Why intimacy brings up pain for neglected adult children

If we were never emotionally connected to or nurtured in childhood, in adulthood we are left with the most terrible emptiness and pain.  Therapist Pete Walker calls this ‘the abandonment melange’ and its also called abandonment depression.  Many of us, before we get to therapy or get awareness around our early attachment wounds fly blind with such a wound which in recovery circles is often referred to as ‘the hole in the soul.’  Trouble was when I was in AA I was led to believe I was born with this wound not that I developed it in the context of early relationships, that is an awareness I have had to painstakingly grow and allow to emerge out of great pain and disaster in later relationships including forcing my ex husband to carry some of what I was unconscious of for years, another wounding its taken me some years to realise and forgive myself for.

Now that I am making a heart centred connection with a partner who is emotionally available to me I find at times this wound is being stirred up in me more and more due to the situation he is in where he has to be out of contact for a lot of the time.  I realised yesterday that I acted out some of my disappointment at not being able to connect with him due to mutual cross scheduling  by making some nasty comments about his ex wife.  He took them in his stride and there may have been a bit of truth to what I said but never the less I found myself dismayed with how I had reacted to him leaving for patrol and not being able to speak.

I shot off a few angry texts including one saying how I hated him for being in the situation he is in and putting me through it then waited anxiously and received a very loving reply back about 6.30 last night which soothed my fears.  However I noticed the same reaction starting up this morning when I missed him again and he failed to respond to a text I sent last njght.  I see I am reacting at the moment because I have never really allowed myself to be as vulnerable with a partner as I am being in this relationship and because he is giving me EXACTLY WHAT I NEEDED AND NEVER GOT FROM EITHER PARENT.  At times it awakens great grief, anxiety and fear as well as warmer feelings.

Luckily I was reading through another bloggers blog on this subject as well as Foreboding Joy (the term Brene Brown gives to allowing ourselves to gain pleasure from something that is a source of great desire only to thwart it with thoughts of doom)  a short while ago and I came across this paragraph which really shone a light on my current situation.

I told T (her therapist) that it confused me that getting what I have always wanted caused me such a lot of pain (and joy, admittedly) and T explained that having deep, childhood, unmet needs – met was VERY painful.  She said getting what you’ve always wanted can cause awful sadness and pain.  I didn’t understand that.  T said that this was one of the reasons that therapists had to be so careful not to “overdo it”.  She said that them overdoing it could cause us more pain! T said “this is why although I understand you want more reassurance and warmth in my emails, it is important that I am very careful”…

Both of my parents are incapable of emotional closeness with me and I craved that so very much all of my life. It hurts me a lot to really realise that neither of my parents gave me the connection and emotional closeness that they should have – could have.  But understanding it wasn’t me, my fault, that helps to ease some shame.  It makes me so determined to never repeat that pattern with my own children. Also, it makes me determined to never waste time with anyone who isn’t able to tolerate emotional closeness again. I only hurt myself trying to change them. I guess I was trying to “right a wrong”.  Trying to finally “get” an emotionally distant guy.  To change the ending of that childhood story where I never did “get” either mum or dad.

Source:

https://unpackingthesuitcaseblog.wordpress.com/2017/10/25/neediness-lack-of-warmth-fear-of-annihilation-re-experiencing-pain/#comments

Those two paragraphs could have been written by me.  I realise in this relationship I am given all the things I longed for, love, respect, attention, affection, unconditional positive regard, kindness, empathy and love.  At times I find myself crying when I receive these things from Scott but at times I can find myself wanting to shut it down as well.   It scares me at times to see there is a part of me that may try to sabotage this relationship but reading this particular blog again today nearly a year later big lights came on for me.  Today I told Scott I will be more careful what I say when I feel disappointed or left alone at times, the way I react comes out of a craving for connection and love (and a deeper unconscious grief and anger I am carrying at emotionally unavailable parents)  the last thing I want to do is destroy that.. the best thing that has happened to me in years and years and years.

