A growing connection with my Mum

I am experiencing a growing connection with my Mum.  I am coming to understand and accept deeply that she could only give a very limited type of parenting due to her own emotional deficits from childhood and I am seeing the very loving kind side of her that worries and tries her very best to compensate for the deep loss of our upbringing. I am becoming more and more aware that she acted out a wound unconsciously and am coming to understand that it is actually part of my spiritual journey to be dealing with this healing.   I cry a lot when I see how sad it is to be carrying all of these wounds.  I know the anger I have felt at not having a lot of it validated in the family is legitimate and real.  I am seeing what a struggle I have had to separate.  I am not attacking or blaming myself as much.  I am seeing how I can turn myself inside out for approval at times when really the approval and validation I feel needs to come from inside.  So all in all I am feeling so much freer than I have done in the past.

When the connection between my Mum and me is loving I find a great degree of peace.   I was able to open up about somethings with her yesterday that really were bugging me from within and she was very warm, comforting and validating with me.  I see that the rejecting or isolated mother of the past is not necessarily the mother I have today.  I am also seeing how important it is that I have learned the emotional lesson that I need to look for that mothering in more positive places where I am received when I meet brick walls with my Mum.

I am so grateful for several of those bloggers here, too who have been so supportive of me in the past week when I faced some really tough stuff from the past.  I know that the pain of losses and emptiness that I endured in past years was excruitiating.   I watched a very disturbing movie on a woman who killed her boyfriend by a lethal overdose here in my home town last night and it brought back to me the darkest days of my addiction which spanned the years 1989 – 1993 when I got sober.  I see how much my life has changed and just how far I have come since then.  Although I can have sad days and pain there is not that terrible inexplicable blanket of extreme menacing darkness and agony that used to cover me like a shroud in those years when I was so empty and lost.  I am coming into the light.

I am glad to be feeling this way as I head towards the 24th anniversary of my sobriety in about 6 weeks time.  I have a lot of warm memories from that time when I got to AA after having only been marrried a few months.  It was a rock bottom but I had the support then of a loving husband.  My marriage was not to last in sobriety, sadly but I will always be glad of those first happy years where I finally put down alcohol and drugs and then cigarettes and was able to embark on a path of recovery.  It was a long journey, is a long journey and we just need to keep fronting up and knowing we can face the pain that inevitabley comes as we work to become more conscious and aware.

I am finding it easier to present for myself in a loving way these days.  I still go through self attacks but I am becoming more aware of when my voracious critic (who my therapist and I call Mr A) is on the scene.  I am aware that a critic attack is often like a shame attack or emotional flashback.  Mr A sees things in terms of black and white and doesnt cope with mess or frustration very well but these days I can give him more of a hug or at least get him to calm down a little bit.

Anyway I am very grateful today.  I am aware of just how much beauty there is in my life lately.  I have been finding it easier to reach out to my sister who has dealt with her own mental health challenges in very different ways to me.  I see how I can now relate to her from an adult side and less from the pain of my inner child who felt neglected emotionally by her older sister in childhood.  I can make that separation today. because I have been able to acknowledge and work through difficult things from the past that hurt with someone and be validated.

I know without a doubt that there is emotional freedom on the side of feeling all of that emotional pain and the gift at the end is a reawakening to my True Self who often felt she had to hide.  There is understanding that comes when we can finally fully feel and acknowledge the darkness and bring it to light.  For that I am so very very grateful.