Many of us have trauma in our history. It can be hard to overcome if whatever caused it went on for a long time. But it can be dealt with, and healed if your recognize it and choose to move forward. I’m happy to have George Molho, who was kidnapped and tortured by his father for a year when he was seven, as my guest today. He worked as a health-care consultant for 15 years before becoming a writer and public speaker, addressing domestic abuse, child abduction, and recovering from trauma through self-reflection. He’s the author Scarred: A Memoir, which tells the riveting story of survival abuse and recovering from it.

Trauma Re-Written, Child Reborn
The reflective healing power of writing?
by George Molho

“While I hope I breathe; while I breathe, I hope.” Every morning I wake up to that same empowering mantra. It electrifies my spirit and awakens my soul, reminding me of where I have been and what I have overcome. These are not merely words. They are my choir, my trumpet, my call to arms rousing me to recognize life and embrace living. Ironically, those ten simple words that saved my life and helped forge my future were taught to me when I was seven in 1978, before my father kidnapped and tortured me for a year. Before, when I still called him dad.

In the beginning, as a child, everything was wild and wondrous…new and untouched. It was a time of bright bliss and endless bounty. I was born in love and laughter. I had a perfect little life. And then like so many who experience suffering I couldn’t see beyond the pain. I stopped living. Who I had been before the kidnapping only served to remind me of what I would never be again. Innocent. And the boy I had been was gone. Therefore, I fought to find a way through the disheartening nature of those troubling times and the agony of paralyzing recollections. I struggled till I discovered a path through the darkness.

So many people today are struggling with the trauma of past pain, the oppressive weight of secretive burdens, and the frozen memories of childhood abuse that stills imagination and stalls dreams that they slowly die by inches from deep within. So many more in our nation are quietly enduring the punishment of this economic upheaval that strangles reasoning, chokes thought and suppresses growth that all that is left to them is to seethe and sharpen raw nerves into rage.

People often forget, as I once did about the empowering nature of belief in oneself. These traumas can serve to strengthen us whereby we learn from them or they can rewrite our instincts and own us as we become servants to fear and puppets to the past. In order to take a truncheon to trauma sometimes we have to believe that we can.?? I understand that there will always be someone who suffers, someone who is walking through life marking time and moving forward seemingly from momentum. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Each of us has it within us to transform those silent songs of quiet despair into the milestones of challenges conquered and obstacles overcome.

We carry within us that divine spark, the core of empowered humanity that has been fighting since the dawn of civilization to the present incarnation of man with nothing more than faith in oneself, a belief that all things are possible and a thin layer of grey matter as a stalwart fencepost of free will that marks us as man and stamps the rest as animals. We hope, we dream, we create but it is for us to decide. We live on the fine thin line between conscious action and inanimate doormat. The difference is choice. The decision is yours.?? As time passed I realized that the only way for me to own myself and be free was to walk straight into the nightmare my father wrote. Recalling each and every memory was the primary key to reclaiming my life.

If you find yourself weighed down from towing a mountain of polluted traumatic memories that vie for possession of your soul and control of your daily life then it is time to begin. Time to rebrand yourself in the image of your deepest aspirations. First by reclaiming the painful moments and repressive emotions from the grasp of your inner pain. Those memories belong to you. Each one you revisit grants you title over it. And the longer they hold sway over the course of your convictions or the directions of your desires the greater the chance someone else will be able to sniff them out and like big red buttons push them till you jump to their rhyme and dance to their meter. Reliving the bad may darken your inner light for a day, for a time even but in the end there will be none that shine as bright.

Secondly, if there are pains that are too torturous to bear that wreak mischief and mayhem in your life, then find a soft quiet place and write what torments you in aggravating detail. Write the letters then burn them. Name your pain. Then burn it. And you will feel a serene sense of sublime peace wash over you. It sounds simple. In some ways it is. And it is absolutely remarkable.

Lastly, I will share there was a time that I often emulated the people I grew up with. I attempted to draw out their best traits they had to share and duplicate them in order to create a new me, the best that I could possibly be. In some instances it worked. In others I failed miserably. This is an example of where I failed. So do not follow suit. Instead, please learn from what I have lived.

The men in my family never seemed to grumble or groan. They were stalwart and stone. They were supermen. After my abduction, and for a great long while, I acted as they did. And I thought I too was made of iron and ice: impenetrable, invulnerable and invincible. Then one day I discovered that there is no vessel made by mans’ hands nor fashioned by his minds inner eye that can contain pain, trap trauma and encase abuse. And before you break down shattering as all vessels do, poisoned by your own contraption of self-preservation. All that acidic matter and all those noxious emotions begin to breathe into your every action and choice. Until one day you no longer recognize your reflection in the mirror.

I focused on the healing power of reflective writing to achieve harmony and fluidity. I discovered a place where I could pour out my pain in notebooks, cell phones or sticky pads. I applied my negative emotions to any object that could contain them, anything but me.

For me, writing became my salvation. Whether it is through writing my book, “Scarred, A Memoir,” penning a righteous letter of closure made out to a dearly departed ex to burn on the barbecue grill, or dropping a prayer in a makeshift backyard mailbox for God to answer; revealing your fear unmasks its brittle bones while disarming your trauma and returning ownership of you back into your heart, back into your hands.

I still wake up in the morning my mantra of hope fresh on my lips. But now at night before I lay my head down to sleep I look back upon all I survived and realize I’m still kicking, I’m still here. I’m alive. I am free. Best of all, I am me.
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Check out George Molho’s book Scarred: A Memoir. It will leave you with an impact you won’t easily forget.
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Take the 31 Days of Self-Love Challenge–a pledge to do something loving for yourself for the next 31 days–and get my book, How Do I Love Me? Let Me Count the Ways for free at http://howdoiloveme.com. Read my 31 Days of Self-Love Posts from 2012 HERE.

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