Love beating

Love beating

Here in this heart

Love that never ends

But for a time only knew hurt and ache and sorrow

And the absence of Love

Longing you showed me where Love hid

Strange this bedfellow

I do not yet fully understand

The when and why and how of it

Love only known ghostly in absence

Love the energy that kept me seeking

All through the dark night

The powerful force that helped me find

Those whose heart beat also

Form a Love that is pure

Mirroring for me truths

Deeply buried

I lost the way to

And only dimly remembered

So now Love

Love

You are known

You are here

In each beat of my heart

I ride the flow of your pulse forward

Powerful like a river

Carrying me home

Mistaken

Little one

You never got to form a protective coat

You had holes that formed in your ego

Where bad stuff seeped in

So hard to make sense of it all

When it never really belonged to you

Hungry heart beating silently

So difficult

To sustain and nurture

Love

To grow a sense of meaning

And protection

When you were

Left alone one too many times

There was not really any place to turn

And no way really to know

That the feelings you had were real

Seeking something to ease the loneliness and pain

Your soul cried silently

And if you didn’t learn that you had value enough

To be worth someone’s time

Was it any wonder you gave yourself away

So freely and so cheaply

But now all this is changing

Although you cannot change the past

Recognition means

Now you can

Wrap an overcoat of protection and love

Around yourself

Now you are free to express

And give full vent to what you feel inside

And now you see how others are hurting

And damaged too

You will no longer expect

What cannot be

And be so bitterly disappointed again

It was all so much larger and more complex

That you ever could have known

In the child self

For all along you needed adult you

To show up

To hold you

And help you understand

The source of true love

True connection

For that lonely soul inside

Who believed for so long

Things mistaken

False beliefs

False conclusions

That were never really true

All the ways you tried

I see it now because my heart is clear

All the ways you tried

All the ways you loved

And how hard your young life was

And how little comfort you found

There was much more to you

Than just being my mother

You knew great loneliness

As I have

Yesterday I danced the pain

The pain you could not express

But is my hearts pain

And with me in the dance were those who have passed

As I danced

I remembered deep in my soul

The sorrow of loss

But also the beauty of their presence

Shadow presence of Poppa hovering

Black hat black tie standing in the rain

The lovely one I never knew

And was too young to remember

Feeling only

Ghostly imprints in my soul

Casting shadows of fear over each new relationship

In my heart

In the dance

I felt the love that was lost

And I felt the anger that covered over the pain of knowing

That coming into the family toward the end

Meant I would have less

Less holding

Less comfort

Less connection

Less of the cosy jumper

Instead I lived to see Pluto trample in

And steal everything

In hob nail boots

Until only injury sorrow and emptiness

 Lay around us like wreckage

Leaving those of us who remained

Inconsolable

Barren

Cast into the wilderness

I went numb for so many years

I was the lost soul wandering

Like Lilith forced out into the dark

To find my way

Through a burnt out landscape

Littered with glass shards of sorrow

Feet were cut and bleeding

After frenzied dances

How my soul ached

With things that could never be spoken

And so in time my vision blurred

And my heart became a beast of hurt

Pumping heat and fury

Between the time lostness and tears

So much emptiness and fear

And others feared getting too close to me

In case they were burned

But the burning was all a part of the process

For a heart’s fire that is loved

Mysteriously transforms into something else

When there is enough trust in the dark

Bringing a dawning into life

Of the healing light of tenderness

Birthed from agony

Light that streams down upon me

In the dance

As love rises up

And swirls

So much love

That I fear my entire being will burst with it

And so, at the end

I see all the ways you tried

All the ways you loved

And all the ways that for so many years

I sadly could not see any deeper

Than my own hurt

And so often

Pushed others away

With an anger

That hid so deep within it

A longing for connection and love

Belonging, authenticity and self acceptance

Wow I found this when I was looking for quotes and images to put on my post on self acceptance.  I find Brene Brown has some incredible insights into acceptance, authenticity and shame but this one hit me to the core.  I have so often I felt as though I didn’t belong as I was trying to fit myself to situations where I felt out of step, but in recent months, and when I have found myself into those same situations being myself, loving myself and not being besieged and assailed by critical inner shaming or invalidating self talk lately I have felt a far greater sense of belonging and I have been able to be more authentic.  That is so powerfully expressed in this quote, I felt the need to share it. Also in those situations when I have been real it has encouraged others to be real and open too. Its such a gift!

Acceptance : healing from the inside

The single most healing attitude we can hold towards ourselves is one of acceptance.  Even if there are parts of ourselves that we don’t like or that we struggle with, is there some way we can learn to love and accept these parts of us and understand where they come from and perhaps even learn to look deeper into where self critical views came from?

Self rejection seems to be such a huge part of our culture.  It becomes even more prevalent if we were raised in an environment or home where there was neglect or invalidation abuse.  In this case self rejection can become a huge part of our inner landscape, not really loving and accepting ourselves for who we truly are means that self condemnation and low self esteem become an habitual way of life.  The inner critic forms inside of us making feelings guilt, shame and powerlessness central issues we struggle with and we may try to hide these feelings from ourselves and others or silence then with addictions.

