The Other Side of Trauma by Amber French

Nov 3, 2023

Hello dear soul. How are you? No no no, that's not what I meant. I'm not looking for the standard polite response. How are you really? Take this moment to tune into yourself. Take a deep breath and connect to your inner self. I am doing it with you right now, as I type this. Let us pause and do it together. I set the intention that as I and my readers go on this journey together, we do it in our highest and best good and that our consciousness takes the highest and easiest path to clarity. I love you, now let us breathe together. In through your nose, out through your mouth, being aware of your body and the emotions you are feeling in your body. Allowing your thoughts to just be there without any judgment or identification with them. You are not your thoughts, or your brain. You are the consciousness that is aware of your thoughts. Allow yourself to breathe this awareness into your bones and muscles for at least three breaths, and feel free to keep breathing for as long as it feels right to you. Then, continue reading my story that I am graced by the Divine to share with you.

Hi! My name is Amber. Now that you are more present with yourself, how are you? Today, I am filled with emotion. What is emotion? Let's break down the word, energy-in-motion. What energies are in motion for you today? How are they flowing? Do they feel stagnant, stuck? Do they feel turbulent as they force you into the winds of November change? For many people, the time of fall marks the beginning of a seasonal depression. Depression of what? What no longer feels accessible to you? Yes, the daylight has waned. Yes, the hot summer heat has shifted to a gentle (or not-so-gentle) chill that paves the way for the holidays. I personally celebrate Christmas and Thanksgiving. What do you celebrate? Do you consider this a family holiday? Do you have a family to celebrate with? If you have a family to celebrate with, do you choose to celebrate with them, or do you bury yourself in other things and isolate yourself to keep yourself safe from a dynamic that plagued your childhood?

I am guided to speak of family ties. These generational shifts that we are experiencing as a society, as a people... when you think about it, are influenced by the family beliefs and experiences that we have growing up. When we are children, we do not have much creative control over our experiences. Our formative years are outlined by the beliefs and experiences that are chosen for us by our parents, loved ones, governmental facilities, etc. Sometimes our experiences are common and quite relatable to other humans we are surrounded by, and other times we have unique experiences that are more difficult for other people to understand. Regardless of what you experienced in your formative years and how relatable you feel these experiences are, they are indeed your experiences. Let us reflect for a moment. Are any of these experiences still plaguing you or blessing you?

We tend to trend towards the negative when we think about our upbringing and our formative years. We tend to think about what we wish we had experienced, or what we wish we hadn't experienced. Dear soul, your feelings are more than valid; they are indicators of what energy is surrounding you in regard to what you are currently creating in your experience as an adult. Even though these feelings are attached to times that ended long ago, we still carry them. These are our beliefs about our worth or the worth of others. These are the perceptions of what is appropriate and fair for ourselves and others. These are our perceptions of right and wrong, which outline our entire decision-making process. The holidays are triggering for many people because it brings all of that up. I invite you to take a proactive approach with me.

I am going to share my story with you. Right now, I am in Fort Myers Florida visiting my family. I am a very talented psychic medium who was guided to come here to help and be of service to my family. This is a turbulent time for us. My grandmother, who is like a second mama to me, is losing her memory. I was guided by my grandfather on the other side and her twin sister to come here and do healing work to help her forgive. As the days pass and her mental dexterity dwindles, I find myself reflecting on the teachings of Louise Hay. In her book You Can Heal Your Life, she has an index in the back of the book of the energetic patterns connected to physical ailments. For Alzheimer's and dementia, the energetic pattern connected to that is being stuck in the past and unable to move forward. This leads to the soul who is affected to having one foot in physical reality, and one foot rooted in their subconscious mind. They slowly lose their ability to retain new information as their thoughts trend towards the past, as they forget more and more of the things that mean the most to them. So here I am, a powerfully aligned healer having conversations with my grandmother as she perceives me in many different ways. Sometimes I'm her granddaughter, sometimes I am my mother, or her sister. Sometimes I am an unknown loved one.

