Women & Chronic Fatigue: This Remembering is Key to Healing

I sat with my inner child today.

She leaned into me and I took her hand. She asked me to please stay and not fly off as I so often do. I tried and then felt the familiar low hum/buzz of urgency that makes it so difficult for me to be still. The feeling that there is always something to be done.

She looked at me again. “Feel it” she said.

Already back in my head, I thought it was odd as I always tell my clients that the feelings in their adult bodies usually belong to the inner child and so they create space for the inner child to feel it. But here was my inner child asking me to feel it in my adult body while she witnessed it, as if she was the adult.

I realised this was the ultimate acknowledgement of her. The presence and acknowledgement she craved. And, like my own children are to me, my inner child is a valuable teacher. If I choose to allow that….

“Get out of my head” I reminded myself. “Stop analysing”. My inner child continued to look up at me with oceanic patience and a gentle expectation. I sat and felt into the feeling of urgency. As I did that I felt my uterus and root contract with a sensation of pain. So this is what lay under it all…..

I was surprised. Was this a suppressed memory of some form of abuse I wondered. “Did someone hurt you?” I asked her. “No, I hurt myself” she replied. So I sat with the discomfort and she reminded me how painful it was to be a girl and how she had shut down her own body to stop it.

I remembered that my father wanted a boy. I remembered that my mother, unconsciously, was afraid I would be a girl as she carried the same trauma of lifetimes of what it means to be a woman. I remembered how I’d desperately wanted to be a boy when growing up

I looked down at my inner child, questioningly. She replied, “Girls get hurt very easily”. I then felt and remembered the vulnerability I’d associated with being a girl. The fear of force, attack, persecution and suppression that had happened to women for eons and that my inner child carried within in her cells from the moment of conception.

I remembered how I had stopped eating when I entered puberty. I’d told myself I was fat. In truth, it was to stop the development of my womanly body. I was terrified of my budding sexuality and femininity, for me tied so closely to being taken advantage of, hurt or violated.

And all along, covering all that, was the wired, humming, buzzing feeling that made it impossible to just stay in this body I felt so unsafe in.

I looked at her again and simply said, “I’m so sorry”.

In leaving my body I left her. The feminine, sexual essence is deeply embedded within play, joyfulness, creativity and childlike curiosity. I chose to shut that all down and, eventually, that disconnection led to Glandular Fever/Mono at 13 and chronic fatigue thereafter.

There was more to it – there was the trauma associated with the collective and my own personal experience of the time. Leaving my body enabled life to be more bearable.

But, for the first time, I truly felt the magnitude of the collective trauma of being a female and how I’d carried that for as long as I can remember. It’s no wonder I turned my back on the feminine and with that I turned my back on lifeforce, my inner child and my truth.

“You are so wise, so sensitive and so strong my little one, ” I told her. “It’s amazing you could feel all of that and you carried it for so long.” She signed with relief at the acknowledgement.

I continued….”I’m also so deeply grateful you’re a girl otherwise I’d never have learned all I know now about how powerful the feminine essence truly is. I’d never have learned what all beings are capable of and can experience when they truly embrace their feminine truth.” She let this sink in for a while – a new perspective.

“Just stay here with me some more” she said. So I did. The buzzing had eased. My belly and root felt open. I felt calm. I just sat with her and my breath.

“I don’t want to forget this” I said to her as I thought how healing this particular way of connecting to her was. “You’re so silly” she said with a giggle. “I’m always here. You just need to remember that”.

PS Did this resonate with you at all? Comment below…..