expectations from society to give the sufferer time to heal. But for someone like me who is ultrasensitive to being ignored, even to a small degree, it triggers some of the same reactions as a person who is grieving the death of a loved one. It's like my brain can't tell the difference.

I had the idea that, in order to work through some of my scars from my marriage and other failed relationships, I might illustrate my emotions as I would in a children's picture book. That's tomorrow's goal, to put some of these raw feelings out into the world, in my own words, my own imagery.