The trauma that broke us down is now the fire that fuels our healing work across dimensions — with him in the Spirit world and me on this side.
The night my husband took his own life, he opened up my ability of communicating with the Spirit world. Over the last two and a half years, he’s led me to the depths of the most profound insights around life, death, soul, and love. He’s opened me up to purpose. He’s helped me understand that neither this life nor our suffering is all that there is. Through this all, he’s led me to immense joy, spaces above and beyond the material world and the thinking mind.
The irony is: my awakening and purpose have come to be because of the most debilitating pain and heartbreak I’ll ever know — so deep they almost took my life, too.
Speaking Your Truth Without Fear
I lost my husband to unexpected suicide when we were in our mid-thirties, when life was just getting really good.
I found out after his death that he was sexually abused for years as a child and adolescent. I found this out largely thanks to him leading me from Spirit to the objective information and evidence he left behind, like writings and other documents; and thanks to my rigorous training as a qualitative researcher.
After he died, I blamed myself for so long for not having seen the signs. More than anything, I blamed him for telling me I was “imagining things” in the moments that I did trust my intuition and speak up that I knew something was wrong.
It's taken time, maturation, and massive healing on my end, but I don't hold this against him anymore. I now understand his trauma and the ways that the abuse continued to be upheld in adulthood, which reinforced the secrets and silence. The fear caused by unaddressed complex trauma carried over from childhood, and the hold it had on his body, consumed him.
He never felt safe or free to speak his truth, or to seek help for what happened to him. He did everything to uphold the secrets until he no longer could.
In the aftermath of his passing, however, he urged me to take a different path.
"Keep nothing inside," he told me in meditation a few months after he died. "Tell it all."
That's why speaking out on abuse, suicide, and trauma are so central to what he and I do now.
Breaking down fear and shame around telling one's truth.
That's part of our mission.
"Keep nothing inside," he told me in meditation a few months after he died. "Tell it all."
Working Together as a Spirit Team
With my husband on the Other Side and me here, we now work together as a spirit team in the areas of trauma, grief, suicide loss and prevention, and sexual abuse of children and especially boys.
We do this through mediumship and soul readings with survivors, who are showing up with their own souls to get insight and support for their healing. My husband trains with me every day in spirit communication, as well as shows up to help with readings. He also helps to guide me and so many others that cross our path to the resources needed for one’s healing path forward. He’s helped me learn how to blend my background as a social worker and a researcher with my mediumship to help others — and myself.
We also do this work through writing and interviews. I feel him every time I sit down to write, and every talk I give. It's not just me; it's us.
We talk candidly and openly about the realities of what it's like to endure the unfathomable. To survive it. To not. And what could have been done instead. It's only by sharing these perspectives in an authentic, honest way that the light begins to shine in and the isolation, shame, and guilt around trauma begin to dissipate.
We also talk about what all of this means for healing, both on the human side and in the spirit world.
Healing Has to Happen, Whether on This Side or That One
As my husband has taught me from the Other Side, no matter what, we have to heal what pains us. If we don't heal it on this side, we have to do it when we cross over.
There is no such thing as “hell” in the afterlife, no matter who you were in the human life. (My husband has explained this to me and countless, highly-experienced mediums have encountered the same.) However, after we transition to the afterlife, there is a period of facing our truths and undergoing healing as needed — a process that we can’t evade or avoid. Some souls will undergo a more extensive process, based on what they lived and how they reacted to it. Unaddressed trauma is one area that receives particular care.
When we cross over, we all undergo what’s called a life review, a process by which we replay our lives through our own lens and those of others. In other words, we see our life and how we lived it through our eyes — as well as through the eyes of the people we loved and the people we hurt. The life review isn’t meant to be a process of punishment, but rather a part of our soul growth and expansion, both at the individual and the collective level. We look back on what our souls learned, what they didn’t, and what will be focused on in subsequent chapters of our soul’s journey.
What is more, as my husband has explained, the vantage point from our loved ones on the other side is that it's more desirable to face our pain and surrender to healing while we’re still on this side — the human one.
That’s because it’s on this side that we're positioned to undergo the most transformative emotional, mental, and spiritual growth. In fact, this is part of the reason our souls (re)incarnate in the first place.
It's also on this side that we're able to experience the human essence of joy, as well as really transmute the suffering caused by unfathomable heartbreak. When we heal, life takes on new meaning. So does our way of being in and seeing the world.
And central to the human journey, it’s over here that we're most likely to impact the lives and conditions of those around us for the better. When we heal, we right wrongs. We clear karma. We lift ourselves and others up. We cause ripple effects that improve other people's lives, too. Sometimes it’s our loved ones; sometimes it’s people we don't even know. Either way, the ripples benefit us all. Prevention of further trauma, awareness around traumatic issues, collective support in healing, exchange of higher-vibration energy — these are just some of the ways one person’s healing spills over.
When we heal, we also open ourselves up to living lives we truly deem worth living. We open ourselves up to our dharma, our soul's purpose. Many of these experiences are most deeply felt here in our human forms — the world of the material and of incredible human senses. Taste. Scent. Physical touch and feeling. These are just some of the fantastic experiences our souls can’t wait to have as humans.
All of this together only adds to the experience of joy that we're able to feel on the human side.
While healing doesn't erase the pain we endure or take back the reasons why we hurt, it does shift the pain and allow us to understand it in a different, oftentimes broader, bigger, more profound way. This better serves us all — the individual and the collective.
To say we’re “making lemonade out of lemons” would be the joke of the year — but in many ways, at a soul level, with some bizarre twists of the universe, that’s exactly what we’re doing.
Lemons
I hate that my husband and I (and so many of the people I've met on this journey) have gone through hell on earth to get to a place of deep connection and purpose. At the same time, I choose to believe that from a soul level, we’re doing exactly what we came here to do.
I don’t believe that my husband and I were “destined” to be an abuse survivor or a widow by suicide loss. The abusers could have stopped or not touched another child. His suicide could have taken a different course.
But this is how it happened, and in the aftermath, he and I both had our awakening — together, and separately.
And so here we are.
To say we’re “making lemonade out of lemons” would be the understatement of the year — but in many ways, at a soul level, with some bizarre twists of the universe, that’s exactly what we’re doing.
With Love,
Lenore & Bruno
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Lenore Matthew, PhD, MSW
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