In these moments, I follow my intuitive guidance and play the part she assigns to me temporarily. I take a journey with her through her subconscious and have discussions with her that are plaguing her waking mind in an objective way. What I have observed is how her brain is helping her in a sense. Her brain is forcing her to look at her limiting beliefs with complete and irrational vulnerability. Her lack of mental dexterity is keeping her from rationalizing these beliefs with logic, so they are coming out in their raw form, which is a beautiful thing to withhold as a healer. The outbursts of sadness and anger that run through her are attached to specific events and experiences that she has limiting beliefs around. As these conversations are happening, I am internally quiet. I am listening as her granddaughter and as these temporary roles she assigns me. I am truly blessed to be a medium and to have access to the souls on the other side that she temporarily thinks I am, so they can give me their perspective on the situation. I am blessed that I come from a family that is open to my gifts and that they have embraced me even though most of them have chosen to quiet that inner intuitive voice within them. I have been having truly divine experiences, where she and I almost come together to replay scenarios like a movie. Then, as her healing granddaughter, I use Theta Healing to help her change these beliefs and transmute the limiting energies she is feeling around these experiences. The best part is that I don't even have to facilitate these healing experiences. She approaches me. She brings these things up, and I just listen and ask questions until she leads me to what she desperately wants to let go and change... and then I help her, and she accepts it.

Many of the things she is bringing up are things that have plagued my own childhood, either through organic shared human experience or through the experiences she gave my mother who then gave them to me. I have been experiencing a beautiful tornado of emotion inside me of clarity surrounding the pain of these family ties and limitations, and how that plays into the generational limitations that each generation of humans do their best to transcend. I am truly blessed to be able to play the part of daughter/granddaughter/healer/human in this dynamic. In this moment as I am writing this for you, my reader, she asked me what I am doing, and I lovingly told her that I'm writing my article for work for the millionth time haha. Do you remember 10-second Tom from 50 first dates? That is how she is nowadays, other than when she is having these sacred and vulnerable conversations with me about her life experiences. Many of us have lost a loved one to this disease, and it can be quite traumatic. My heart is with you as I walk this path with my own loved one, and I would like to share my perspective with you as a healer.

Whether your experience is happening currently, or you are remembering your experience with tears streaming down your face, I am sending you love and healing. If you would like to receive and give permission, close your eyes and affirm yes to receive this download before I share my Divine Knowledge with you. Healing sent! It is done. Now, let's focus on you. In these moments where your loved one is forgetting things, bring some extra awareness to what they do remember. What do they remember about their past? What feelings are they talking about? What beliefs are they representing in their psyche? As many of us know, those who suffer from these memory-loss based illnesses have moments of illusion-based clarity where they speak with conviction about their experiences. Reflect on these moments. What was your loved one saying, and how does it relate to your own internal traumas and belief system or values?

My grandmother has been speaking to me about all of her regrets and resentments. Those who have taken Theta Healing know how deeply those beliefs and emotions affect our life experience. She has been speaking about her regrets as a wife and as a mother, and the mistakes she feels like she made by lying to herself about what she truly values to chase in-the-moment satisfaction. She's looking at her life in her end-of-life stage of existence and evaluating her decisions and how that has affected the relationships that matter the most to her. She looks at her relationship with her children and regrets being so stubborn on her opinions and perceptions all of these years. She's looking at her own childhood and remembering the abuse and trauma she experienced, and how that affected her in her adult years. She is looking at these things with very deep regret and resentment towards others as well as herself. There is a part of her that is aware that her mind is slipping away, and that she is no longer for this Earth; and she is trying to emotionally process it all, and I am doing my best to help her and ease this process.