On disengagement, indifference and insecure attachment

I heard a programme on radio today that really got me thinking. Its a great weekly segment in the show Life Matters that airs on Radio National in Austrailia, called Three Men and A Feeling in it two therapists discuss a feeling with the presenter Michael McKenzie and provide insights into its ramifications.  Today indifference was discussed most particularly from the point of view of how often it manifests in insecurely attached inviduals or those who have known hurt or pain as a ‘giving up’ defence and reaction to those hurts and pains.

I would love to be able to quote some of what was said, because it really spoke to me about the emotionally disengaged state I ended up in a few years into sobriety when my marriage fell apart.  The interviewees were saying that often when we are not securely attached we dont know how to show interest in anything outside of ourselves and we can become very self obsessed while at the same time being competely incapable of showing ourself self care.  To me this would equate with what I have read about consequences of emotional neglect.  Early or consistent disappointments with caregivers or other significant relationships can also land us in this place where the cost of caring and connecting just seems too great.  We may have learned the cost of caring is an emptiness that comes when nothing comes back to us.  When  lack of connection, nuture and emotional unavailibity is what we find when reaching out we also learn to treat ourselves in similar ways.  We may learn the price of interest and caring is a brick wall and so we give up.

This is shown in the early attachment experiments which show a child left alone to cry who finally gives up and resorts to a depressed state.  That child has no way of knowing what he or she went through if all of this occurs before the age in which language for feelings is gained, and it leaves us with a devestating emotional cost.

In my own life I learned to turn to substances and possessions to find my connection.  Lately I am really feeling the emptiness and sadness of this kind of coping.  After my father died Mum often gave me big sums of money and I so I would go shopping,  After my father died and I was sent overseas all alone I learned to entertain myself by going to the movies, going to galleries and going to the big department stores.  God knows what I would have done had I not had those avenues, detached as they were.   I look back and wish I could have got into a 12 step group then as I may not have had to endure all the years of disconnection that I did,

And of course up until the age of 31 I also fell into addictions.  Sadly the end of my marrige which occured when I was 11 years sober saw me fall back into complete isolation.  I made an attempt to go overseas and find work but I got triggered and fear voices dissuading me from actively engaging put all that to death and then I had my second accident and a major head injury.   I am still finding my way back from that.  After it I came home and retreated to the coast fobbing off attempts to get me back into life and relationship.

The path of recovery has led me into therapy where I can engage with a therapist in order to explore and heal those early attachment wounds in me as well as the guilt and pain I struggle with due to the coping strategies I used which cost me a lot.  I am managing to shop less on the lonely days and spend time in my own company listening to my own heart and feelings, as well as trying to reach out to others more.  Writing my blog definately also helps me feel more engaged and interested and connected.

Today Jasper, my dog, didnt want to go walking so I went to the shopping centre, not to shop but to have a coffee and go to the library but also because my mobile phone which is bottom of the line has been breaking down and I genuinely needed a new one.  The part of me that is no fan of technology was beating myself up after I settled on a mid range phone and paid for it.  Its a bit of a process as I had to get a new sim card sent in order to set up the new phone.  I managed to do this after all the inner critic attacks against buying the new phone subsided.  I got the car with my phone and then Mum called on the old phone   I got very emotional the moment we started talking and by the time I got home was still drying my tears.   Something deep was being triggered. All weeekend long I was hard at work in the garden trying to clear up some of the jungle of vines that has overtaken the backyard over the last few months as I was not well.   I was going to have a moment of self pity about how alone I had been with it all, but the sadness was very real and very deep and I probably wont even try to reach for explanations here.

Maybe I was having a kind of wake up call as to the reality of how far away my own insecure/ambivalent attachment style has taken me over years from active engaged connection with life and relationship, but at the same time I do respect that my genuine ability to shed those tears today shows my inner connection to real me is growing.   I have to beware of beating up the part of me that in the past tried ways to cope with wounds that only ended up leaving me more disengaged and drowning in ‘stuff’.  It takes time to grown in awareness of our patterns and defences and we are not ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ for using certain ways of coping with our emptiness that we do.  For me self compassion is the solution and was what the therapists in the progamme spoke a lot about, that and reaching out to get good help and therapy.  I am doing both so I dont need to beat myself up today.  I can feel genuine sadness for a past I didn’t wholey choose while realising that life is not over yet and I have been blessed even while struggling.  Looking on it all with eyes of love, rather than with eyes of judgement or rejection is a better solution for me in the long run.

