Soul Migration

Abstract:

Just as the human being comes apart at death, with the body dying and decaying while “the breath of life” persists, we suggest that a person comes apart in a similar way at other crucial junctures of life, such as moments of excruciating shame and delirious orgasmic experience, insurmountable trauma and ecstatic spiritual experience.

The abused child, like shipwreck survivors in an overcrowded lifeboat, must sacrifice some aspects of the self in order to preserve others. The more overwhelming the assault, the more essential and closer to the core is that aspect that must be sacrificed. Inner resources such as innocence, trust, spontaneity, courage, and self-esteem were lost, stolen, or abandoned in those early traumatic moments, leaving an immense empty space. The psychic energy cast off through dissociation and splitting, the sacrificed aspects of self, do not simply disappear into thin air, but rather continues in split off form as a primitively organized alternative self.

Retrieving these inner resources in age regression to those traumatic events reunites the sacrificial alternative self with the immanent embodied person, strengthening the fabric of the soul’s energetic field.

What we are proposing here is a profound level of splitting in that what is split is neither consciousness nor ego nor self, but rather one’s essential spiritual identity, what we are calling one’s soul. A further distinction is drawn in relation to the concept of where that separate aspect of oneself is kept; that is, it is neither repressed into unconsciousness (vertical split), nor allowed to alternately come into conscious awareness (horizontal split).

It is sent into hiding from itself, in the “witness protection program” for the soul. Strength of character, resilience, determination, deep trust all come from repair of disruption in intimate relationship, not through eliminating any disruption. Likewise, the growth of the human being spiritually is achieved through the repair of the bond with his/her soul following disconnection (miscoordination).

Soul Migrations: Traumatic and Spiritual
David Hartman, MSW and Diane Zimberoff, M.A.
Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 2006, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 3-96