For those with high sensitivity

14 Things I Love About Being a Highly Sensitive Person

So, do I want this new car

My brother has control of my trust fund, it is something that is very triggering for me and led me to really firmly state how much it is affecting me the other day, since he was putting some pressure on me to upgrade my little car saying it was unsafe.. The thing is, that so often when he thinks will be good for me isn’t always what I want but then due to my own inner confuion at times I am not sure if I am being too fixed or bloody minded about following my own way.. Lately when I do it seems to alienate me.

After I sent him an email trying to express distress I shared with a distant family member who knows the situation well and she immediately told me it was a mistake, the way I expressed myself speaking about emotions, she felt was sure to confound him and put him offside, she told me the way I phrased it was not showing empathy for him and the fact he was trying to help. It was a bit hard to hear at the time to be honest but then all of this longing poured out of me.. I realise I just long to be close to him but I do not know if his own defenses make that possible and now it may seem the email alienated him as he did not respond.. And who knows if I will be able to go through with the car. I did cry a lot with my friend about all of this.. I hate getting so angry at the control of money Mum left to me.. I just fawn to keep the peace or is this just a case of admitting I have been defeated and must surrender as to protest or fight about it all seems too hard to do?

Life can be so frustrating at times. I am trying to study up on what happens to kids who are frustrated by not being attuned too or able to develop skills and abilities fully due to lack of understanding and nurture.. I have started a post on this and it will follow in a day or so .. because tonight I am just exhausted by all of the emotions flowing around about this car issue.. It all came to a head yesterday as Mars in Aries faced off with Pluto in Capricorn and Mars is shifting tonight from fire to earth.. So hopefully things will ground and calm from now on in. With Mars passing though Taurus patience and tolerance are going to be important issues. And Mars will meet with both the North Node of spiritual opportunity as wells as Uranus in Taurus early in August. Maybe its time to seek a slower more patient approach to things instead of getting myself all fired up with emotions.

yelling into a void

Lately it feels

I may as well be yelling into a void

The me you see is not me

It is just your projection

So you tie me up in knots

Thinking you will either

Protect or free me

Superiority is sickening

Those who adopt that defensive pose

Just are in flight from the hidden depths

Of their own shadow

All they see around are demons

Since they clearly cannot face their own

And yet even as it feels a blessing to feel for

The weak that suffer

At times there is a need to know

How tough and cruel and absolute

Are the natural ways of this world

Human minds just tend to naturally

Split and divide

Never clarify the complex

Feeling depths

And when this happens

Life becomes so precarious

As we tetter on the edge

Of that agonizing precipice

And sadly the cause and cure to our pain

Is often sought without

By those invested in blaming

The problem upon

Everybody else

On perfectionism

My perfectionism arose as an attempt to gain safety and support in my dangerous family.

Perfectionism is a self persecutory myth. I do not have to be perfect to be safe or loved.

I am letting go of relationships that demand perfection

. I have a right to make mistakes. Mistakes do not make me a mistake. Every mistake or mishap is an opportunity to practice loving myself in the places I have never been loved.

Pete Walker

Borderline Personality: Are They Bad at Reading Others? | Psychology Today

This just shows how ignorant some so called ‘proessionals’ can be.. People with BPD are often rejected by therapists who do not have any understanding at all of high level sensitivity, let alone the intricate complexity of what would be better labeled Complex PTSD.

Scarlett's BPD Corner

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/matter-personality/202206/borderline-personality-are-they-bad-reading-others?amp#aoh=16566242118420&csi=0&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From%20%251%24s

This article from a doctor is absolutely appalling. “They make most therapists hate them.” Does he realize that numerous people with borderline personality disorder are going to read this? Does he think that his anectodal knowledge of therapists and other support personnel represents all therapists? I have always had good relationships with therapists. You are adding to the stigma of a very stigmatized mental health condition. We don’t need to know how therapists feel about us. As much as we don’t need to know how doctors like you feel about us. It is unprofessional, uncalled for and you should be ashamed of yourself.

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Turning against our tenderness

When we were young

We sought the soft

But often kind and loving available faces

Were turned away

So often we were told

Stop your crying

It didn’t hurt that much

You are just being

A bloody drama queen

But deep inside our body

We knew what hurt

And what went against the true needs, values and feelings of

Our deepest self

There are some things

We do not need to ‘just get over’

There are some wounds that run so deep

They will always leave permanent scars

The point being

How tenderly did we treat ourselves

In the midst of injury

And how often were we asked to deny the truth

And in so doing

Forced into abandoning ourselves?