When hope has gone

I have known

Hope dashed on the rocks of harsh reality

Too many times

To be a superficial person

I have known

Those who told me

Such breaking didn’t hurt

Was just a flesh wound

When it went soul deep

Is it any wonder I get confused?

That I question what is real

What I feel

And what do tell myself

As I wrestle deep within the schism

Such things created

This fissure deep inside

Hope lies vanquished here

I don’t think it will return

I am older and wiser now

I need to like and trust who I am

I must now love myself

For amidst this wreckage

This is the best of what is left, really

My soul has known hope dashed

Against the rocks of harsh experience

So many times

That now I must never cleave

So far again

From my what my soul feels

And knows

Deep inside

They do the best they can : and when it isn’t enough we struggle to accept and find release.

At times its so hard to appreciate that others are doing their very best when we are not getting what we want or need especially from someone we long for something from in the way of validation or connection.   In this situation the limits of our ability to relate is diminished and its a sad complex feeling when there are deep feelings of hurt or frustration around the relationship or certain things we experience.

The best we can do in this situation is let go and only we can make the decision to do this as in some way the decision involves drawing a line underneath something and perhaps closing a doorway of possibility in our heart we long to keep open.  Then there are the aftershocks we go through as we try to get our head around a situation that has no real solution.  We truly find ourselves in a place where our will and desire is powerless to effect any change.  And I guess that is where I have found the AA serenity prayer so essential, especially in praying for the wisdom to know the difference between what I can and cannot change.  And so often our feelings are just our feelings, they arise organically out of who we are as a person and what we value in our lives and I am sure there is a way to at times change how we feel?

This last question is one that still confuses and mystifies me to a degree because my Mum always tells me I need to feel differently about things and so I guess I have been conditioned to surrender my own feelings and point of view at times.  It occurs to me that this plays a huge part in keeping me stuck and angry as validation is so important of our emotions because as energy in motion of the spirit and soul inside us, such emotions give us so much essential information about what is necessary to keep us well and in a good place.

Learning to recognise our emotions and feelings makes the difference between knowing who we are and what is good for us.  It plays a part in giving us information about what we may need to set boundaries up against.

That is why I feel I struggled a fair bit yesterday after the Sunday encounter with my Mum.  I had a dream last night that the caretaker of the building where my Mum lives wanted to have a sexual relationship with me, he was pressuring me and because I know he is married I told him it would be wrong, but he was trying then to invade my boundaries using his will and power.  I awoke quiet startled and twisted around and feeling like I had to fight to get back to being on my centre.  When I thought about the dream I thought about how so often when I try to address or confront something with my Mum she uses the defence of how hard her own life has been and how unfair it is that I am bringing it all up, she may also collapse in tears but they aren’t adult tears, they are like the tears of a little kid having a tantrum over something.  I then feel so guilty and that I have to take care of her feelings and put my own aside.   And this happened to a degree on Sunday.  Even though we connected and shared mutual pain, I also felt such guilt and shame for having caused my mother sorrow by trying to address and get her to see some of my own pain.  But while it was going on I was talking to myself about what was happening inwardly and saying I didn’t feel it was really fair, but that I would have to accept it as I cannot change my Mum or her reactions.  She had so much to deal with after my father died due to her own father loss issues that she ran into a new relationship too fast, instead of fully working through her grief.  And that left me alone when I finally returned from overseas.

Thinking about this it isn’t any wonder that yesterday I felt very sad and defeated.  I spoke in a recent post about the unhealed wound but after writing it, I began to think how I don’t want an unhealed wound to forever dog my life in totally negative ways.   There needs to be a time when I recognise the deep unfairness of a lot I have gone through in the working out of familial and ancestral karma but also don’t identify with it as strongly since its a wound that should not really forever affect my sense of self.  For what I am seeing is that I am a very kind person with so many good qualities.  The thing that has really dogged me all of my life is low self esteem and that is now something I need to begin to work harder to address.