The other day, she spoke to me about her father, and the cat o' nine tails he used to punish her with. She spoke to me of her mother, and how her father forbade her from seeing her mother when she was losing her memory, as she now is. She spoke of her resentment towards her father for all of the pain he inflicted on her and her siblings, and the pain that she feels when she looks at her own parenting decisions and sees how she accidently repeated certain patterns of abandonment through self-abandonment that she continued as an adult and passed to her own children blindly and accidently through her lack of self-awareness. This is obviously a much longer and more complex story than I can outline for you, and I am trying to outline it in a way that stimulates the clarity for you that I am feeling in my own heart, so bear with me. My father was also very abusive and I also felt deeply abandoned by him, and lately I have been doing some very deep trauma work and inner child work to take my power back over my belief system. Yes, these things did happen and they were painful and detrimental to the little girl they happened to. I am still that little girl, and I am also the adult who gets to choose for myself now.

As a teenager, I chose men who abused me and overpowered my will because as a child that is how my father treated me. I forgave these men because as a child, that is what I was encouraged to do with my father. "You only have one father", I was told. "But he's still your dad", I was told. As time went on and I dove deeply into self help material, I started to pick up the broken pieces of my childhood and glue them back together with self-love and the desire to change and break the cycle. I stopped repeating the pattern of abuse within myself. I stopped telling myself "But he still loves you, and he's still your boyfriend, so you should forgive him", the same way I was encouraged to forgive my father as a young girl. I began to walk the path of awareness and forgiveness for all involved, which hasn't been easy. I had many moments of screaming about the injustice randomly while doing dishes as my mind wandered to past memories of abuse. I've had many moments of cry-yelling at myself in the mirror while trying to tell myself how worthy of love and respect I am. I've had many moments of looking at the body marked with cutting scars of self-harm that is carrying my soul with judgment and thinking to myself "if I was only more beautiful, or smarter, or more loving to myself sooner, this wouldn't have gone this far." With determination and practice and by grounding myself into the present moment, that all began to change. As I brought the awareness of knowing that THAT was then and this is now, I began to train myself to DECIDE to be different, because it is a decision that you have to make. You are not hopeless. You are not damned into this way of existence forever. You CAN CHANGE and get yourself out of these situations and patterns of thought. There is so much help nowadays available to us, and first you must be willing to help yourself and choose to change.

After YEARS of inner work, I am now with a tender and gentle man who would never lay a finger on me or raise his voice to me, or our future children. My eyes fill with tears when I think about the daughters and sons we will one day raise together, and all of that pain that came with changing my belief system has been worth it. All of those empty nights that I spent alone while changing my belief system because I refused to settle for what was toxic and familiar have been worth it. On those empty nights where I grieved the toxic things I was letting go of, I treated myself with the utmost respect and compassion, even though it felt weird and unfamiliar. I nurtured myself the way I wished I was nurtured as a child. I tried to imagine what having a tender and loving male presence felt like, even though I wasn't sure what that looked like yet. I sat with those emotions that came up instead of pushing them away and shaming myself for being unable to let go of the past. My love, if you are still feeling it, it's because it's attached to a limiting belief. Do not quiet that inner voice that is guiding you to heal. In the midst of my grandmother losing her mind, her resistance to feeling these closeted emotions are finally coming up. I am having the opportunity to heal them for her and myself, and all of the generations to come. It's bittersweet, but it is beautiful. I am worthy of this healing. My family is worthy of this healing even though we've all made mistakes in our blind unawareness of these patterns. You are worthy of healing too, and so is your family. Who cares who takes the first step? Does it really matter? That's ego. Stop telling yourself "I'm willing to change, but only if they change first, because that's the only way I can keep myself safe." Stop putting your healing in the hands of everyone else except yourself. Stop only setting boundaries based on the other person's ability to accept it. Take your power back, and lovingly hold your hand out to the rest of your family without judgment. You will be surprised by how many family members are willing to take your hand. Even if they don't, at least you are free now and not passing it to your own children. Give them time, they might come around. But don't deny yourself the opportunity to be free because of their inability to be free with you and your own fear of being alone or your own fear of being loved properly for the first time then losing it. That's your trauma tainting your perspective my love. Don't let the past lie to you about what good could come to you in the future if you would just allow yourself to try. Isn't it funny how we can be so unwilling sometimes to take the risk to be happy, yet we are so willing to continue to be in misery because it's familiar? It's silly when I put it that way, isn't it?