Do not be led astray by those who have

Not one decent shred of

Care or feeling

Do your necessary grief work

And deep healing

Because

Really when it comes down to it

You need nobody’s permission

To feel the pain that you do

How unprocessed anger hurts our current relationships

Not dealing with the pain of our past sets us up for a great deal of loneliness. I am seeing this more and more lately as both the grief I suppressed as well as the anger at my own self blame and shame (turned back upon myself due to parental unavailability and unsafety) and feelings of fear that stopped me reaching out is becoming available to me. There is a lot to grieve when we recognize finally that we may have been standing in our own way for many many years and even justifying our isolation based on old pain and hurt we buried. Many of the feelings some of us deal with may be buried deep inside the limbic system and not available to our conscious mind.

The following piece of writing again comes from Pete Walker’s book Complex PTSD it is about the outer critic that we use to defend against closeness now, something the voice dialogue therapist Robert Firestone has also dealt with a great deal in his own work in books like Fear of Intimacy.

As a baby thrives on love, so does the outer critic thrive on anger. Like a parasite, the outer critic gorges on repressed anger, and then erroneously assigns it to present day disappointments

The most common transferrational dynamic that I witness occurs when left over hurt about a parent gets displaced onto someone we perceive as hurting us in the present. When this occurs, we respond to them with magnified anger or anguish that is out of proportion to what they did.

Transference can also grossly distort our perceptions, and sometimes we can misperceive a harmless person as being hurtful. Transference can fire up the critic to imagine slights that do not actually occur. Transference typically runs wild when the outer critic is on the rampage.

Just as the inner critic transmutes unreleased anger into self hate, the outer critic uses it to control and/or push others away. Unexpressed and unworked through anger about childhood hurt is a hidden reserve that the critic can always tap into. The anger work of grieving the losses of childhood is so essential because it breaks the critic’s supply to this anger.

Grieving our old unexpressed pain about our poor parenting gradually deconstructs the process of transferring it unfairly onto others. This is crucial because love and intimacy are murdered when the critic habitually projects old anger out at an intimate.

(it is to be noted that often the outer critic’s judgements and angry feelings have value and it’s perspective is healthy since we actually are attracting abuse.. in this case Walker states we need to self protect and also to do the grief work about what such treatment brings up for us about how we were treated as kids.)

A note to my ancestors : Cancerian reflections 30th June 2022

You had such painful lives, you endured so much and deep in my cells I know the pain of it.. William you lost 6 children by the age of 81 when you died. I believe I lived a lot of that through the 6 terminations I had. Now that the subject of abortion has become such a thorny one in America, I do think it is sad that the so called ‘right to lifers’ take such a shallow view about it.. The angels told angel intuitive Lorna Byrne that a soul that becomes aborted knows it will endure that fate and accepts it, they forgive the mother and even stay close by to give healing.. I cannot tell you how much this helped me because when I finally got sober in December 1993 I was suffering so much guilt over those five aborted babies, and then in May 1994 when I discovered I was pregnant again I decided I lacked the skills to bring that child to term which does sadden me now and I know it hurt my husband deeply. When he left me after 11 years of marriage the fact that I had not borne him a child was, I believe, a big part of that.. I am so glad that he got to have his daugher Lottie and that he has been able to share photos of her with me.. I feel sad I was not able to take on a mothering role and rejected it, but I just did not feel prepared..

At this time of year when my house is so cold and I struggle to keep warm bundling myself up in blankets I also think a lot about that letter Samuel, (your son William,) sent to his son Thomas in New Zealand in the final years of his life.. He spoke of how hard life was, how tough and bleak the winters and also about how sad he was he would not see you again. When Jonathan and I lived overseas the pain of leaving Mum and Judy behind was just too great but in another part of my life I wanted nothing to do with the bound up toxic condition I felt my older sister to be in in the home where they medicated her and often denied her her needs.. I do feel so grateful she had the loving support in those final years from the ladies from the nearby Anglican Church who took her on as a project and person to help. They organized a lovely funeral for her on the 18th of April 2014 and Mum and I kept in touch with them for a year or so after Judy passed.

Mum, I felt you around me so much last night, I have a bottle of the perfume you loved to wear : Allure by Chanel. I sprayed it and as I was falling to sleep I sensed its sweet fragrance rise and fall in waves.. I did a double take then over how it used to annoy me having to do car trips with you and my other sister Sue when you were both wearing strong perfume, it used to make me feel nauseated..Your heavy black Prada sunglasses used to annoy the hell out of me too, they spoke of a spiritual opacity and defendedness that used to annoy me like when you judged that sweet old lady so like a gypsy selling her home grown flowers outside the cafe we took my other sister Sue to on the way home from her first cancer operation in October 2016..