The fact is that I suffer emotionally when I try to play the role of emotional caretaker of others feelings.  It is something I have done for  lot of my life and at heart it comes out of a feeling of guilt and low self esteem over things that really are not to do with me at all.  How different the last 14 years would have been for me if I was more able to put the focus fairly and squarely on my own life?

I guess some deep patterns can take a long time to see.  I understand now though why I felt the need to rebel in my family.   I see now how deeply and unconsciously a traumatic past has affected me and I see the part I can play in keeping the co-dependency dance going.   Even though it was painful last week having limited contact with Mum I did feel better for it in the long run and I recognise the need to separate emotionally has now become essential for me.

I have compassion for my Mum.  In many ways I don’t blame her any more as I feel she never got the support to really understand her emotions and that my father understand how to deal with emotions even less than my Mum did.  I think the reason I so often give way in my own relationships is that that is what I saw my father do.  Hard as it was the painful incident over the auction for the town house all those weeks ago with Venus retrograde showed me essential things about my relationship with my father and what I did and didn’t learn from and longed for from him.

As I see it now the most critical work I need to do is self parenting my inner child and younger adult self.  I am reading Louise Hay’s book The Power is Within You at the moment and she speaks a lot in that book about how we can be with and establish a strong caring connection with our inner child, that part of us that is the source of all our power, love, truth and joy.  When we neglect this little one or tell her or him horrible things our parents may have told us or were told themselves we really suffer.  I look back on all the mean and unloving things I have said to myself over years and as Louise says would you really feel like you wanted to leap out of bed if you knew deep inside you were going to face a nasty inner adult beating you over the head all day for not being good enough?  Its only natural in this situation that we feel depressed.  And our inner child has a lot of lesson to learn about detaching from others’ reactions which are hurtful or come out of their own disconnected state.

Self love, self joy, self compassion are such important things.   Learning to be strong and to be able to say “No” to what is painful or not good for us in the long run is just SO IMPORTANT.   If we don’t champion ourselves and our own lives how can we grow strong?  How can we be there?  How can we really love others, if loving others means not taking care of us?  And loving others means recognising that often they struggle so much too and are not always there to meet our needs. That so often they cannot be there for us in the ways we may have needed.  So often we transfer old pain of an abandoned or neglected inner child in upon new relationships with people who carry their own deep wounds as well and may not be fully equipped to help, love or understand us.   Loving them as well as us means recognising this, really, well at least I feel it does for me.  For only through this kind of awareness can I really find peace, calm and freedom.  And with these strongly in place I can take care of me and look for relationships where frustration does not outweigh connection and satisfaction of my real needs.

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.

I took the risk

I took the risk this morning of speaking to my sister about the intense reaction I had to her going to the coast on her own and not including me today.  She didn’t have a clue as to how I was feeling, had made all of these assumptions, such as I would just go down sometime on my own despite the fact she knows all the trauma I went through down there at her hands and those of my ex and that I have told her several times next time I go down, I don’t want to go down alone.  Its also clear to me that she didn’t really want me going down with her as I may cramp her style and to be honest on reflection we are so different perhaps its for the best.  However after the conversation I ended up feeling even more alone.  What’s new?!  Its a wake up call and a reality check for me.

“It wasn’t maliciously intended.”  She said to me at one point.  Why use that word?   I didn’t think that at all, rather I just thought was a case of her not communicating and then assuming she could mind read me which is what she does all the time.  Also I find that because she is on medication rather than doing any emotional work she operates on a very cut and dried level of purely based physical activity and with little regard for the subtleties or consequences of her reactions.

I got off the phone feeling like a bit of a freak to be honest that I don’t operate in that way.  Anyway I spoke to my therapist and she told me I did very well.  That I expressed how I felt calmly, which I had.  The charge went out for me too and the nose bleeds have stopped.

