The Beat Up that hides the truth

The beat up in my head goes on and on, the voice inside me that tells me wrong things about myself and the past, that criticises me, judges me, invalidates me, says nasty things like “yeah when he told you in his last email you were flighty, screwy and insecure he was right”.

But there is a stronger part of me that knows that what I went though in that last relationship was emotional abuse.   I was trying to deal with a past of emotional invalidation and subtle neglect that left me without any strong resources.  I looked to places and faces that were not able to really see me in the depths of my soul and so I fell into the dark night of the soul and thought that it was far, far better to take myself and live all alone in a place where no one could see me, no one could touch me and no one could force their own projections onto me.  Then I opened up to trust a man who could not validate the pain, just wanted to judge me for the grief I was trying to own, feel and release, the same grief he suffered and was invested in denying.  To discard me, he had to put me down, he had to push all of his own pain away from him.  And it was necessary as I had to do my own inner work alone, but still sometimes nasty things he said to be come back like ghosts.

Last night when I awoke in the middle of the night the blog idea came to me.  ‘On being seen’ for I feel that for most of my life I was not truly seen and I also did not truly see myself.  As a legacy of my painful childhood in which I was the youngest in a family looking elsewhere I developed the pattern of looking outside of myself away from my own soul.  But I feel that deep inside my soul I always did know who I was, it was just I had no help with realising this self.  Not until the past few years in my therapy, with the time I have had to be able to spend time alone with myself, deeply immersed in my inner world and feelings, complex and dark and tangled up as these have been, have I really come to know and live my true self.  Often it is difficult to manifest that outside in a world geared at times to the superficial and mundane where much is about appearances and control.

Now I am seen my by therapist.  I can tell her what the beat up voices say and these things can be exposed as lies.  I can get her reality check.  And then I can see when others are subject to the beat up voices inside themselves.  The part that dis’s them when they are reaching for something good, or healing, or just expressing who they really are from the depths of their souls.

I feel there is a phase where we have to recognise the darkness inside of us.  We all have it somewhere and I believe most of our modern society demonises this darkness which is really just an expression of how the light of our souls got corrupted or buried or hidden down deep and obscured from view.  We learn to hate these parts of ourselves because they are not loved by others, we learn to hide them and lie about them and our healing consists in bringing this so called darkness to light.  And as we do you can bet there will be people out there invested in keeping it and us under wraps.

But there are also others out there like us who understand and can see and know us, who can allow us to express all the anger, grief, confusion, frustration and pain about what happened to us, those who can love us in the midst of it so in loving and holding we can form a container in which those seeds can transform within the deep compost of the dark to beautiful individual flowers and fruits.

Sometimes we cannot plaster a happy smile upon our faces.  Sometimes we cannot stop the tears from falling down.  Sometimes our hearts burn with a fire that feels like it will obliterate us, but this I feel and know that if we can just stay where we are and have the courage to love ourselves and be true to all we find, both dark and light, we will emerge in time from the darkest of nights into the brightest of days.  A shining star burned clean and clear of obstructions and corruptions that wanted to obliterate us. For many of us are emerging from the dark night, a dark night of abuse, from a world where the inner child of healing and light got buried and confused.  Many of us are trying to find our way back home to the light of our true spirit that has learned and experienced so much emotional pain and truth through the darkest of nights.

You have to make your own world, instead of succumbing to the one that presses on you.

You have to turn the tables on what appears to be fate or the full weight of society.

Against greatest odds, you have to keep your wits about you, and refuse to surrender to anyone or anything less than divine.

You have to be faithful to the mystery taking place in your heart, rather than to any idea or system that would try, with the best of motives to disempower you and make you theirs.

Thomas Moore