by Allegra
Today we took a sick day from work. We'd been very sleep-deprived for the past couple of days, and our sleep habits in general have been poor of late. We slept until about 5pm.
Charity is the one who most fears going to sleep. Often she has disturbing dreams that represent issues that she's having difficulty resolving. It does her no good to hear that incidents from the past can't hurt her/us anymore; for her, flashbacks keep the past in the present, and she needs her feelings validated in order to heal.
We think about how our system principles basically leave her to resolve most of the trauma. Is this really the best way to do so? Or can/should others help at all? The problem isn't that others want to help; it's that most of the others, including me, are minors.
System Principles:
1. Safety is the first rule.
2. The welfare of the children is paramount.
3. Minors should not be responsible for overall system welfare, for taking charge of system activity, or for providing emotional support to older system members.
Since the adults in our system are the ones with the biggest issues, this creates a dilemma. They need to heal from these issues, yet we have to function well on a daily basis. And this is why minors end up running the system.
Getting back to Charity's dreams....She's often had dreams where she's running away from something or someone. Recently, for the first time, she had this feeling while awake. She knew that this was progress, even though it didn't feel good. This feeling played heavily into our latest sleep problem.
We've been having other small breakthroughs as she's continued processing some of the memories that she's recently posted here. I'll leave her to write about these when she's ready.
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