Even if you do not have any experiences that reflect the ones I have just outlined, as we go into this time of holiday cheer (or lack thereof), bring a sense of awareness with you as you visit family. Bring this sense of awareness with you as you bury yourself with work to avoid them, or sit alone because you taught yourself to be a private person to avoid pain, and ask yourself if this is how you want to feel. Joyfully embrace the patterns that bring you fulfillment, and listen quietly and without judgment to the patterns that continue to bring you pain, and do it with awareness. Life is not short nor long, it just is, and all we have is the present moment. What are you doing with yours now? Are you repeating patterns blindly that you swore you wouldn't? Are you keeping yourself lonely and afraid because as a child you taught yourself that was the only way to feel safe? When you look at your life and your loved ones (or lack thereof), do you feel like you would be proud of this life you are living if you were in your end-of-life stage? We tend to feel like we have all of the time in the world. The moments that truly matter sneak up on us, and if we aren't exercising that awareness, we can easily accidently do what is familiar and comfortable even if it doesn't align with our desires or values. We are often so afraid of the unknown or getting it wrong that we don't try something different, not realizing that the sameness we are choosing still feels wrong to us because we have trained ourselves to be complacent with pain and lack of fulfillment. Those moments when you are stressed and overwhelmed and you just need your children to behave, pause before reacting. Do you value what you are about to say? Before you cancel your family vacation to focus on work – pause. What do you really value in this moment? Can you make up this overtime later and spend some time with your loved ones instead? Before you people-please and try to make everyone happy but yourself – pause. What do YOU need to feel fulfilled during this holiday? Success is defined in many ways.... but at the end of the day when you are on your deathbed, most people weigh whether they are fulfilled or not. Success is outlined by the fulfillment you feel from moment to moment, and the joy and purpose you feel in your heart, and it is not without pain. Pain is a natural part of the human experience, and it is what makes the joy so beautiful if you can allow yourself to see the clarity laced in these moments of pain-filled joy.

If you look deeply into every limiting pattern we hold as a People, it's rooted in self-worth and self-love. What could you do to practice self-love during this time of familial remembrance? Self-love is a muscle. It is not a certificate that you earn or a milestone that you reach and then never think about again. self-love and awareness of our values goes hand in hand with our fulfillment in life, and loving thyself is a long term journey. It is a forever journey, and it is the secret to liberation from these generational limitations we perceive. Each generation that is born transcends that which we could not dare to overcome, and we resent them for it. We say things like "our generation, this generation, etc." Don't you remember being a kid and clearly seeing your parents limitations, and vowing to be different? These upcoming generations are trailblazing the path we wished we could have walked as children, and we are the ones who made the decision to make that safe for them. As I help my grandmother heal and release these regrets and resentments so she can feel the inner peace she deserves, I can feel my internal conviction to continue to grow and change and strengthen within me. I can feel my conviction to continue to trailblaze the path of what no longer serves me and humanity, while holding my self-love flag high in the air; like the statue of liberty. Even if other people do not understand me or relate, I am determined to cultivate this fulfillment that is available to me through my sacred ability to decide to be different from what I have currently come to know.. and I feel incredibly honored to have this awareness at my young age of 28.

I specialize in self-love belief work and values, and awareness-based boundary setting. If you need some extra help this season, feel free to book a session with me because I am happy to help. I am fulfilled to help. I am purposeful to help. I also offer end-of-life healing for those on their deathbed or their family members who are struggling. I can help you take a healthy and proactive approach through this pain. I love you, I love me, and I love humanity. Namaste.