Not as triggered : some small steps forward

I wrote this post on Tuesday.  I didn’t post it.  Same old, same old beat up by the inner critic, even though my therapist thought it showed a sign of growth.

Being ignored is usually a huge trigger for me.  I guess it reminds me of being young and being left alone a lot and finding myself on the outside and not in the popular pool of happy gregarious youngsters who all got on and felt free to express and be themselves without feeling locked up in a prison of thoughts and projected inner judgement.  Its hard to go through life feeling scared and not safe enough in your own being and skin.

So today at the dog park when two people deliberately ignored and excluded me from their conversation I felt good when it didn’t hit me as hard as it usually would have in years past.   One of the people in question is someone I know and we don’t have a lot in common.  In fact I think when she asked me about my Christmas a few months ago I honestly told her how hard it was emotionally and that is a trigger for some people.  They just don’t want to hear about anything that isn’t light and breezy and since then she doesn’t make any effort to connect at all.

I have to remember at such times that there are other people I connect with.  At the moment I feel a bit isolated and lonely as I haven’t managed to connect with my usual friends at the park much and often our contact is fairly superficial.  I spend a lot of my time alone.  And at the park today when they made no effort to talk even though my dog Jasper was playing with the other woman’s dog  I just thought “fair enough” and I took myself off and read my book under a tree.  There was none of the harsh inward cricitism I would have heard inside my head before.

It seems at the moment I just have to nurture myself in solitude.  I am not going to lie and say it isn’t really lonely at times.  Since I have moved back to my home town I find it hard to find others of like mind to connect with and I spend a lot of time with my dog.  I am so grateful  that I do have connections through blogging as without that I would feel quiet disconnected and lost.  I want to concentrate on the connections that I do have such as the one with my therapist and my very very good male friend who lives away from me.  We talk on the phone a couple of times a week and I know I can call him any time.

I just wrote a blog on unmet needs prompted by one Athina posted on Courage Coaching.  Thinking about it the need for friendship and emotional connection is such a huge one that relates to and has such important consequences for our emotional and mental health.  Lack of connections and isolation such as I have lived in past years must led to mental health problems and  disease and Deepak Chopra makes that connection in his book The Book of Secrets speaking of how our body cells naturally connect in a state of health and in ill health this connective ability runs awry with the cells often turning against themselves.

I don’t find it easy to find others to connect with.  How I cope is by connecting with myself and then spending that time on my blog.  Connections cannot be forced, they have to occur naturally.  I don’t need to beat myself up if I don’t connect or others ignore me.  I don’t have to make that the cause of negative self talk.