CPTSD ~ PAINTING THREE

This painting is the hardest one I've done so far in my series. It's only my third but I cried through almost the whole process of making it.

It's about one of the most traumatic moments from my childhood. Too personal to share in detail. It haunts me still.

I only half knew what I was doing as I made it. Allowing my intuition to guide me. I used some torn paper to symbolize stairs. Blue paint to symbolize the physical experience and the feeling of a part of my soul leaving my body.

The birch trees came next and at first I used them as a symbol of the woods behind my house, where I found refuge from the world. But after tearing and glueing the pieces I was left with some tiny scraps of birch and I used that to make little steps going up in various places. As my way to climb out of the dark.

The tree was last. Originally I intended it to represent the tree in the woods behind my house where I attempted to build a tree house. I was always fascinated by tree houses. I didn't have much success building one on my own as a child. Mostly just planks of wood nailed down to make a floor. But it was my favorite place to go to get away.

Some really big connections came about as I was making the tree and house.

I used to tell people I had a twin brother who died falling out of a tree when I was seven. I never really understood why until later in life. This specific memory the painting is about I had suppressed, completely forgetting about until my teens. And it wasn't until close to my twenties when the full memory of it, emotions and all, came back to me.

My "dead twin" was actually me. A part of me that left my body during a moment that my brain was incapable of handling. Something in shamanism known as soul loss. Something I was unable to verbalize as a child so described in the only way I understood.

In my twenties I began having reoccurring dreams of a haunted tree house. It was always hard to get to, sometimes the exact location unknown. Rarely did I make it to the treehouse in my dream. But when I did, it was rundown and scary looking and I was too afraid to go inside.

Until one night during a dream I finally did. And waiting inside was the ghost of a girl: me. It was the oddest thing, seeing myself starting back at me in ghost form. And it dawned on me the tree house was haunted by my inner child, the part that had been so badly traumatized.

After that revelation I stopped having the dream. And in my thirties, before beginning my own shamanic training, I saw a shaman who performed a soul retrieval and brought back that lost part.

I'm still kind of blown away by all this painting has revealed to me. And, despite the tears, it has been very healing to create.