Yet now I just feel love and a deep sadness about this, the things that annoyed me did so for a reason but spending time with your best friend Betty yesterday reminded me of the good things in you and of how much your own defendedness was often just down to having had no loving parents to contain you, nor mirror back your feelings. And when you lost your Dad at the age of 7 how could you grieve? That was just not possible for a child, the Nuns treated you with next to no empathy and made you clean the chapel as punishment for not doing your homework. No wonder you used to get into such a frenzy cleaning things and trying to perfect our ‘flaws’. Nana used you hit you if you did not do the best job cleaning and yet you always said “I forgave her, as I knew it was just frustration.” Still it hurt you so much. I was so sad for you when you told me a few years before you passed on that Nana never once told you she loved you or cuddled you..

Mum I remember well that lovely little book you gave to me before you died, a small book of kindness quotes.. You could be so controlling at times, but ever so generous and kind too.. I love you Mum, you hurt me but only because you had been hurt too ❤

Eliza Jane (my great grandmother), even though I think you died before I was born I still feel you. I hear the New Zealand Maori Haka tribal call to battle chant and dance sound out in my head at times, ‘a tough old bird’ according to my brother you danced it when you used to visit and always waited until you thought the family were out of view to take a sip from the silver flask of whiskey you kept with you at all times. I would have loved to have met you. THANK YOU FOR PASSING ON TO ME YOUR STRONG FIGHTING SPIRIT. You were the daughter of a violent alcoholic Dad who had so much unprocessed grief and frustration and so many children to support.

Big sigh!!! We had the New Cancer Moon yesterday at about 1.37 pm Eastern Standard time in Australia, the Moon will oppose Pluto soon. I have really been feeling so many layers of our family story over the past 24 hours.. I woke in a very different place about 3 am last night. I am keeping the door open on the men in my life asking for help while trying to set boundaries. I also asked Betty more about the stress of that borrowed money/financial scheme Dad got involved in in the early 80s that went belly up and apparently in causing him so much stress along with his daughter’s traumas that he became so ill with cancer. Apparently it was called ‘the bottom of the harbor scheme’ (how Neptunian). I will research that today.

Ancestors I just wanted to say I will light a candle to you all for the next 22 days of the Sun’s transit through Cancer.. I know your love surrounds me.. I firmly know myself to be flesh of your flesh and cells of your cells.. For you gave birth to me and without you as my eternal strong taproot I would not have been able to come into being or even exist.

You needed me (many years ago)

You needed me

But I left you alone for far too long

As long ago I had to turn away from the part of me

That was in need

Of so many things they could not give

So

In the end

You left me too

Making me face the utter depths

Of a seemingly unfathomable emptiness

And yet

It was a rich place

That Underground world I found

Painful as it was

Haunted by so very many

Lost ghosts

Sending up vapors and echoes

And only those brave enough to face

The emptiness

Know how full it is

And how much redemption lies

Within its icy

Burning

Churning depths

There at the base

I found a grieving widow

Dark as night

Who lost her child

The psyche never lies

In its images

And so it was I wept

And wept

But then the tears revealed a life

I lost the way to

The forgotten refrain of a song

So essential

Only its bittersweet melody

Could bring me life

And so it is now

I know these things to be sacred

To cry

To dance

To laugh

To long and ache

And finally to find a way

To embrace

All of those lost children

Whose ghosts came seeking me

In the land so very far away

All of those

Many years ago

We can learn to love ourselves unconditionally

Sometimes I think I write posts I badly need to read in my future. this one is spot on for me today.

Emerging From The Dark Night

Finding the unconditional love for ourselves inside that we missed as children is perhaps our greatest adult recovery task.  The pain of not being met or loved unconditionally or in an open receptive way can haunt many of us well into adulthood.  The yearning for this love and deep disappointment over its absence may or may not be fully conscious.  It may be triggered by what brings up the hurt we felt when we were not loved in this way.  Re reading the Chapter I Forgive Myself in Michael Brown’s book The Presence Process this morning is reminding me of this as I read back some of my blogs from yesterday as well as comments left.

I think of my Dad’s generation and what they went through. Dad’s solution to the poverty and loss of his childhood was to get as far away from his family and war torn country…

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