You have worked so hard remembering what caused your personality to go astray, healing your past with therapy, releasing it with bodywork. At what point do you say "Enough focus on the past, I am healed!" When do you create a clear presence in the Now, and get on with your life?

Answer: as soon as you can. You must pass through valid and real stages of opening to repressed feelings, uncovering your unprocessed experiences we call “memories”, and discharging the rage and grief of abuse. However, you reach a point in “doing your work” when it’s time to move the focus from what was to designing and creating what can be. As healing deepens through time and well-guided inner exploration, the yearning to have a "now" increases. Court the skills for developing happiness.

When you no longer are attached to your story because you have retrieved your full soul from it, declare yourself healed and set about creating a life that reflects your Authentic Nature. Invoke the Divine in whatever form you perceive it and ask It to recreate you in Its Image so your Essence can take up full residence in your body. Ask It to teach you how to be happy and free.

You no longer need to live “at effect” of your past and what others did. To move on requires giving up the Victim archetype; the very one you came into this life to study. You may feel grief in giving up old coping mechanisms developed to fend off the pain of victim. You may feel vulnerable not using these old, outmoded but familiar ways of constructing your reality. Let these reactions be and they will pass.

You cannot get to a new reality with old thinking. To reach dreams you pray for may require that you give up cherished addictions. Addictions to substances likely fell away long ago; addictions to misery and suffering may be fading. Now release attachments to mind games, old things you tell yourself, ways ego and “little mind” fret and stew and worry. Under stress, notice how your mind sounds like it did years ago, especially when younger, dissociated selves get lost in old fears and anxieties.

Listening to this "small mind" chatter gives it power, and leaves wounded inner kids in charge again, with no adults on duty. Under the duress of possible life-shattering abuse in the past, you learned to dissociate away, secrete away, your most precious and unwounded selves. These are the ones who grow up to become your adult and evolve into your spiritual seeker. As healing progresses, you develop stronger links with Spirit and the capacity to keep these resourceful states present even in crises. Ground in your strength instead of joining younger splits who are lost in the past.

The shift from living out of a child’s coping mechanisms to operating from an adult, rational, compassionate, intuitive personality requires that you give up the dissociative mechanism itself and reside in your here and now. All of you. Use your practices.

Develop zero tolerance for doing it the old way, while compassionately embracing any part of you that seems to need to do so. Consider a regression as cause for reaching out to nurture a part of you that needs love, rather than cause for shame or blame. Each button or trigger then becomes an opportunity to co-parent your inner selves with Spirit, bringing them into current time.

The arms of Divine Mother are always available as are those of Kwan Yin, Christ, Mother Mary, Isis, Yemaya, and many others to assist when parts of you need to be held. Give attention to the part that is reacting, rather than enter into the outmoded reaction. Nurture it and call in a Divine babysitter to hold and coddle it. Assure your inner children you are on duty and can handle life without their help, so they can rest, be loved, and play as children do. Use effects of the past as a signal to draw the reacting part to the present, where you are safe and loved, saving all your energies for functioning here and now.

How do you relate to family of origin now, how be authentic and not play their games? First, notice that people who share your blood may have little else in common with you, and make that ok. Has trying to make them more like you ever worked? Give it up! Give up needing to be understood and seen by those who have no context for you. Really seeing you might threaten their carefully constructed system of denial and activate yearnings that may feel dangerous. Or you may function outside the parameters of their radar screen. Your true kin recognize you, as do We.

Remain sovereign so that your experience is fully within your own power. Seek joy and happiness from how well you hold integrity with your truth and show up in ways you prefer. Thus you are powerful in determining your own reality instead of powerless to change theirs. Resign all jobs of having to understand your family members (taken on to avoid the next abuse) and begin to relate as if you’ve grown accustomed to a new land and are observing the old country through new eyes.

Family isn’t so bad if you need nothing from them. Witnessing them with detachment informs you about your patterns. Every now and then, something you say, or more likely model in living your Truth gets through to someone and for a fleeting moment they join you in authenticity. Settle for these gems of brief contact, knowing by appreciating them you help anchor the experience in the heart of your relative. Mostly expect nothing, offer nothing unasked, be willing to let everyone just be, and focus on being Who You Really Are. Staying in self-love is the best gift ever.

The way Home is claiming it. Thought creates. “I now live sovereign in my body, I now claim my wholeness, asking Goddess to recreate me in Her Image. Help me integrate my dissociated selves to be the best I can be." A good exercise: List in your journal qualities about who your abusers see you as being, the ones they inculcated. Then list beside each quality its opposite, which is probably closer to the truth of your core self. For each piece of up-side down conditioning (evident in your negative self-talk), look for the positive opposite which may well describe what is emerging within.

Sing your Authentic self onto the bones of your transformed nature. Use sound, dance and movement, visualization, drumming and ritual to reveal to your mind’s eye how you’ve evolved in the strengthening process of recovering yourself. Move your eyes into now and paint the pictures of what you’ve created from gathering all your spiritual resources and using them. Feast your eyes on the good before you and let it grow and blossom into a personality capable of fulfillment, satisfaction, and happiness.

In your sexual centers, breathe yourself into your organs of pleasure and activate your Goddess-given passions. Your perpetrators did all they could to destroy you loving your sexuality, naturally embracing your passion. Write about the opposite of that conditioning and reclaim your free, erotic, sensual nature. Heal your connection with your genitals so they become, once again, sacred portals to your Temple of Light. Allow the Lover archetype of your Soul to emerge to create the natural blessings of opening to your own ecstasy.

You have earned the right to be called HEALED. Claim it so you can enjoy the life you’ve so carefully recreated. We shall walk every step with you if you ask. Your Spiritual Family of Light agreed long ago to be present when you were ready to awaken, to help you emerge from the chrysalis of your recovery process. Let us midwife as you birth your spirit-based life, nurture you as you evolve your visions, and help you learn the surrender that unfolds the Divine Plan. Blessed Be. Namaste'