In the Beige homework section I suggested you start with yourself. In Purple my suggestion is to now start doing this work with others. There is tremendous healing power in groups.
This is the big one. You almost certainly know on some level if you have had major trauma. What was your childhood like? Were you beaten or abused or maybe simply neglected? Those all can cause deep trauma. Have you been in a situation where people got killed and your own life was at risk? Have you been placed in an impossible situation where you had to do something unspeakable? Or maybe simply you grew up sensitive in a very harsh world. That all alone can cause deep trauma. Please don’t dismiss your trauma as less than others. It all hurts.
The key thing is to get out of the story that there is nothing you can do. That is so no longer true! There are now lots of ways to treat trauma. Please don’t fall into that same trap the writers of that movie did. We no longer have to just live with our traumas. Please read (or listen to) The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk. This is such an important book. It is the formal announcement that we no longer just have to suffer with trauma like those characters in that movie did. In the second half of this book Bessel talks about all of the different treatments for trauma. One that he is particularly excited about is MDMA talk therapy. This kind of treatment has you (after several initial preparatory talk sessions) do a “heroic” dose of MDMA and then do an extended talk session with a therapist. Please read up on this. If you have severe trauma it is the best treatment that I am aware of. But first I want you to investigate it. This kind of treatment is very close to FDA approval Unfortunately MDMA can be hard on the body so it won’t work for everyone.
In the Beige homework section I suggested reading Self Compassion; The proven power of being kind to yourself by Kristin Neff. You read it, right? If not, I get it. Books are great, but experiential learning is even better. Actually practicing the material with others is the way to go. Kristin helped set up a worldwide teaching institute for teaching self compassion called the Center for Mindful Self Compassion. They offer both intensive week long retreats as well as an 8 week program. I signed up twice for courses and twice they got cancelled due to Covid so I have not personally yet taken the course. But they look like great courses. So good that I have seriously considered going into their training program so that I can learn to teach the course. Note, if you can, sign up for a course in person. It was astonishing to me how much Zoom could handle during the pandemic, but in this kind of work it so much better to do it in person if you can.
In Beige I suggested you take up a mindfulness practice. In the same way I suggest here that you take up a loving kindness practice (Metta). Again this site gives a good overview of the practice:
https://positivepsychology.com/loving-kindness-meditation
But I also really encourage you to start looking at others as mirrors. Find where you are resistant to them and get curious. What is it that I’m resisting in them? Do I resist that in myself as well? And then work on loving them. Take turns between looking in the mirror with compassion and then looking at others with compassion. Start to notice how similar this work is.
The heart of Purple is to find a group that welcomes all of you. This is where I have done most of my growth work. Unfortunately there are not nearly as many of these groups around as I would like, and even less when you subtract out the “push” school. My favorite is HAI:
If you can just get past that whole taking off your clothes thing, amazing miracles of healing become available. A HAI workshop can be even more powerful than a MDMA session which is saying something.
If the naked thing is too much another path is medicine work done in a group. That also can be powerful, but before starting on this work please, please make sure to deal with whatever traumas you have first. It is incredibly dangerous to simply dive into, say, mushrooms without handling that first. And make sure the group takes time to do a proper intention setting before the journey and thorough integration work as a group afterwards. It is during integration that the real benefit of the journey starts to show up.