I guess what is being driven home though is how lonely it really is in my family.  How its not going to be possible for me to have any more than limited contact at the moment.  I took the opportunity to express how I truly felt and I got the brush off.  She was obviously in a hurry to get everything done and dusted so she could just get on with her day which is the way she operates.  Maybe it would be better if I am more like that, providing a container for deeper feelings and only sharing them with people who are capable of meeting me on that level.

I’ve lost the really happy space I was in yesterday when things were going well, though before the phone call to my Mum.  I operate in a happier place when I am outside family relationships with both my Mum and my sister which have been the cause of so much pain and hurt in the past.  That much has been made clear to me over the past 15 hours.  For those of you who don’t know my major traumatic head injury came on the back of their emotional abuse and sidelining of me during my depression following the end of my marriage when I made the mistake of choosing to stay close to my family rather than make the break and get away and concentrate on my deep emotional healing.

I lost 10 years of my life in the wilderness trying to get back on track and the decision was my responsibility so I have to be an adult and wear it.  At the same time it was the way they treated me with such contempt and complete disregard of my feelings which drove me into such a painful and lonely place.    I was warned how they were by others who saw but my inner child kept clinging on in the hopes of getting unrequited needs met they could never, would never fulfil.  Some hard lesson is being driven home currently.  I am sure now that being empathetic to me and caring about what I need doesn’t really enter their radar,  perhaps is not even their job now that I am an adult.  Expecting anything better is part of my own mixed up co-dependency.  But there I go again second guessing and giving a way out for poor behaviour and selfishness.

I read a great post last night on which wolf we should feed, the wolf of anger or the wolf of love.  An interesting comment from someone said they have learned that they must steer clear of those who awaken the angry wolf within them. I think that the angry wolf isn’t bad at all.  It is the part of us that tells us what isn’t right for us when it gets angry and we should listen.  I personally watch in the dog park when dogs set their boundary snappishly.  The emotionally healthy owners don’t mind this if they realise their dog is just setting a boundary.  So should it be for us.

I awoke this morning after all the nose bleeds feeling like I would never get out of bed.  I am glad I made the risk of talking to my sister so I could get into a clearer space.  I am grateful I could talk to my therapist but I still came off the phone from her feeling nauseated and ill deep in my gut.  What has helped me become clearer and to release the sick feeling has been writing this blog.  Blogging helps me to get the feelings out there.

Yesterday I posted and then took down a post of a poem which expresses valid anger at my sister. Shame and fear made me take it down.  I am going to restore it this morning.  At times due to my Catholic education and due to a childhood where anger was expressed in a dangerous way I get so scared expressing anger.  I am scared I will lose followers cause I get more likes when I post about ‘love’ but still the genuine feelings of anger I have had are real and I need to honour them and express them.  I need to release them so they don’t poison me from within and expressing them makes it easier for me to let them go.

I am inspired by this comment from a fellow blogger appearing on the blog I referred to earlier:

….I struggle when freeing myself from that wolf of hate….. I accept my wolf of hate whenever it finds me because to not accept it would be a form of self-hatred. I don’t believe in that.

Source :  https://silentfall.me/2017/01/08/wolf-of-love-%f0%9f%92%96/#comment-1413

When I see its me who is suffering from an emotionally insensitive or unconscious person’s actions its best for me to let it go.  They don’t see what they are doing or even care or lose any sleep, so why should I?  I can’t go all bullet proof and say it doesn’t hurt.  The valid feelings of hurt will give me good information about actions I need to take around them in the future in order to steer clear and not be hurt so much next time.  It seems clearer and clearer to me lately how much better my body feels when I steer clear of toxic, triggering influences in my life.  My body shows me pretty quickly what’s what.

 

 

Giving ourselves the Five ‘A’s to deal with wounds, regret and disappointment

I am very grateful to the books of David Richo, a psychotherapist whose work I came across 10 years ago in an English bookstore.  At the moment I am re-reading When the Past is Present :  Healing the Emotional Wounds That Sabotage Our Relationships.  He has written many books but this one has a lot of great information about how to work through deep wounds to the Inner Child and Inner Self we can carry into adulthood.

