"Trauma Response" – May 17, 1980

In the tranquil and sacred space of the akashic library, the air was thick with the essence of wisdom and ancient stories. The soft glow of candles cast long shadows on the towering bookshelves as Peter and Calliope settled into their seats. Calliope, her quill poised, was ready to capture the delicate and profound memories that Peter was about to share.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

Peter began, his voice steady yet carrying the weight of past pain. “Childhood trauma. What is the relationship between the subconscious and memory? How has the trauma of my childhood affected my ability to hold onto my intentions and powers? What created the memory prison, and how do we dissolve it?”

Calliope looked up, her eyes full of empathy. “These are profound questions, Peter. Can you tell me more about how your childhood experiences influenced your sense of safety and trust?”

Peter nodded, his gaze distant. “Later, I will realize that these events will sour my trust in the sanctuary of family in the deepest of places. Trauma is a brutal thing. Its strike within our childhood is one that lasts, rippling its effects in a prison of repetitive incoherence and lost love.”

Calliope’s quill moved swiftly across the parchment. “Trauma. Give the gift that keeps on taking,” Peter continued with a bitter smile.

Calliope looked up, her eyes filled with understanding. “In your experience, how does the trauma we experience in our early life shape our evolution as individuals?”

Peter’s voice carried a deep sense of wisdom. “In my experience, there is a certain relationship between the traumas we experience in our early life and the way we evolve as individuals. It is an inquiry that sits at the very core of the industry of healing and wholeness involving lifelong divinations into the events which sit buried in the layers of our consciousness through all manners and means ranging from psychoanalysis and meditation, processes of acceptance and forgiveness, to medicine journeys with psychotropic plants, yogic kriyas and more, all of which speak to the foundations of what it means to be human – to have a self and a story in the great expanse of the human condition.”

Calliope’s quill captured the profound nature of his words. “Looking back on the events of my childhood from the present, it’s easy to see the patterns in consciousness that defined the arc of my story, to see the repetitive trauma expressing itself across my timeline and how that defined the shape of my reactions and responses to the world.”

“To my sensitivities, the constant barrage of insults and mania hammered through my skin, leaving tremors moving through my bones that felt a constant ill-at-ease. It’s something that sticks with you, that layers into the depths of your self and its story. A feeling of never being safe.”

Calliope paused, her eyes meeting Peter’s. “How did this constant feeling of unsafety affect your perception of the world and yourself?”

Peter sighed deeply. “Trauma is a poison. Something passed on from one generation to another in pressure and projections. It screams at us on the air, impacting who we perceive ourselves to be and how we perceive the world, crushing us from within.” he gave her a moment to process.

“I tried to take sanctuary in my room. Yet even my room was no respite from the hammering as I could sense presences beyond the material plane which lurked in the closet of my alcove and in the deep places of our home. More times than I could count, I would force myself to turn quickly in my bed, half-expecting to see some ghostly apparition waiting for me to dare its discovery in the place where I wished to be safe. Yet while I did this time and again, it never appeared, leaving me wondering if I was simply imagining.”

Calliope’s expression softened with understanding. “That must have been terrifying, feeling those presences and having no safe space to retreat to. How did you cope with this constant fear?”

Peter’s voice grew more intense. “There was no sanctuary there. Hiding beneath the covers didn’t make the fear go away, but I pulled them under my feet and over my head anyway just in case. I hated that feeling. Like something was watching me. Like presences were moving through the space that I could feel just outside my awareness. It frightened me, and I pushed against it, finding my way towards the closet to punch through the clothes and disrupt whatever it was.”

Calliope’s quill captured his every word. “And it wasn’t just me. It was like I could feel all the children being screamed at, I could feel how unsafe they felt, how abused and betrayed they felt by those who were supposed to take care of them.”

Peter paused, his voice trembling slightly. “I felt scared all the time. Like the world was screaming at me. It felt like waves of knives and hammers constantly hammering me. Desperate to make sense of it, I did my best to focus the energies I felt inside myself, to pull together some means of protecting myself.”

Calliope looked at Peter with deep empathy. “How did you manage to not give into this overwhelming feeling? What kept you fighting back?”

Peter sighed. “In many ways, it felt like people were screaming at me all the time. That the very essence of who they were and what they embodied in the world pushed a certain landscape of vibration out into the world, one that I felt pushed on me through its very presence. Of course, I was a child and had no real terminology to describe what I was seeing or perceiving and was shuffled through the archaic forms of healing that defined the consciousness of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, a medley of forced therapy, difficulties in school, and numbing medication designed to sculpt me into a form that was not my own.”

Calliope’s eyes softened with empathy. “It must have been incredibly challenging to navigate through all of that without a proper understanding or support.”

Peter nodded. “It was the tools they had, and I do not blame them for that, yet they were blunt instruments, a madness of conjecture and experimentation with chemistries and alchemies half-discovered and made of a substance that rubbed my senses wrong. The problem was that reality itself was not constant. In the constant overwhelm of my senses, the only navigation that I had was feeling, sensing my way through the shifting barrage of sensations that constantly redefined my world.”

Peter’s eyes reflected a determined resolve. “Yet I refused to give into this. To let the energies pour over me, constantly prickling at me from the outside, pushing on me with subtle ripples. I knew I couldn’t give into it. That somehow I had to push back against it. To fight my way free of what felt like an attack.”

Calliope’s quill moved again, capturing his words with care as he continued. “As I would come to discover, the trauma of feeling unsafe at home, of having no sanctuary either within or without, was instrumental in the events that followed. It was a pattern, one etched into the foundations of my being, that would repeat itself over and over again.”

Calliope nodded, understanding the depth of his struggle. “In retrospect, how did these patterns of trauma influence your perception of people and the world around you?”

“Deeply. Yet much of it lay beneath the surface, influencing my perceptions from past my own line of self-knowing. It demanded me into a healing that continues to this day.”

“I see.” she said. “And how do you feel about that?”

“Resentful. Like I was forced into the slave labor of trauma resolution but the very nature of the Age itself.”

She recoiled for a moment, sensing the acid beneath his words. It reeked of unforgiveness, and she knew he knew it.