Add to this the complication of the fact that if as a child difficult things occurred which may have not been our fault we may have mistakenly come to believe that something we did played a part, for example the early death of a parent, illness in a sibling, abuse or chronic rejection.   Well into adulthood we may go on struggling with the critical voice inside of us or deeply unconscious feelings of guilt that cause all kinds of probelms.  We may also begin to learn to turn that critical voice outwards.  We come to believe in negative expectations.  If we feel we are not good enough we won’t learn to set appropriate boundaries against abuse or we may go on fearing rejection when there is actually no need to maintain such a fear.  We then learn to live from a self fulfilling prophecy which just brings more of the same to us.

The way out of such a dilemma is the practice of self acceptance, self care and love.  When we have distressing critical attacks we can learn to address the critical voice and the shame it may be trying to pass onto us in a loving way.  We don’t even have to argue, we can agree with the critic that we are messy or absent minded or careless but recognise that such traits have nothing to do with our self worth or lovability.  As human beings we don’t need to be ‘perfect’ to be loved, we should not have to ‘earn’ love by forcing ourselves into shapes others would like us to assume or by hiding who we really are deep inside, even if we are deeply emotional and deeply hurt or angry.  All such feelings really are acceptable, but he hard truth is that in childhood and even well into adult hood we may have been around those who struggled to accept such feelings and so we learned to internalise a similar lack of acceptance.

We can also, as we grow in critical self insight and self acceptance, learn that we cannot always expect a perfect love from those around us, who in being human are not perfect either.   I struggle at times when I hear of those who suffered some neglect in childhood saying they are going ‘no contact’ with parents.  Often it is apparent the parent has suffered deep wounds, wounds they may have passed on, and I do understand if the abuse is bad the person would not want a lot of contact.  But at the same time it is true that human beings suffer in all kinds of different ways in the course of their upbringing and so often pass this suffering onwards.

When we choose to undertake a journey of inner healing we are on a course to open up to this so called ‘shadow’ material or dark side in ourselves and in others.   We are on a journey to explore all the blockages of separation, fear and guilt as well as shame that have kept us from the experience of love, we are also being called on a journey of forgiveness.  We don’t ever have to like what happened to us, forgiving does not mean we ever say that what happened to us is okay, but forgiveness is the conscious choice we make at one critical stage in our healing process when we get to see the cost of pain passed on over years, ages or generations and resent into and through our own emotional systems and in relationships and see with absolute clarity that the cost of holding onto it is too great a price to pay and solves nothing.

Working through our anger may take years.  We find it hard to let down that steely defence which in keeping us protected blocks us from truly expressing the deeper pain or sadness of the hurt we feel, grieving and mourning in order to pass through the process, releasing from deep within our cell tissue traumas that hurt.  We may never have the hurt, or anger or sadness validated by the other person. In order for many o fus to heal we most certainly initially need to seek validation from someone but most importantly in time we must learn to find it from deep within our selves and our own souls for this is where our true healing lies.

Once our reality is validated from inside it becomes so much easier to love ourselves, to know that we were always worthy of protection and care but that also life is not perfect and due to this we as humans can and do suffer all kinds of hurt and abuse.  We may think “this should never have happened to me” but the truth is it has.  Hate it as we must we have to deal with the consequences and further we have to learn how to live a peaceful and loving life from within that place in order that we don’t go on to re-enact the hurt upon ourselves or others over and over and over again.

Most certainly it helps to have a champion or companion on this journey.  In my own life the unconditional loving presence of my therapist Katina has meant so much to me.  I have and do struggle with such self criticism at times, mostly over things that were so far outside of my control, with Katina I get a reality check as to where I am being too hard on myself and I see also where others can at times be hard on me and I see that I can stand up for my truth in the face of that.  I had an incident yesterday where I had to do that with someone who was a bit of a bully and was trying to criticise me in a joking way.   I didn’t have to carry the anger of it as I took the steps to stand up for myself at the time.  In years past his criticism could have launched me into a negative spiral for some days.

Self love, self care, self compassion and self acceptance are such critical issues on our healing journey from neglect, emotional abandonment and any other kind of trauma or abuse.  These are the healing balm to counter the voices and forces of self condemnation and self rejection that we may have internalised while growing up in dysfunctional environments and societies full of shame based attitudes which can leave such a destructive lasting legacy and impact recycling for years.  Without them it is hardly possible to heal and grow as we so need to.

 

Rejection sensitivity : some insights

As humans, we have a fundamental need to belong and to maintain close bonds with others. Anything that threatens this need can set off psychological alarm bells, prompting us to do whatever we can to prevent rejection from occurring or to save face if it does. But for some people, this alarm system is hypersensitive, […]

via How Rejection Sensitivity Derails Relationships — PushUP24

The 5 Defense Mechanisms that Can Sabotage Your Relationship

A brilliant window into defense mechanisms. How honest can we be in facing our dark side?

PushUP24

Everyone uses defense mechanisms, and if you believe Freud, everyone has to in order to avoid staring in the face of our worst anxieties. Even if you don’t believe Freud, it’s hard to argue with the position that we all occasionally rely on such common forms of managing our most difficult feelings by pushing them out of awareness. In close relationships, where your deepest emotions are often aroused, it’s even more likely that you’ll rely on your defenses to help you manage those emotions. As it turns out, some of the most common defense mechanisms may make you even more anxious by getting in the way of your relationship happiness. A new paper by Wei Zhang and Ben-yu Guo (2017), of Nanjing China’s Normal University suggests which defense mechanisms are worst, and by extension, how to turn them from maladaptive to adaptive.

According to Zhang and Guo, researchers have moved…

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