One of the central ideas that David repeats in many of his books is that in order to recover a good relationship with our true inner self we need to be shown or learn how to show ourselves the Five ‘A’s that we needed in childhood in order to grow and blossom but so often did not get.  The Five ‘A’s are as follows

Awareness

Attention

Acceptance

Allowing

Appreciation

The sixth ‘A’ I might add is affection.

David explains how we can use these five ways of being receptive to the whole of us, even our dark side, in order to work through all of our feelings surrounding losses, disappointments, regrets, grief and other wounds.

Today I found myself deep in old regret.  The following paragraphs helped me to find ways to deal with the feelings I was having rather than just run away.  I am sharing his ideas here in the hope they may help others.

Both regret and disappointment are forms of grief.  We can learn to greet them with an unconditional ‘Yes’. Then our acceptance leads to handling them so they don’t impinge too long upon our happiness.

Regret is repeated grief.  Regrets become helpful when we cease trying to rid ourselves of them.  Instead we make a place for them in the context of the five ‘A’s.  We notice them, we accept them, appreciate what they mean, still love ourselves as we are, and allow ourselves to go on with life without being held back by them.

In regret, as in guilt, we feel bad about feeling bad.  When regret comes to mind, as we recall our past mistakes and poor judgements, we can acknowledge them as passports to humility, ego deflation and useful learning.  When they are experienced in the context of acceptance of the given that we all err, they are not so hard to take.  We can say yes to them and thereby to our ever falling, ever rising selves. If we and the world had been meant to be perfect, our central human archetype would not be the heroic journey and our world would not be based on evolution.

The third century Christian theologian Origen proposed the beautiful concept of apocatastasis, that all beings will be converted and saved at the end of time, even the damned, even the demons.  For him, hell is not eternal; only divine love is.  So all that happens can be redeemed, ultimately used for our good.  This can be a metaphor for all the things we have done that we are ashamed of and now regret,  They can all be “saved”, that is, included in our positive image of ourselves as errant beings who keep finding ways to get back on track.

These words have a softening effect, don’t they?  I feel soothed myself just reading them.  And on one level even while typing is I was aware that mistakes themselves might not even be only mistakes, but learning experiences.  WE may in the words of songster Seal “need to get things wrong, to get them right”.

In the next paragraph David Richo makes the important point that if in childhood we lacked a positive or adequate hold environment we would have learned better how to be less critical and judgement of ourselves and of others.

In childhood caring parents noticed our disappointments with them and the world and they helped us name them.  They held us in a warm embrace as we wept.  They did not criticise us for what we felt, but listened to us and accepted our experience.  They appreciated and valued us enough to love us just as we were.  We seek relationships now that offer all that.  We no longer need a mother when we are adults, but we always need motherly moments and fatherly moments, too.  What are such moments?  They are the times when we are held in the five ‘A’s.  These are also the very moments in which we learn to give the five ‘A’s to others.  The result is intimacy with all its comfort and challenge.

Is anyone out there triggered by the above into grief, knowing that is the very thing you did not get often in childhood?  I know I am.  If I blame myself now isn’t it just a re-enactment of the way I was blamed or criticised or shamed in childhood.  Isn’t my inability to hold myself adequately now, just a reflection of what I did not learn?  It now appears to me that in order to grow I need to learn most how to self soothe in this way.  I now need to learn to hold and comfort my own sore spots and look for those who can and will do the same.

I will go out from this place

I will go out from this place

though the road

leads through a deep dark wood

In the wood

I will make a fire

from a pile of kindling

and a bed

from a pile of leaves

the animals will come

and wrap their love around me

and I will know

true comfort

that I could not find

at home

with you

Out beyond this place

is a wide open field

of acceptance

where there are just questions

wide open questions

and no need for answers

or the tyranny of certainty

hard glances

even harder hearts

deep in this wood

 there is

only the whisper of the breeze

and on clear nights

a canopy of stars

that shine brightly

with the love of the Goddess

I will go out from this place

though the way be lonely

I will find in that loneliness

a hearth

a heart

and a home

a place to rest

to centre

to dream

to become

all I was intended to be